# A Life In Movies: Tim Webber

An episode of [All The Right Movies](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1471502633), 1 Mar 2025, 51 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO4635450504.mp3

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## Transcript

[0:04] All the right movies. Hi there.
[0:35] This is A Life in Movies, the interview show from All the
[0:38] Right Movies, where we talk to people inside the industry about
[0:41] films they've worked on and outside the industry about their
[0:44] favorite films. Today on the show, we're talking
[0:47] to an industry figure who's among the most successful names
[0:49] in this field, A visual effects supervisor at Visual Effects
[0:53] Studio Frame Store. Tim Webber has a career going
[0:56] back to the late 1980s and has worked on some of the biggest
[0:59] effects movies this century. Harry Potter, The Dark Knight,
[1:02] Avatar, Gravity, among others. We're going to be talking about
[1:06] all of that and more. So welcome to the show, Tim.
[1:10] How's it going? Good.
[1:12] Thank you. Very good.
[1:14] Great. Thanks for joining me.
[1:16] You're in London, I believe. That's right.
[1:18] Yeah, yeah, I'm based in London and I've been travelling around
[1:23] a bit recently, talk, doing talks and things, but yeah,
[1:26] usually in London. So you never quite made the move
[1:29] to Los Angeles then? No, there have been a couple of
[1:32] times when that's nearly happened, but I'm I like living
[1:38] in London. I've I've stuck it out.
[1:41] So you have quite the filmography, looking at your
[1:43] career, some huge titles that you've worked on.
[1:47] Before we get into those though, Tim, I'd like to go back to the
[1:49] early days of your career. Yeah.
[1:52] So the earliest credits I've found for you, Tim, were in the
[1:55] 1990s on TV, Merlin in the late 90s and the 10th Kingdom.
[2:00] Yes, that's right. I actually did one other TV show
[2:05] before those, which was actually I thought a great project to
[2:12] work on. It was Gulliver's Travels with
[2:13] Ted Danson. It was, it was a mini series for
[2:17] TV. It was it was the first time I
[2:19] had been a visual effects supervisor on something long
[2:22] form. Used to that I'd done
[2:24] commercials and pop promos and worked on things like that.
[2:28] So it was quite a big moment for me.
[2:31] And it was, we did hundreds of shots.
[2:34] I remember we, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves
[2:37] in for. So, you know, we just took the
[2:40] leap and said we'd do it. And, and I won an Emmy for it.
[2:45] And, you know, I think the work was very good and, and the film
[2:49] itself was great. It's still one of my favorite
[2:51] ones. I think it was, it was a great
[2:53] thing to work and obviously lots of cool people and small people.
[2:57] And we had to develop new techniques for, for keying.
[3:01] We, we did a lot of blue screen work on it to make people talk
[3:05] and small. And we had to develop new
[3:06] techniques so that we could get wisps of hair and shadows on the
[3:11] floor because to make the people feel that they were in these
[3:14] different environments to make sure they didn't look as though
[3:17] they were cut out. Basically.
[3:19] It was a great, great project. So how did you come to get
[3:22] involved in those early projects?
[3:24] How did you break into the industry in the first place?
[3:27] Well, I broke into the industry. Well, broke in, I sort of crept
[3:31] into the industry. I'd say I, I, I left, I left
[3:34] university where I'd, well, I'd say I studied theoretical
[3:37] physics because in theory I was supposed to be studying physics
[3:41] and I didn't spend an awful lot of time doing that.
[3:44] I think I spent more time in the art school than I did in physics
[3:46] lab. So, so I'd, yeah, I studied
[3:50] physics, but I was, I very much enjoyed visual art.
[3:54] I almost went to art school. It was a toss up between physics
[3:56] and art school. And you know, I carried on
[3:59] drawing and stuff whilst I was at university.
[4:01] So then when I left, I wanted to find something that combined the
[4:04] two, you know, those two sort of interests and skills.
[4:07] And at the time it was kind of the golden age of pop promos.
[4:13] Lots of innovative work was going on in the world of pop
[4:16] promos and they were doing some quite ever things and, you know,
[4:21] they were visually interesting. And so I went around a few
[4:24] companies that worked on pop promos and I got a job at frame
[4:29] store making coffee. And that was kind of how I
[4:32] started. And I wasn't very good at
[4:34] making. Well, I wasn't very good at
[4:35] making tea because I didn't drink it.
[4:38] So they promoted me instead. Yeah, people are very particular
[4:42] about the tea, are there? Yeah, exactly.
[4:45] Yeah, I started to work on adverts and things like that.
[4:50] It was all short form because the computers in those days, we
[4:53] used a computer, it's called a Harry made by Quantel.
[4:57] It could store a minute and a half of video and this is old
[5:02] small resolution TV resolution video.
[5:07] It could only store a minute and a half and everything you tried
[5:09] to do and if you wanted to change the colour, it would take
[5:11] 3 seconds before you anything changed.
[5:14] And you had to change the colour on a shot before you if you were
[5:18] keying it over onto another shot.
[5:19] So combining 2 images, you'd have to change the colour and
[5:23] then combine the two images and then go, oh, the colour's not
[5:25] quite right. You'd have to go back, separate
[5:27] them again, change the colour. And it was incredibly clunky
[5:30] compared to what you can do on a mobile phone these days.
[5:33] But you know that it cost £1,000,000 I think back then to
[5:36] buy a Harry that was proper cutting edge technology, but
[5:41] basic. So yeah, one of the people who'd
[5:44] worked with us before on ATV programme was Duncan Kenworthy,
[5:48] who was a producer, who he produced for Weddings and a
[5:52] Funeral was the big thing he'd produced at the time and he was
[5:57] producing Gulliver's Travels with Charles Stubborn.
[6:00] So they came and yeah, we slightly naively said, yeah,
[6:04] let's do it. And you know, they believed we
[6:07] could and in the end we, we made it.
[6:11] But it was it was quite a challenge.
[6:13] But looking at your filmography, Tim, it looks like one of the
[6:16] first features you worked on was as a visual effects supervisor
[6:20] on Love Actually. Was that kind of a link from 4
[6:24] Weddings in the Funeral to that? It there was absolutely, yeah.
[6:27] It was the same producer again, Duncan Kenworthy, young
[6:31] Gulliver's Travels with him. They were making love.
