Ask most people what visual effects artists do and you’ll usually get the obvious answers – wild creatures, huge explosions, vast impossible landscapes stitched together in post, maybe just name-check this year's big Marvel movie – but speak to Enrico Selmi, co-head of VFX at Milk VFX in London, who worked on new nature documentary Surviving Earth, that explores eight mass extinction events stretching back 450 million years, as it follows the lives of the creatures that came before the dinosaurs or lived alongside them, and the focus moves almost immediately away from imagery and into something far less visible: data structures, workflows, pipelines, and USD, which doesn’t sound especially cinematic until you realise it underpins almost everything that ends up on screen.
Selmi’s role, as he describes it, sits right in that space between creative ambition and production reality, “Ultimately, my role is about helping the team deliver great VFX that match the client’s vision while keeping the project moving smoothly,” he says, adding that a large part of the job is simply keeping those two forces aligned, “balancing the creative ambition with what’s technically achievable for the show.”
