For E ridendo L’uccise, Videa had to create a medieval village.

Every single operator is like a mosaic’s dot. A good example would be the immense work done for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where the first goal was to keep the same stylistic feel during the storytelling, and they did it artistically and technically.

Learning from what Weta and other companies have done, Italian people started to understand the team’s interactive importance and how an internal organization should operate, at the same time recognizing the artistic contributions of each individual.

This new observation allows new companies to rise along these lines, structuring their own working pipelines in a much better way.

From an internal perspective we are split into two operating offices at Videa, which is also divided into two main departments: Digital effects and a special shooting group. The digital effects group is comprised of around18 creative talents subdivided between 3D and compositing divisions. Many of them came from traditional art and skills such as scenography, comics, cartoons and design, while the shooting group is composed of several operators with particular skill at handling bluescreen stage work.

While each department has its own structure and internal philosophy, we have some points in common that are musts for everyone. For us at Videa, one of them is previs, because it allows us to begin adequate planning of the work and to setup the pipeline according to the needs of the production.

But working in Italy means facing several problems when approaching the visual effects for a movie. At the office we use a particular formula to study movie projects, which is not properly the “Italian way.” That’s why sometimes it can create little misunderstandings with new clients, especially when they are not accustomed to working with a good planning system. In fact, while we love to face the work using storyboard, animatics, layouts and asking ourselves technical questions in advance, some directors see this as an obstacle to their creative vision and an incredible waste of time; for that reason, it is not always easy to let them understand how important this study is.

However, in my experience once directors try their hand at previs they come to rely on it because of the obvious advantages and cost factors. These experiences have been very educational. We have nearly three people on staff plus outside collaborators dedicated to previs and storyboarding for our visual effects purposes. They use pencils and some dedicated software packages to create animatics to show to directors. We use Poser to create little storyboards or animatics, especially when the scene involves human elements. We use the “sketch renderer” to give it a more appealing feel.

Videa created digital birds for Francesco.

From a producing point of view, our effort is to be constantly sensible when making a visual effects study of production costs, because it can be really sad to see your producer watch your solutions and say: “You mean you want to use motion control? Are you mad? Forget it,” ripping the page and dropping it in the trashcan. Unfortunately in Italy, this is very common. But to avoid this grotesque scene, we write more than one solution for shots, even if sometimes the second is an ancient method, as long as the final target we aim for is the best we can achieve.

A good visual effects study can’t be compiled without the supervisor’s touch; this is a very important role for us during the project analysis phase for production on stage and in front of monitor screens in post.

For these reasons I supervise all shoots involving our work, and I write down, on a special log, all possible data regarding set and motion picture camera setup, such as film stock and format, focal length used for that scene, shooting speed, camera inclination and height from the ground, eventual filters used, take duration and also if we did a light probe pass or clean plate.