[6:33] Actually, you know, they were. It was the same team that had
[6:35] made 4 weddings, you know, a lot of the same people, Richard
[6:40] Curtis. And that yeah, that was the
[6:43] very, very early days of digital film being able to work on, you
[6:50] know, films which were much a higher resolution were going to
[6:53] be shown on the big screen. So the quality had to be that
[6:55] much better. So again, a huge technical
[6:58] challenge actually back then. I'd love, actually, it's a
[7:02] little while since I've seen the film, but there's nothing that
[7:04] jumps out as needing visual effects supervision.
[7:07] So what were you covering on that?
[7:10] Yeah, there was a huge amount. Another project we did with them
[7:14] had something a little bit more interesting in it with the same
[7:17] team. So Duncan Cameron, the producing
[7:19] again, Richard Curtis wrote. It was Notting Hill and that was
[7:24] interesting because there's one shot in that which people spoke
[7:27] about and they came and talked to us and asked us about it for
[7:30] many, many years later. I mean, it still comes up in
[7:33] conversations with our clients and things and that's, it was
[7:35] called the Seasonal walk. It's in the middle of Notting
[7:38] Hill and it's a time passing moment.
[7:41] Hugh Grant's character is walking down Portobello Rd.
[7:45] Market and it goes through all the seasons of the year in one
[7:48] shot. 1 long continuous shot. And so we had to shoot that as
[7:53] separate elements because, you know, we shot a snowy bit and a
[7:57] rainy bit and, you know, we had to shoot them all totally
[7:59] separately and then join them together into what appears to be
[8:02] 1 long seamless shot. And it's, it's such a clever use
[8:06] of visual effects and an interesting way to tell the
[8:10] story. And it's, you know, it's a
[8:11] lovely emotional moment that gets the message across about
[8:15] time passing and his his transition from one mood to
[8:19] another. And it it's just one of my
[8:21] favorite shots that I've worked on so.
[8:23] Yeah, I know the shot. It is a great shot.
[8:25] It's very visual, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.
[8:28] And seems to be around this time then maybe the mid 2000s of
[8:31] things really took off for Frame store and yourself you were
[8:34] visual effects supervisor on, among other titles, Harry Potter
[8:37] and the Goblet of Fire, Children of Men, and then a mega
[8:41] production, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.
[8:43] So how did you come to be involved working on that?
[8:45] Did Frame still have to pitch for the work?
[8:48] Yes, Friends Door, like you say, around all of those films it was
[8:51] getting bigger and bigger. Harry Potter was a big part of
[8:55] what grew the film industry in London, I'd say, because there
[8:59] was a regular supply of films and on each film there would be
[9:03] a larger and larger amount of work.
[9:06] So by the time we did the Goblet of Fire, there was a significant
[9:10] amount. There was creatures and huge
[9:11] environments and we were doing quite a lot of work.
[9:13] And then we had a lot more capability and we were ready,
[9:18] you know, to do more complicated films like The Dark Knight.
[9:21] And that was also a big challenge is sort of again, it
[9:25] was a step up in resolution because Christopher Nolan for
[9:28] one of the first times, I think he really pushed the shooting on
[9:31] IMAX. The whole film wasn't on IMAX,
[9:33] but there were some big sequences on IMAX and some of
[9:35] our sequences are out and the resolution you have to deal with
[9:38] for that was huge. And it was, that was incredibly
[9:40] challenging because we, we couldn't, even when we had the
[9:44] scenes in the computer, you couldn't play them back at full
[9:48] resolution. So when you wanted to view it
[9:50] and check there wasn't anything going wrong, you'd have to play
[9:53] the bottom left hand corner and then the bottom.
[9:55] Really. And and and you know what?
[9:58] Look at your work in bits and see if it was all it was, all
[10:02] looking good or not. Is that because the equipment
[10:04] hadn't quite caught up with IMAX at that point?
[10:07] Exactly that, yeah, yeah, I mean to keep the quality of IMAX you
[10:11] had to have I think we had 7.5 K images.
[10:15] So if you think these days sort of TV tends to be 2K and then,
[10:18] you know, done a lot of Netflix and stuff like that, it's 4K
[10:21] that's high resolution. We were working at 7.5 K and it
[10:24] and the, the number of pixels you have is proportional to that
[10:28] number squared because that's the length in One Direction.
[10:31] But you're, you know, if you double it in One Direction,
[10:32] you're also doubling in that the other direction.
[10:34] So you have 4 times as many pixels.
[10:36] So huge number of pixels for the computers to have to deal with
[10:40] the storage, the playback, everything was, was very, very
[10:43] challenging. And of course, you know,
[10:45] Christopher Nolan, one of his big driving things is to keep
[10:49] everything very, very grounded in reality.
[10:51] You know, that's something that's very close to my heart.
[10:53] I love doing very believable, real feeling, photo real work
[10:58] and he likes to, you know, do as much for real as possible and
[11:02] only rely on visual effects when you absolutely have to, which is
[11:05] something I totally agree with. I think, you know, the more you
[11:08] can do real, the better. And even when you are having
[11:11] then to do some visual effects, it will be more grounded in
[11:15] reality because you've got some real things to base it off.
[11:18] So, you know, that was a big part of what we were trying to
[11:21] do. And as he said himself, one of
[11:23] the few exceptions to his rule about trying to keep everything
[11:27] grounded in reality actually was one of the big challenges we had
[11:31] was the character Harvey Dent, who becomes 2 faced.
[11:34] Of course, one side of his face is all burnt and scarred.
[11:38] And, you know, Christopher Nolan realized that if you did that
[11:42] too real, if it looked genuinely like a real scarred, horrible,
[11:47] burnt face, that would not take for a good movie.
[11:50] You know, it would take people out to the movie, they wouldn't
[11:52] want to watch it, etcetera. So he said, this is the one time
[11:56] where I want to do something a little bit fantastical.
[12:00] But getting that balance between fantastical and real was quite
[12:03] tricky because it still had everything else in the movie he
[12:06] was trying to make as real as possible.
[12:07] I mean, you know, even down to Batman being able to fly, he
[12:11] can't fly. He can glide on his caves and
[12:13] the mechanics behind it is all thought through and it makes
[12:15] sense. It's there's kind of physical
[12:17] reality behind it, so we had to fit in with all of that and for
[12:22] it to feel real. But it was designed so that you
[12:26] could see through to the muscles moving and you could see through
[12:30] his teeth, through holes in his face.
[12:32] And it was still pretty shocking, but it was sort of
[12:35] over the top enough that you knew it wasn't kind of real, if
[12:39] you see what I mean. And it made it a much more
[12:42] enjoyable and fascinating film to watch.
