2022 Visual Effects Bake-Off
This Saturday, January 29, Visual Effects Chair Gray Marshall, screened the 2022 Oscar’s Visual Effects Bake-Off. During this exciting event, we witnessed the pitches from the top ten potential “Best Visual Effects” Oscars nominees of the year. After this event, members of the Academy vote and narrow down the top ten movies into the five nominees that will be presented at the Oscars. In addition to the Bake Off screen, we also witnessed an insightful presentation from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Branch members: professor Gray Marshall and professor Stuart Robertson, who also won an Academy Award for “Best Visual Effects” on “What Dreams May Come.”
During the first half-hour presentation of our dear professors, we received enriching information regarding the Academy. There are 7,000 members in the Academy that are divided into several branches:
- Actors
- Casting Directors
- Cinematographers
- Costume Designers
- Directors
- Documentary
- Executives
- Film Editors
- Makeup Artist and Hairstylists
- Marketing and Public Relations
- Members-At-Large
- Music
- Producers
- Production Design
- Short Films and Feature Animation
- Sound
- Visual Effects
- Writers
From the Visual Effects Branch, there are 20 members total, four for each nominated film. You may wonder how a VSFX supervisor gets to be a member of the Academy out of so many people who work on a movie? There are two main paths which a person can take to be part of the membership:
- Two members of the particular Branch nominate you. For this to happen, the person needs to have at least five years of experience in addition to excellent networking. This is a challenging step because each member of the Academy can only sponsor one person per year.
- Your film gets nominated for an Academy Award. Being nominated means you automatically earn an invite to be a member and a voter within the Academy
However, both paths must pass the Branch’s Membership Committee.
The Bake-Off process of Visual Effects is divided into:
1) The Long List: to make it, the film must be acceptable
2) The Short List: presents the top ten films
3) The Bake-Off: After pitches, members of the Academy narrow down the “Short List” into the five nominees.
4) The Oscars: beauty contest to share the Academy Winners
Each Branch has a different process they must follow to reach the Oscars. Within the VSFX branch, the person nominated must receive approval from peers. Actors consist of 40% of the voters.
In addition to The Oscars, The Academy has multiple different Activities:
- SciTech Awards
- Science and Technical Council (ACES)
- Library and Archives which are available to the public
- Academy Gold that provides Internships, Fellowships, and Grants
- The most recently opened Academy Museum in LA
After receiving this insightful information from the enriching presentation, we were able to witness the Pitches from all ten possible nominees that are:
- Black Widow 6) Godzilla vs Kong
- Dune 7) The Matrix Resurrections
- Eternals 8) No Time to Die
- Free Guy 9) Shang – Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings
- Ghost Busters: Afterlife 10) Spider-Man: No Way Home
How the pitches went was one of the visual effects supervisors from each film went up first to give a presentation. This presentation was the supervisor speaking over the breakdown reel from that specific movie. They went into as much depth as they could about how the visual effects were created in the time they were granted. The reels of each of the nominated movies were incredible. Knowing that the Academy did not show in-depth breakdowns in the past made the current process even more exciting and enjoyable.
It was amazing to see all of their CG work and its creation. For example, in multiple scenes of the movie Eternals, they were completely CGI, and you wouldn’t have known unless you saw the reel. It was incredible that technology has come so far as to trick our eyes into believing particular works of art are reality. Another astonishing feat of VFX was the battle between Godzilla and King Kong in the movie Godzilla vs Kong. The breakdown showed that they recreated the entire city of Hong Kong, city by city, to be accurate for the creatures to battle in. Not only was the city recreated building by building, but they also had to destroy it. The number of simulations and fx that had to be done was immense. With three full CGI creatures destroying an accurately created Hong Kong, it’s a wonder their render farms didn’t explode.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/james-bond-no-time-to-die-stunts/
Not all movies have gone fully computerized for visual effects; some still have the traditional special effects that keep the realism aspect in the film alive. For example, during the reel of No Time to Die, the scene where James Bond is in his car with Madeline and the vehicle is swerving in circles was all done in real life (except the bullet hits on the glass). Multiple explosions in the movie were also done in real life and comped into their respective shots. One of the most incredible special effects stunts shown during the Bake-Off was a scene in ‘The Matrix: Resurrections”. Remember the scene where Neo and Trinity jump off a building? Yeah, that was all done in real life. The actors were stories up that high building attached to harnesses and were brave enough to jump off for the film.
After a supervisor would talk over their movie’s breakdown reel, they would show multiple visual effects-heavy clips from the film for the audience to rewatch. The supervisors who worked on the film would then come to the stage after those clips played and answer questions from the two hosts. Although it was amazing to hear the details from all of the supervisors, it was very disappointing to see that every one of the supervisors was a white man. If anything critical would be said about the visual effects industry, is that there needs to be more diversity to allow opportunities for women and people of different ethnicities to climb to supervisors.
SCAD students who participated in this event could vote for their favorites as if they were part of the bake-off. The results were clear; the top 5 choices of SCAD students were: Black Widow, Dune, Godzilla vs Kong, Shang Chi & the Legend of the 10 Rings, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The student’s favorite was Dune, with 93% of the votes! We all loved the naturalistic style of this movie. Most of the effects were done practical and pushed forward digitally. They also used a sand-colored screen instead of a green screen to keep the natural aspect and produce a better bounce light. The official results of the bake-off will be published on February 8th. We will see if our favorites are part of the five nominees!
The Visual Effect’s “Bake-Off” was a fantastic event to watch. The reels made by powerhouse visual effects studios were stunning and inspiring. And not only were the interviews with the supervisors insightful, but they were silly at times too (for example, they revealed for one of the movies they played with toys to make an animatic). It was an excellent opportunity to see the “Bake Off.” We thank Professor Gray for setting it up to have us watch it!