The Oscars: Trojansky Talks Hereafter

Scanline's founder and vfx supervisor discusses the new mindset for working with Clint Eastwood.

By Bill Desowitz | Monday, February 7, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld | Site Categories: Awards, CG, Films, People, Visual Effects

Check out the Hereafter trailers and clips at AWNtv!

The tsunami was all about setting up the emotional crisis. Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

After raising the bar for the wild fluid sim ride on 2012, Scanline VFX had to shift gears for the more real world demands of Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. Stephan Trojansky tells us what new challenges this entailed.

Bill Desowitz: What has this experience been like?

Stephan Trojansky: It's been a crazy ride. I never thought this would happen at all. When we finished the movie, this seemed like a really good piece of supporting visual effects for a Clint Eastwood movie that's very emotional about finding yourself and thinking about the hereafter. And suddenly there was this big bombastic sequence at the beginning of the movie -- a tsunami -- and we delivered it. But when it came to the awards season, we never thought of this as a visual effects movie. And then when we heard we were in the long-list, I was like, "Oh, my God! Well, somebody saw something in it that needs to be added to the plate." And then when we were still in the running, I thought, "A few more people think it was an interesting piece of visual effects work." And then when we were in the bakeoff, I thought, "OK, we're not like a $200 million movie, and the only thing I can emphasize is that we did a lot of difficult work to actually create supporting visual effects for a movie."

BD: And here you are.

ST: Look, it's refreshing and I'm happy that it shows that it's not only about the budget and the size and the number of people and the time that you have. It's an opportunity on a normal movie to do something exceptional and get rewarded for it.

BD: This is a direct consequence of expanding the nominees to five.

ST: It shows how a diverse range of visual effects affect today's movies with cutting edge level of technology. That's how I see and what makes us proud, independent of the fact that it was the only movie that was actually created by a sole visual effects vendor and it means a lot to us because all artists live for this.