[12:44] It wasn't sort of purely horrible, I suppose.
[12:48] So the process of getting involved in a production like
[12:50] that, will Warner Brothers sort of put the feelers out to all
[12:53] the visual effects studios saying we're looking for this
[12:55] kind of thing, come and do a pitch for it.
[12:58] Yeah, yes. Normally there is some sort of a
[13:00] pitch involved unless you have a very good relationship with
[13:04] people. So typically we do little bits
[13:07] of artwork or we show tests, or we put together a reel of
[13:11] previous work that is relevant. And we also nearly always have
[13:15] to estimate the cost. You can do a budget for, you
[13:19] know, all the key scenes or, you know, or the whole movie.
[13:23] And then a combination of Warner Brothers and the director and
[13:26] the producer will choose sometimes one, how to do all the
[13:31] work on the bigger movies, particularly back then.
[13:33] It's less true now, but back then they were too big for a
[13:36] single visual effects company to do because you had to deliver it
[13:40] all at the same time. And if you were delivering too
[13:42] much stuff all in one go, it would be really hard work.
[13:44] So they would spread it out across a few companies and, and
[13:48] in those days, you know, they were, as I said, London was
[13:51] becoming a really big visual effects centre.
[13:53] So there was quite a few companies all based in Soho and
[13:56] we were all kind of quite close together and and that was very
[14:00] effective then when people wanted to split it across
[14:02] different companies. Yes.
[14:04] Your role on The Dark Knight was credited as visual effects
[14:07] supervisor, frame store, and looking at the credits like you
[14:10] kind of alluded to there, there was also a visual effects
[14:12] supervisor, BUF, Visual effects supervisor, Double Negative, New
[14:16] Deal Studios, Synesite. So there was quite a few studios
[14:20] all working on the film at the same time.
[14:22] Do you have a lot of overlap between what you work go on?
[14:24] Do you do you speak to those guys?
[14:26] Well, a little bit, yeah. So the other main company that
[14:29] was doing it was double negative with Paul Franklin was the their
[14:32] supervisor. And then there's there was one
[14:35] overall supervisor, Nick Davis, who, you know, coordinated all
[14:39] of us kind of thing. So there was two big companies
[14:41] and then some other companies doing other bits.
[14:45] So most of the work sort of is, is going through the overall
[14:49] supervisor who coordinates us, but we also, then we also have
[14:52] to work together a little bit. Generally it, you know, having
[14:56] to work together is avoided as much as possible.
[14:58] So, you know, trying to keep all the shots, you know, that we're
[15:03] doing separate from all the shots that another company is
[15:05] doing makes everyone's life much easier because trying to
[15:09] coordinate and you're waiting for them to finish what they've
[15:12] got to do on a shot. And, you know, they're waiting
[15:14] for us to finish what we've got to do is unbelievably
[15:17] complicated, much more complicated for some reason than
[15:20] you think it would be. So, you know, it's usually a
[15:23] case of, well, we'll try and separate it.
[15:25] But obviously, you know, if another company was doing all
[15:29] the backgrounds for a certain scene and then Harvey Dent
[15:32] appears in that scene, we would have to do Harvey Dent, they
[15:35] would have to do the background. And there are times when you
[15:38] have to work together. Yeah, you you just have to try
[15:41] and make that as effective as possible.
[15:42] Then it's not. It's not easy, but but we get
[15:45] that. So will frame store tasked with
[15:47] handling specifically the Harvey Dent face CGI?
[15:50] Was anything else other than that or was it mainly Harvey
[15:52] Dent? There was some other various
[15:54] other bits. Harvey Dent I'd say was the sort
[15:57] of most complex and interesting bit we did.
[16:00] But we had the scene in Hong Kong that this was 1 scene that
[16:04] was shot on IMAX where he escapes from a building.
[16:08] He flies off 1 building. It's the second.
[16:11] Well, it was at the time, the second tallest building in the
[16:13] world. I think he jumps off that and
[16:14] flies into another building. I got to go and stand on the
[16:17] corner that he stands on and the second tallest building in the
[16:20] world, which was fantastic. Yeah, lovely.
[16:22] Very scary. Much more scary than I thought
[16:24] it was. I didn't jump off, so we had to
[16:29] create a computer generated building so that he could smash
[16:33] through the windows. Obviously we had to create him
[16:35] flying through the air and the stuntman did.
[16:38] This is a classic example of how Christopher Nolan tried to keep
[16:41] stuff real. So a stuntman did do a jump knot
[16:45] off that building. He was filmed at one point
[16:48] standing on that corner of that building and then separate there
[16:51] was a jump of him. Shots of him jumping off on blue
[16:54] screen in the studio onto a crash mat.
[16:57] So we had the reference of how he looked on the building.
[16:59] We could make sure it looked exactly like that.
[17:02] We started the shots with him actually jumping and then we
[17:06] took that over and you know, as he flew around, we did ACG
[17:11] human, which was pretty tricky back then.
[17:13] So it was a combination of of different elements and and
[17:17] that's what makes it feel more grounded in reality is having as
[17:20] many of those bits as real as possible.
[17:22] Of course. Yeah, I know.
[17:23] I know the exactly the shot that you mean now.
[17:25] I've never ever noticed that was a CGI Christian Bale.
[17:28] Great. So that's what we like to hear.
[17:33] So in terms of Christopher Nolan then, we've mentioned him quite
[17:35] a few times, of course. How closely did you work with
[17:38] him? Did you see him on the set
[17:39] regularly? Reasonably closely, yeah.
[17:43] The closer you can be to the director, the better.
[17:45] There are times, you know, and they're very busy, so there are
[17:49] times when sometimes you don't see very much of them, and that
[17:54] is always the biggest challenge. Luckily, I, you know, we did get
[17:57] enough direct contact with him to be able to do that one
[18:01] successfully, even though it was a pretty big movie, so it was
[18:04] challenging to get his time. It makes a big difference being
[18:07] able to hear their thoughts. It's it's how it's being able to
[18:11] understand the why of why they want to do something.
[18:14] I mean, Christopher Allen is a really good example of this.
[18:16] You hear that he wants to do something in a shot and you
[18:19] think, oh, it's a bit strange. Why on earth do you want to do
[18:21] that? I don't understand that.
[18:22] You know, we'll try and do it. And then you get to talk to him,
[18:25] and he explains not just what he wants to do, but the philosophy
[18:29] behind why he wants to do it. And you suddenly go, oh, I see.
