From the course: How a Visual Effects Company Works

Your place in the VFX industry

From the course: How a Visual Effects Company Works

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Your place in the VFX industry

- [Conrad] Most visual effects training tends to focus on technique, skill, and using software, which makes sense. But I often find that students are taught in a bubble where they concentrate on doing all the work themselves, when in reality producing a visual effects shot is a team effort. Visual effects companies have many departments each doing specialized roles and there are many layers of feedback and approval from lead artists to visual effects supervisors and ultimately, the director or the studio executives. Knowing how this works and how you fit into this process as an artist is probably just as important as knowing how to use the software that you're going to be working with every day. Being the greatest artist in the company isn't enough if you can't work efficiently as part of a team. My name is Conrad Olson and I've been a visual effects artist for feature film and high end television projects since 2008. During that time I've worked at many different visual effects companies, big and small, including Framestore, MPC, Image Engine, Sony Imageworks, Digital Domain, and Industrial Light and Magic. While each of these companies do things their own way, there are a lot of practices and processes that they share. In this course, I will give you an overview of how the visual effects process works in a production sense, but also how projects are organized, how the work is split up, how and when feedback is given, and who decides when a shot is finished. Because every company, and even every project within a company, is slightly different, I can't give specifics. So instead, we're going to use the short action movie, Space Cop, which was produced for the LinkedIn Learning course about visual effects software HitFilm as an example project. So if you're ready to dive in, let's learn all about how a visual effects company works.

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