What really gets you ahead in VFX?
Do qualifications matter in VFX?
I’ve spent nearly 20 years in the industry - slightly over half of that time being employed or freelance, and slightly under half running my own VFX company.
In that time I’ve interviewed or pitched for jobs many times, and interviewed many candidates for work. So here’s my question - how often do you think the subject of qualification comes up, as a rough percentage? It’s definitely not 100%. What about 50%, every other interview?
Nope. The answer is…0%. I have never once been asked for a qualification (although I do have a VFX degree), and I have never once asked anyone about theres.
I don’t care about it, and it seems like no one else does either.
So what DO VFX employers or clients care about? Take a guess.
I bet you guessed “They care about how good you are at VFX!”. That feels like it should be true, but…ehhhhh…
As an artist, I once had an interview that ended with two different surprises - the first being offered to make the spaceship in Cuaron’s “Gravity”. The second was when the interviewer revealed that they had never seen any of my work. So clearly, what mattered was how good I was at being interviewed, not how good I was at VFX!
And that cuts both ways - I know (because I’ve spoken to many of you) that a lot of you made the decision to join us at Shoot First only after checking out my credits at IMDB. Apparently all my efforts to convince you with dazzling VFX were for nothing! You bastards.
But seriously, I think that this is good news, especially for those of you who feel daunted at learning VFX, and torture yourselves watching other peoples amazing work and telling yourselves that you’ll never get there.
You can get there. But you don’t have to. VFX doesn’t need superstars, it just needs people who are good enough. Here’s what matters more, in priority order:
1. Tenacity. You can get there by just smashing the door down by contacting everyone looking for an internship, or being a runner on set, or starting as a receptionist or PA or…just whatever it takes.
2. Luck. Truth is, you don’t get there without it. I stepped out into the industry just as it was blossoming in London, mostly because of Harry Potter, which was one of the first projects that I worked on. If JK Rowling hadn’t insisted on the VFX being done in the UK, I probably wouldn’t have found work
3. Contacts. My school had great contacts, and without them, breaking into the industry might have been much harder
4. Professionalism. In VFX you’re generally working as a team, to hit a target defined by a client, to a schedule. Those things require professionalism much more than raw artistic talent.
Even if you’re creating your own content, the rule of “good enough is good enough” still holds. You can’t make a bad film good with VFX, but you can make a good film worse if the VFX are distracting.
So the bar is this - your VFX needs to be good enough to tell their story, and not bad enough to be distracting
To come back to the first question - do qualifications matter in VFX? No. Not at all.
Does that mean you shouldn’t go to school? Up to you! But as long as you’re tenacious, lucky, and “good enough”, you won’t need to