[18:32] Yeah, of course, that makes total sense.
[18:34] I see what he wants to do. I mean, some, you know, now I
[18:36] understand why he wants to do it.
[18:37] I can do what he wants to do. I can get what it is he really
[18:40] wants because I understand the why of it.
[18:42] And that makes a big difference. So yeah, direct contact is is.
[18:47] I've seen quite a bit of behind the scenes footage on The Dark
[18:50] Knight and some of that Christopher Nolan films as well,
[18:52] and it always seems to be really, really relaxed.
[18:55] I'm not sure if that's normal or if it's Christopher Nolan's
[18:57] style or something like that, because I would think with his
[19:00] kind of films being so precise, I would imagine him being quite
[19:04] intense, but doesn't seem to be the case.
[19:07] There's a sort of relaxed intensity.
[19:09] I would say he's he is very precise.
[19:11] He knows exactly what he wants and so there is an intensity
[19:15] because he knows exactly what he wants.
[19:17] But also because of that, everyone is focused on that one
[19:21] thing. Everyone is working together.
[19:22] I mean, for example, he tends not to shoot with multiple
[19:25] cameras. So you're not sort of trying to
[19:27] make something work from two different angles.
[19:29] You know, everyone's focused on the one shot 1 camera.
[19:32] He knows exactly what he wants and it's very, you know, he gets
[19:37] what he wants much more. And here's a good example of his
[19:39] philosophy. He's really thought through why
[19:41] he wants to shoot on single cameras most of the time.
[19:44] You know, he knows that you didn't get a much better view
[19:48] through that camera, that he doesn't want to have endless
[19:51] footage to look through in the edit.
[19:52] He'd rather have the clarity of what you want.
[19:54] You know, he, I mean, I'm, I'm probably mangling slightly his
[19:58] philosophy for doing that from memory, but you know, he's
[20:01] really thought through why he does that and it makes total
[20:03] sense. There's a real, really strong
[20:05] logic behind it. So he's a director who turns up
[20:08] and everything's been thought through already.
[20:10] He knows how we how they're going to do it, what we're going
[20:11] to do. And I guess that's why it's so
[20:13] relaxed, because there's no real stress of how we're going to do
[20:16] this and that kind of thing. Yeah, well planned.
[20:20] And to me that's a really critical part of making a movies
[20:23] for it all to be well planned, everyone on the same page, but
[20:27] planned in a way that allows for changes, fluidity, happy
[20:32] accidents. But but if it's planned, you can
[20:35] incorporate those. You know, the actor suddenly
[20:37] goes I'd rather do this instead of that.
[20:39] You know, that's what you want them to bring to it.
[20:41] So you've got to make sure there is the room for that to happen.
[20:45] And if it's well planned, it's actually easier for that to
[20:48] happen because you know your parameters.
[20:49] You can go, yeah, we can make that work.
[20:51] Or if it's not well planned, you might think there's more
[20:54] freedom. But I usually find there's just
[20:57] more confusion, you know? So it's great to have the
[21:00] planning, as long as you're planning to allow for the
[21:03] fluidity, you know, the creative.
[21:05] Fluidity well the year after the dark night you were visual
[21:07] effects supervisor on where the wild things are and then a huge
[21:11] visual effects movie in avatar groundbreaking digital effects
[21:15] on avatar how did you come to be involved on that one we're.
[21:20] Working on a few sequences in that there were the bits on the
[21:24] alien planet where he's not in the land of the Navi, if I'm
[21:27] pronouncing that correctly, where he's not in his avatar.
[21:31] It's the more real looking stuff.
[21:33] It's not the alien planet, blue creatures, which I slightly
[21:37] jokingly said made our, made our work much harder because it had
[21:41] to look absolutely real. It wasn't full of fancy colours
[21:43] and blue alien creatures. I mean, what Wetter did, who did
[21:47] all of that was, was phenomenal. That was amazing work and, and
[21:50] was very, very complicated. There's a tiny bit of truth to
[21:52] what I say, but not a huge amount.
[21:55] But so yeah, we we were doing those sort of scenes.
[21:58] So they they were often just we have one person on a blue screen
[22:03] and everything else in the shot was created in the computer, but
[22:07] had to look photo real because it was had to, you know, feel
[22:10] like it was just a space station or, you know, a massive
[22:14] warehouse of the robots, the neck suits or whatever.
[22:18] And I came on to the show quite late because the supervisor who
[22:22] had been doing it had to leave suddenly and wasn't well.
[22:27] And so at that point it was in a tricky position.
[22:31] But I'd say, you know, there was, there was not long to go
[22:34] before delivery. And it was, there was an awful
[22:36] lot of work to do. Things weren't going well at
[22:38] that point. So it was a very, very
[22:40] stressful. You know, Jamie Cameron is
[22:42] someone else who knows exactly what he wants.
[22:44] And there was a lot of pressure and we weren't in a good place
[22:47] but, you know, to begin with. But we managed to sorted stuff
[22:50] out and it was fascinating again to work with James Cameron
[22:53] didn't get much contact with him because it was a huge, huge show
[22:55] that one. But we, we did have some, we, we
[22:58] did reviews with him and again, it was incredibly beneficial to
[23:02] be hearing stuff directly from him as to what he wanted.
[23:05] And we we managed to finish it off in the toughest few months
[23:11] of of my life. Was that because of the
[23:15] tightness of the deadlines? Yeah, absolutely.
[23:18] It was. Yeah.
[23:19] There was a lot to do in in a little in not much time left,
[23:23] yeah. And James Cameron, another huge
[23:26] directing name, has a reputation for being a bit intense on set.
[23:31] Did you see much of that? Well, I didn't see him on set at
[23:34] all because I only came on during post production and and I
[23:38] had this, you know, fear. You know, when we sort of, when
[23:41] we did calls with him of how intense he would be, he was, I'd
[23:45] say it was intense, but it was great.
[23:48] I thought it was really enjoyable working with him
[23:51] because he does know what he wants.
[23:54] He's very specific and precise and you can really get out of
[23:58] him. You know, he's a good
[23:59] communicator. And yeah, it was.
[24:02] It was really enjoyable. So then another big visual
[24:05] effects film came after Avatar, when in 2013 you were visual
[24:10] effects supervisor on Gravity with director Alfonso Cuaron.
[24:14] One of the jewels in Frame Store's crown, I think.
[24:17] This one isn't it. I think so, yeah.
[24:19] So how did you guys come to work on this film then?
