Headline, Feb24, 2013

!WOW! : ''' STUDENTS GOING ENTREPRENE​URIAL'''

According to David Scammell head of film industry consultants 2M2L and the author of Lost in Space: Where next?, a report into the British VFX community: ''US film directors don't just buy British to save cash. Overseas, they tend to be more factory-driven and people take a small part of the project and nobody sees the whole picture. 

Here, we are good at being very creative, and we are good at being a little bit entrepreneurial. I think that's what's appealing to the film directors.

They are looking for something a bit different.''

Creative considerations, as well as commercial ones, certainly played their part in the ''Big Bang'' that led to the creation of the British Film VFX business as it exists today.

George Lucas's decision to shoot special-affects sequence for Star Wars stirred the market up. He wanted experts who could help pioneer modern special effects at a time when Hollywood was turning its back on the technique!!

After this, the British Talent migrated to the US; now US companies cherry pick entire companies. Universal recently bought Soho-based Double Negative  -the company that provided the grimly authentic bombing scenes in  Enemy at the Gates. Double Negative is one of a half a dozen companies that is at the epicentre of a home-grown industry that now numbers hundreds, most of them ''ONE MAN OPERATIONS'' literally working out of bedrooms.

Double Negative's 40 staff still operates from an anonymous office block in London Soho, near rival The Mills. Old photographs of submarines and more than 40 detailed technical drawings are stacked against the office walls, as the designers painstakingly go about constructing a World War US  submarine for a forthcoming thriller Below.

On the computer screens, the vessels float underwater, sunlight playing on its hulls.

FILM EFFECTS ARE usually associated with loud and obvious action -as in this year's The Mummy returns, which crammed 400 effects into 35 minutes of screen time. Increasingly, though, VFX are being employed for more wide-ranging and subtle uses.

More and more films are using visual effects as just another tool in the tool-set. Take Elizabeth: nobody in their right mind would describe it as a special effects movie, but it used tons and tons of it. Making new backgrounds, making new scenes, changing environments, painting out things that shouldn't be there  -they are all visual effects.

''The people who work here are artists,'' says Alex Hope, who founded Double Negative, ''They just happen to work with computers.''

True Sir! True! And because this opportunity is going to mushroom in days ahead, we all best prepare to think about it. The Artists, the Technologists, the Thinkers!! The days ahead, even your future, will be a Testing Time for you all.

Respectful dedication, Francis Ford Coppola for his masterpiece: '' The Godfather''.I  remind the great man what he once said: ''The great frustration of my career is that nobody wants me to do my own work!''

The world students should grasp that!!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless