185 - Director Gareth Edwards and the Oscar-Nominated Visual Effects of The Creator

The Academy Award®-nominated VFX team joins our returning guest, director Gareth Edwards, to discuss how they created such a visually stunning, effects-heavy science-fiction film with a comparatively minuscule budget. Rather than utilizing extensive previz, green screen studios, and fully-rendered CGI environments, “The Creator” was filmed on-location in Asia, documentary-style, with a very small crew, completely upending the usual methods of shooting for VFX:

“You do concept art. That's typically one of the first things that happens — storyboards, concept art. And then you spend the rest of the life of the film chasing that artwork. They immediately say, ‘well, this is science fiction. It doesn't exist. So we'll build all this. And we have to build it in a studio…’ And you just get trapped immediately in the straight jacket of every big film ever. And everything's all green screen. And it was like, ‘Forget that. We'll have concept art. But forget the specifics of it. Just trust that it'll look as good as this. But it won't be exactly this. We'll go around the world for every scene. We will find a location that's the best location in the world for that scene. We'll shoot it there. And then we'll design it in post.’”

—Gareth Edwards, Director, Producer, Co-writer, “The Creator”

Joining Gareth:

- Director of Photography, Oren Soffer.

- Jay Cooper, Visual Effects Supervisor: Industrial Light & Magic.

- Andrew Roberts, Visual Effects On-Set Supervisor: Industrial Light & Magic.

Be sure to check out “The Creator,” in Dolby Vision® and Dolby Atmos® (where available), ahead of the Academy Awards, live from the Dolby Theatre® on March 10th!

For more awards season coverage, please subscribe to The Dolby Creator Talks Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also check out the video for this episode.

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