[24:23] No Frame Store had done a couple of films with Alfonso by this
[24:27] point. 1 was a Harry Potter film.
[24:30] The third one, I didn't work on that one, but then I worked with
[24:34] him on Children of Men, which was another huge challenge.
[24:38] Very, very tricky work in that we had to create a digital baby
[24:42] and we had to do some very long shots, like the the birth of the
[24:45] baby happens in a 4 1/2 minute continuous shot.
[24:48] You know, had a good time working with him on that.
[24:51] And so when he was writing Gravity, he came to us and we
[24:58] sat with him. I'm still clearly remember
[25:00] sitting with him in this small office, sitting on a couple of
[25:03] sofas and and he spent 45 minutes just chatting through
[25:07] what the story of the film was going to be about this woman in
[25:10] space. And you know, a lot of it, she's
[25:12] on her own in space. And it was fascinating just just
[25:15] hearing him tell the story back then was left me breathless.
[25:19] You know, I, I remember at the end of it just feeling kind of
[25:23] exhausted as he, it was quite, quite intense.
[25:27] And he at the time, kind of thought it was going to be quite
[25:30] a quick and easy film to make. It was quite a short film.
[25:35] He, he just, you know, envisioned we could just hang
[25:39] astronauts in space suits from wires.
[25:42] So it looked as though they were floating around, build little
[25:45] bits of the space shuttle or the ISS.
[25:48] And in visual effects, we would extend those, you know, to be
[25:52] bigger. But the the thing about that
[25:56] film is he took the film language did using children of
[26:00] men of the long shot and he really lent into that.
[26:04] So Gravity has a huge number of very, very long shots.
[26:06] The opening shot is 12 1/2 minutes long.
[26:09] The second shot is not much shorter.
[26:11] At one stage they were all one shot actually.
[26:14] So it's going to be 20 something minutes long.
[26:17] Those two are huge. And I think 70% of the movie is
[26:22] made-up of just 17 shots, though, you know, the 17 shots
[26:26] all over a minute long. And if you just string those
[26:28] together, that's 70% of the running time of the movie.
[26:31] And that creating a long shot is complicated in so many reasons,
[26:37] for so many reasons. It multiplies the complexity of
[26:42] everything else you're doing. And making something feel
[26:46] genuinely weightless is very challenging.
[26:49] And you know, they've done it for Apollo 13.
[26:51] But in Apollo 13 they'd, they had normal length shots so they
[26:54] could shoot a little moment up in the vomit comet where someone
[26:57] was genuinely floating and they'd cut the few seconds.
[27:00] You can get the fat in with someone you know on a wire and
[27:05] you wouldn't notice they were on a wire because it was just a
[27:07] short shot or they were doing something while simple so you
[27:10] didn't feel that they were on a wire.
[27:12] Haven't you had the real weightless moment to go with
[27:14] this? And you know, if it was a close
[27:16] up, you could, you can do all sorts of easy things.
[27:19] But we had to start with a massive, beautiful, wide Vista.
[27:23] And then we had to come in very slowly and see George's
[27:28] character flying around in a on a jet pack and Sandra's
[27:31] character working on the Hubble, on the electronics of the
[27:35] Hubble. And we had to come slowly put in
[27:37] right up to an intense close up, more continuous performance and
[27:41] then two shots of them working together and bolt photo and
[27:45] camera continually choreographed beautifully because again,
[27:49] without the ability to edit, you have to sort of edit your shots
[27:53] in the camera move. So it has to be choreographed
[27:55] perfectly and you can't make changes later.
[27:58] You can't only say, oh, look, what happens if we make this a
[28:00] bit quicker by cutting some stuff off.
[28:02] You can't. You've just, you've got to move
[28:03] the camera from there to there. This stuff's got to happen.
[28:06] So that has to be planned incredibly well.
[28:08] And then there's, you know, action, there's destruction,
[28:11] there's everything kicks off and it's all mayhem.
[28:14] You know, see, we've got to get all of those moments.
[28:16] We've got to find a technique to make all of those moments work
[28:19] in one continuous shot. And but you cannot do that by
[28:23] hang hanging people on wires in space suits and moving the
[28:26] camera around for, you know, it just that that wouldn't work.
[28:29] And because of the continuous shock, the the audience is
[28:32] examining what's going on much more intently, frankly, and
[28:36] that, you know, anything that doesn't feel right, they will
[28:38] notice much more. So in the end we decided to make
[28:43] it largely CG basically to make the whole environment and the
[28:49] astronauts, all of it in CG apart from their faces because
[28:54] CG faces incredibly challenging. They still are incredibly
[28:57] challenging. Very hard to not fall into the
[28:59] uncanny valley. So that was the decision and and
[29:03] that kind of led to a whole load of other challenges.
[29:07] Well, yeah, I know that from speaking to you before Tim, and
[29:10] from doing research myself, that there were loads of technical
[29:12] challenges on gravity. I know there was a device
[29:15] created called the Light Box to help with the anti gravity
[29:19] scenes and shooting faces and that kind of thing.
[29:21] You tell us a bit about that, how that came about.
[29:24] Absolutely, yeah. So we tried to think of a number
[29:27] of ways to film the faces because the tricky thing when
[29:31] you're making everything in CG, or pretty much everything in CG
[29:35] really is when you then film the face.
[29:38] You need to make sure the actor can feel as if they've got the
[29:42] right stuff around them. So they know what they're
[29:44] performing. You know, they know what's
[29:45] around them where they're, you know, you also need to make sure
[29:48] that the lighting around them is correct.
[29:50] So we had to have the sun. That's straightforward.
[29:54] You just get a traditional light, you pointed at them
[29:56] that's like the sunlight. But then you also have this
[29:59] very, very large banks light coming off the Earth because the
[30:03] Earth fills half of the horizon almost when you're in low Earth
[30:07] orbit. And it has lots of different
[30:09] colours all over it. It has white clouds and blue sea
[30:11] and stuff. So that has a lot of complexity
[30:15] to it, and it's huge. And then you add to that that
[30:18] these lights have to move around the actor because as the actor
[30:23] is in theory, rotating, spinning around, flying around, whatever
[30:27] they're doing in space, we can't necessarily spin the actor
[30:31] around. We can't dangle them upside
[30:33] down. It will be uncomfortable, it'll
[30:35] look uncomfortable, it won't look like they're being
[30:36] weightless. So we had to keep the actor
[30:38] relatively still and move the camera around them and the
[30:41] lights around them. And kind of the first solution
[30:44] we had to that which we did use was to move the camera.
