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“You can go on forever if you want, refining the image,” says Paul of the process. Paul shows a shot from the upcoming Patrick Melrose and explains how he altered a photo of Cumberbatch standing behind a window in a house to make it look like he was on the 20th floor of an office block. So Paul creates the painting on a screen, and then hands it over to Adrian who animates the image into a credible moving sequence. The creation of photo-realistic backdrop paintings has been going on since 1907, and were more significantly deployed in classics including Gone With the Wind and right up to the early Star Wars films. The techniques they use start with the matte painter. Patrick Melrose scene set in Glasgow prior to conversion by Vine FX for New York CGI artist Matt McKinney, who’s also part of the team, isn’t in the studio when we visit. Laura Usaite is production manager, Paul Phippen is digital matte painter and Adrian Banton is the compositor. Two times BAFTA nominated (for Atlantis and Crazyhead), Vine FX’s studio is at the CB1 Business Centre on Station Road.
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“If we did our job well, no one knows anything about us,” explains Vine FX’s founder and visual effects supervisor Michael Illingworth, who’s offering a peek behind the veil, not just to the work he’s done on films but also on TV adaptations including Atlantis, Troy and – starting on May 12 – the Sky Atlantic mini-series Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. But the thing about these amazing cinematic illusions is you rarely get to know how it’s done or who’s behind it.
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And in the Harry Potter series there was all sorts of CGI (computer-generated imagery) magic going on.
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Which is probably why it won an Oscar for visual effects. The visual effects on these films were part of its success: in Gladiator, creating a Roman amphitheatre and filling it with people was largely done by computer, and it was one of the first times in cinematic history the result looked authentic – you couldn’t tell where reality ended and digitisation began. Remember Gladiator? If not, check it out. From left are production manager Laura Usaite, compositor Adrian Banton and visdual effects supervisor Michael Illingworth from Vine FX.