[30:48] We put the camera on a car assembly robot.
[30:51] There was a small company in San Francisco who were doing their
[30:54] own little pieces called Auto Fuss.
[30:56] They were doing their own little pieces where they put the camera
[30:59] on a car assembly robot so that they could move it in
[31:02] interesting ways. And Christopheria, the studio
[31:05] executive had come across them and, you know, we all got in
[31:08] contact and we work with them to increase the capabilities of
[31:13] that, A, to be able to move the camera in ways that we needed
[31:17] to, which was slightly different to what they needed, but B, to
[31:19] be able to move the lights as well.
[31:21] So we, you'd put the sunlight on one robot, a massive bounce for
[31:26] the earth on another robot, and the camera on another.
[31:28] We had these three robots, you know, moving around the actors
[31:33] as the shot progressed. But that's quite cumbersome
[31:36] having three car assembly robots moving around with, you know,
[31:38] with the huge lights on them and everything.
[31:40] It, you know, they bumped into each other if you wanted to do
[31:42] certain things and stuff. So it didn't work for
[31:44] everything. So then the next concept was the
[31:48] idea was to create the light box, as you say.
[31:50] So that was basically it was a cube big enough for Sandra or
[31:56] George to get in. And we could, we had a device
[31:59] that allowed us to move them in certain ways.
[32:02] We still had the camera on the car assembly robot so it could
[32:05] move around in certain ways. But on the inside of this box
[32:09] was LED screens like you have, well, in those days, you have a
[32:14] lot of them at the back of pop concerts, you know, giant
[32:18] screens. But we made, you know, all of
[32:20] the screens pointing in on the box.
[32:23] They were quite low resolution back then.
[32:25] They had sort of, you know, separate individual dots for LE
[32:29] DS. These days they're much higher
[32:31] resolution, but it enabled us to put an image on these LE DS and
[32:36] they were just bright enough to be able to light the character
[32:41] with all of the bounce light from the Earth or the bounce
[32:44] light. For example, you know, if if
[32:47] Sandra was flying towards the ISS and about to grab onto it,
[32:51] we could put an image of the ISS on the screen and make it get
[32:54] bigger and bigger and closer and closer to higher.
[32:56] And it would give us give you the like pouncing off the ISS on
[33:00] her face and and she could also see it coming towards her.
[33:04] So she understood what was happening and how she had to
[33:07] perform. We still had to do a traditional
[33:10] light for the sunlight because the LEDs weren't bright enough
[33:13] for that. So we had the traditional light
[33:14] in there being moved around by hand and these images playing
[33:18] back, you know, complex images playing back on the on the
[33:22] screens, moving around them to get the environment so that
[33:26] their faces would fit into the CG that that we were creating
[33:32] later. We designed the lighting we
[33:35] previoused, which is like a low res animation of that.
[33:38] We did that for the whole movie so that we could plan it and
[33:42] design it. And then we did a pre light with
[33:44] Chilo, the cinematographer of of the movie so that the lighting
[33:48] was planned before we even got on stage.
[33:51] So that the lighting, then you'd, you'd know how the
[33:56] lighting for the whole shot was going to look, even though
[33:58] you're just filming a face, you know, you were doing it in a way
[34:01] that would work for the whole shot.
[34:03] And that was much better than what people often do.
[34:08] Or certainly back then is they'd go and they'd light the face and
[34:10] then they'd try and make everything else fit that and you
[34:13] can't do it. It's a real struggle.
[34:14] But so we did it that way around which was more effective and
[34:18] their faces would just fit very naturally into the CG.
[34:22] And we still had to do some work to make it all balanced
[34:24] etcetera. But it was much, much easier to
[34:26] fit them into the CG and create these long, continuous shots.
[34:31] Well, that sounds like a genius invention.
[34:33] A genius idea. The light box.
[34:35] Is that something that's now become a bit of an industry
[34:37] standard if other people adopted that as well?
[34:40] Well, the box and you know, using in exactly the way we did
[34:45] was has been done since, but is only really worth it for certain
[34:51] shows, often shows set in space, you know, certain shots.
[34:55] But people have taken the basic idea and as the technology of
[34:59] the screens has developed, you can get much higher resolution
[35:03] screens now. So now people build a whole and
[35:06] they're much cheaper than they were back then.
[35:08] People build a whole stage and we've done this as well out of
[35:12] LED screens and you know, you can have people acting wandering
[35:15] around on a stage surrounded by the LED screens.
[35:19] Again, you've got the lighting environment you need, but the
[35:22] resolutions to the screens is good enough.
[35:24] Now that what you film, you can actually, if you put the correct
[35:28] image on the screen behind the actor, you can film the whole
[35:31] shot in camera. It's called in camera visual
[35:33] effects. So you're generating live the
[35:36] image that goes behind the actor and you film the actor with that
[35:40] behind them and you get the shot in camera.
[35:42] They're a problems and limitations to doing that.
[35:46] But yeah, it's, you know, as the technology has moved on, you you
[35:50] can do a lot of it. We we sort of almost did some in
[35:53] camera, an in camera shot on gravity.
[35:56] In the end, there sort of is 1 where the camera goes right,
[35:59] right close into Sandra's eye and you can see the Earth as
[36:05] she's spinning around at this point rotating and you can see
[36:08] the earth reflected in her eye. And that is purely off the light
[36:12] box. And because of the reflection,
[36:15] the resolution is fine. You know, we get away with it.
[36:17] So in ways that was the first in camera visual effects shot, I
[36:20] suppose. But yeah, but on the whole,
[36:24] yeah, the the screens were too were too low resolution to make
[36:27] that work back then. For talking about Alfonso
[36:30] Cuaron, you said before Tim that he came in with certain
[36:33] expectations how he might make the film.
[36:35] And then obviously they were blown apart pretty quickly, I
[36:37] would imagine. So how was he to work with?
[36:39] That must have been a very collaborative relationship I
[36:41] would imagine then between him and everybody.
[36:44] It was, it was, it was very collaborative.
[36:47] You know, as as I was saying earlier, it's great the closer
[36:49] you work with the director. We work very, very closely with
[36:51] him. He he had his office enough on
[36:54] our floor that we were on in our building so that he could be
[36:58] close to what we were doing because no one had ever made a
[37:02] film that way before. It involved a lot closer
[37:05] collaboration between me and Chivo particularly.
[37:09] It was fantastic working with Chivo Emmanuel Lubetzky to give
[37:13] him his full name. He, he is a genius
[37:16] cinematographer and I learnt so much of working with him.
[37:20] And you know, all the departments, production design,
[37:23] costume were designing things that were never physically made.
[37:27] We were just creating them in the computer.
[37:29] So it was a different relationship to normal.
[37:31] And because it was different, everyone had to work much more
[37:33] closely together because you don't just have the normal
[37:36] established lines of communication that people have
[37:39] worked out for 10s of years and they know how it goes, etcetera,
[37:43] etcetera. It was different.
[37:44] We had to be much more tightly involved and much more
[37:47] collaborative, and that's one of the reasons Gravity was
[37:51] unbelievably challenging, but the most satisfying film to work
[37:54] on because I was at the heart of the film making process in every
[37:57] way. And it took us three years, but,
[38:00] you know, three years of being very, very involved in
[38:02] everything about the film, and that was really very satisfying.
[38:07] Two huge movie stars in this one as well in George Clooney and
[38:10] mainly Sandra Bullock in the lead.
[38:12] How were they to work with on the film?
[38:14] They were both great. We were very lucky, I'd say, to
[38:17] have those because we had to get our cast to do some, you know,
[38:21] unusual things and to work in unusual circumstances.
[38:25] George was very relaxed and very entertaining on set.
[38:29] And you know, that that made life much easier than if he'd
[38:35] been a different personality. And Sandra was incredibly
[38:39] willing to, you know, I mean, she had to, she had to spend
[38:42] half her time in the light box as or Sandra's cage as it got
[38:46] dubbed at one point. And she actually said in some
[38:50] ways it was quite good because she was isolated in this box
[38:52] from everyone on this through and you know, it's a bit like
[38:56] being isolated in space. So she, she used it to help her
[38:59] get performance, but she had to do that and put her on this
[39:01] thing called the 12 wire rig, which was like we were puppeting
[39:05] her. We, we could move a little sort
[39:06] of minute, the model of Sandra around, sort of tilt it, swing
[39:11] it, slide it along. And that the computer would then
[39:14] control the wires that she was suspended from and replicate the
[39:18] movement we were doing on her. And she was dangling from this
[39:22] rig and this was mainly for the shots inside the ISS where she's
[39:26] sort of floating down the corridor and, you know, she had
[39:29] to act as if she was pushing herself that it was that that
[39:31] was moving her along. But actually we were.
[39:34] But so all of that had to be coordinated.
[39:36] Incredibly complex marks for her to hit in three-dimensional
[39:41] space, not just a mark on the floor like normal actors have to
[39:44] deal with, you know, 3 dimensional space, different
[39:45] angles, etcetera, mining certain things.
[39:48] And she did that. I still can't believe how
[39:52] incredibly well she did all of that.
[39:54] And then on top of that, gave a great performance.
[39:57] Very, very impressed by how she managed to do that.
[40:00] She is fantastic in the film. One bit of trivia that I heard,
[40:03] Tim, which kind of blew my mind if it's true, was that the
[40:06] effects work that you guys did was so complex that the whole
[40:09] film, if they'd been rendered by one machine, would have taken
[40:12] 7000 years to render. That that's, I can't remember
[40:17] the exact number, but it was it was it was the beginning of when
[40:20] they started to build the pyramid.
[40:21] So that probably. Isn't that?
[40:23] That sounds about right though. Yeah, it's certainly a few
[40:25] thousand. Yeah, Yeah, it, it was, it was a
[40:29] lot of rendering. And actually, you know, we
[40:31] talked about sort of the innovations we had to create to
[40:34] be able to shoot it, but we also had to use a whole different
[40:37] rendering technology that had been not used barely at all up
[40:43] to this point, you know, and we had to make a big change at
[40:45] Frame store. And I kind of knew at the
[40:47] beginning that it was not physically accurate rendering.
[40:51] And you could make stuff look photo real, but you had to do a
[40:55] lot of human work to balance things to get the feeling of
[40:58] bounce light, the subtle little bit.
[41:00] It wasn't very good at creating. And those make a huge
[41:03] difference. So you don't notice them,
[41:05] obviously, but it just feels wrong if they're not there or
[41:08] not correct. So I, I knew that was going to
[41:11] be a problem. And the technology team at
[41:13] Framestore worked very, very hard to find this new renderer
[41:17] and to re engineer the whole set of the systems at Framestore so
[41:21] that we could use this new renderer and render it using
[41:24] that. But it then took a lot of
[41:26] rendering, a lot of computers to get through it.
[41:29] And you were nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Visual
[41:32] Effects for Gravity. What accolade?
[41:34] So how are the Oscars? And they were great.
[41:38] It was the second time I'd been first, first time I'd won.
[41:41] I'd been for The Dark Knight, which was fascinating.
[41:45] It's more fun if you win, but it's fun either way.
[41:49] It was such a big night for Gravity because Gravity won a
[41:53] lot of Oscars that evening. So it was lovely for the whole
[41:57] team to be having such a great time, you know, very enjoyable.
[42:02] And, and the Oscars, it's interesting to see the occasion,
[42:06] you know, I, I, I've been to the Baftas a lot and, and that's
[42:09] grand and I love the Baftas, it's great.
[42:12] But the Oscars is so much bigger And it's like, you know, you
[42:16] don't realise how much bigger it is until you're there.
[42:19] And it's just huge as an event. The thing that sums up for me is
[42:23] when you're walking down the red carpet and there's one side is
[42:26] decorated all lovely because that's the side the cameras are
[42:29] on the other side looking at the one side that's all nice and
[42:32] you're walking down the red carpet.
[42:34] The other side is just all the cameras and it's a mess and you
[42:37] know, it's all done for the cameras.
[42:40] It's quite funny like that. And actually because the visual
[42:44] effects was such an integral part of Gravity to get a lot of
[42:47] the attention. Normally visual effects is
[42:49] slightly ignored at events like the Oscars, frankly, you know,
[42:52] it's just sort of not not of any interest.
[42:54] This was, I think it was one of the rare occasions where we got
[42:58] a lot of the attention and that was, that's great.
[43:01] Well, leading off from that little bit, something I've
[43:03] always found a little bit strange is how a lot of visual
[43:06] effects studios don't become really well known.
[43:09] I mean, you've got like say ILM, maybe that's about it.
[43:11] You mentioned Weta before, but like, great, some of them are
[43:14] greatest and most ground breaking effects films of recent
[43:16] years. And I think even most movie fans
[43:18] probably wouldn't know who they are necessarily.
[43:20] And why is that, do you think? Why do effects teams become
[43:23] unsung heroes? I, I think there's a few
[43:26] reasons, but it's a really good point.
[43:28] I mean, one is the work is done by a lot of people.
[43:32] It's very much teamwork and you know, it's a company doing the
[43:36] work and people latch onto individuals more easily.
[43:40] That makes it less personal and therefore there's less interest
[43:43] from the audience. I'd say we come along in
[43:46] people's minds, we come along at the end and and it's computers
[43:49] that do everything. Actually, we're involved from
[43:52] the very beginning, from the very initial bit of planning.
[43:55] We're involved in the shoot. And it's not computers that do
[43:59] it. It's artists that do it who use
[44:00] computers as as a tool, you know, where it's teams and teams
[44:04] of incredibly talented craftspeople and artists working
[44:08] on it. So, you know, recently there's
[44:10] been quite a lot of people talking about, oh, there's no
[44:13] visual effects in this. We've tried to avoid visual
[44:16] effects and, you know, tried to do it for real.
[44:18] And which as I said before, you know, I fully into that
[44:22] philosophy up to a point, but it's almost become like visual
[44:25] effects is a bad thing. And I think that's a shame
[44:29] because it's a lot of work. It's not true that there's no
[44:32] visual effects in a lot of these films where people are talking
[44:35] like that and we did 1500 shots on them.
[44:37] And you know that the work that goes into it, the love and the
[44:40] care and the artistry that goes into it from a big team of
[44:43] people working very, very hard is is huge.
[44:47] What do you think as well, Tim? Because with visual effects,
[44:49] say, unlike say music, say, John Williams, a big name, the better
[44:53] the work he does, the more you notice them in the film.
[44:56] Visual effects. The better your work is, the
[44:59] less you notice you in the film. That that's a very good point,
[45:02] yes And yeah, a lot of work is 100% like that.
[45:07] You know, when, when you're doing in what we call invisible
[45:11] effects, you know, so we might be working in a romantic comedy
[45:14] or a, you know, period drama. And if you see our work at all,
[45:19] we, we've done a really bad job, you know, so you should not know
[45:22] there's any visual effects in it.
[45:23] But even when we're doing, say, a creature like Rocket Raccoon
[45:27] or Paddington, if you're thinking about the visual
[45:30] effects, it's not a good job. People know it's, you know,
[45:33] there's no bear talking in the shots.
[45:35] They know there's visual effects in there, but hopefully they're
[45:38] just engaging with him as a character and, you know, being
[45:41] carried along. And I think that's a good point.
[45:44] Yeah. The better job we do, the less
[45:45] people notice us. Yeah.
[45:47] And to finish it off, Tim, I have some more general quick
[45:50] fire style questions, if that's all right.
[45:53] So of all the directors you've worked with, mentioned some
[45:56] really big names, who was your favorite to work with?
[46:00] Oh, that would be, that would be unfair to say, but I, I would
[46:03] have to say I think I'd actually Alfonso, because, you know, he,
[46:07] he is a real genius, as many of them are, I'd say, but he is a
[46:13] real genius. He's you know, he does, he
[46:15] pushes things forwards. I get to work very closely with
[46:19] him. You know, the level of
[46:21] expectations of the quality he wants is incredibly high.
[46:25] He's not satisfied just to go the easy way and he, you know,
[46:29] he's always looking to do something different and he makes
[46:32] great films, you know, so. I think you may have answered
[46:36] this one already, but of the films you've worked on, which
[46:39] film are you most proud of the effects on?
[46:42] Well, that kind of has to be gravity.
[46:44] I mean, I think for obvious reasons, you know, it would.
[46:47] Yeah, it would be that. I mean the other one I still
[46:50] look back on and really enjoy is and you know, what we achieved
[46:58] with what we had back then is actually phenomenal I'd say.
[47:01] And that's a nice little 2 films.
[47:04] Very satisfying too. Great, and finally, if there's
[47:07] any aspiring visual effects artists listening to us, what
[47:11] would your top tip be on getting into the industry?
[47:14] It's really hard and it's a very different industry to when I got
[47:17] into it, you know, when I got in, started making coffee and
[47:20] you know, but then I, I got in and I just, I, I, I had to do
[47:24] everything. I was a one man band on anything
[47:27] I was working on pretty much. I mean, when, when on all the
[47:29] adverts. So I learned about being on set,
[47:32] I learned about compositing, I learned about CGI, learned about
[47:35] stop frame animation because I, you know, I'd be involved with
[47:38] stuff, you know, all sorts of things.
[47:40] And even when we did Gulliver's Travels, that was pretty much
[47:42] just a team of two. We did hundreds of shots and it
[47:45] was me and another visual effect supervisor.
[47:47] But he is another visual effect supervisor now, William
[47:49] Bartlett. And it was just the two of us.
[47:51] So you really learnt a lot. These days it's very
[47:54] specialised. People come in and they're a
[47:56] modular or a texture artist or a matte painter or a animator, you
[48:02] know, so and they're coming out from university having trained
[48:06] in that specialism. And you know, we have 20 or so
[48:10] different departments of friends to all of them specialized in
[48:12] what they do. So understanding the bigger
[48:14] picture, which is what enables you to do great work and move on
[48:19] is hard when you go in in with that speciality.
[48:21] And, and it's hard when you're going into the industry to know
[48:26] which speciality is right for you.
[48:29] You know, my advice is just get in, I would say and look around
[48:33] and don't get into the specialization too soon until
[48:36] you've looked at the range of options that are there and in
[48:40] your early days particularly, but this is true all the way
[48:41] through. Try and understand the big
[48:44] picture. Try and understand what the
[48:45] departments around you are doing and why.
[48:47] It will make what you do better and more suitable.
[48:50] Try and understand film making, try and understand art and music
[48:56] and things because they all affect what you do.
[48:59] You know, you know, so focused on the bigger picture, you need
[49:02] to be good at the specific expertise you have, but it's
[49:06] also important to understand the bigger picture.
[49:09] Great advice. Well, Tim Webber, thank you very
[49:12] much for joining me. Thank you.
[49:14] That's been a pleasure. And that's our chat with Tim
[49:18] Webber. Some fascinating insights there
[49:19] into the visual effects that make some of our favorite films.
[49:22] So hopefully you've enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, you may
[49:26] already be aware that we have a regular podcast show, ATRM
[49:29] Classic, where three of us do deep dives into classic and hit
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