Interview with Fiona Walkinshaw on the VFX industry
Posted on Mar 18, 2025 by Admin
Fireside chat
Framestore’s CEO of film & episodic delves into the impact of enhanced tax credits, the rise of AI and the need to fill the talent pipeline, giving insights on the road ahead for the VFX industry
We are seeing green shoots, which is heartening. There are projects coming down the line that are creative not just in the stories they seek to tell, but in their workflows, methodologies and concepts of what it’s possible to achieve with VFX. This all speaks to a recalibration across the film and high-end TV sectors, as studios and streaming services seek to craft content that sets them apart, curating a considered slate and choosing quality over quantity.
This doesn’t negate the impact of the six-month hiatus in all production, which is still being felt to some extent. But if you’re in VFX, it is picking up a bit. There are lots of opportunities to work on bold new stories and figure out how to best deploy new and emerging technologies to bring them to life.
The UK VFX tax credit uplift was welcome news for the VFX community. Visual effects is a globally competitive industry. The sands shift for different reasons, and tax credits provide some stability when they do. The UK has always been the place for productions to come to, and tax credits further strengthen it as a place to work. Knowing that this investment in our creative industries will continue gives immediate reassurance. This in itself is a positive effect that will keep talent, their ideas and the infrastructure that’s been built – all essential to any film – here in the UK.
While generative AI tools are interesting, in our field we’re working with directors and filmmakers who have specific visions, brought to life through a highly iterative creative process that requires back and forth between people embodying a multiplicity of skills. The specificity of this process, the level of control required and quality of output can’t be replicated with AI tools. Film studios, in addition to making blockbuster movies to be enjoyed by audiences on the big screen, are also creating company value via copyrightable works, which are the result of human endeavour and authorship, not simply a prompt.
For us, it’s ‘test and learn’ in a closed environment: what could generative AI mean for our workflows when the provenance of the data is known? How big does that dataset really need to be, and could our artists have more editorial control of the constituent elements to better direct the output? These are some of the questions we’re working out the answers to here. There’s often also a lack of transparency in the data used to train models, and the legality is uncertain. We do use machine-learning techniques to automate the creative decisions made by our artists, time-intensive tasks like inpainting, rotoscoping, denoising and upresing. We call this Directed AI.
In VFX, there will always be a final sprint to the finish line – that will be true of any business with creative deliverables at its core. But what we’ve seen at Framestore is a growing appreciation for our pre-production teams. This is an area of our business that has grown consistently since we launched Framestore Preproduction Services (FPS) five years ago. Built for preparation and planning, our teams make everything that happens on shoot days and during VFX post-production far more efficient, making room for early creative exploration and decision-making.
Few Framestore projects don’t involve FPS, whether it’s designing Deadpool & Wolverine’s oner or Wicked’s Defying Gravity sequence with previs, VP and techvis on Barbie, deploying Farsight for Paddington in Peru, visual development of over 40 CG characters for IF or previs, techvis and postvis on Loki Season 2. The creative continuity that comes from our FPS team working with a filmmaker from the very beginning creates firmer foundations for productions. The ability to forecast and schedule with less deviation is invaluable, and the benefits of preparation, preparation, preparation in all facets of life are indisputable.
VFX relies on a pipeline of skilled artists and technologists. To attract, train and retain the next generation of talent, we need consistent investment in the industry. Tax credits provide security, but any industry will find it hard to attract and retain talent if it can’t provide stability and opportunities for growth. VFX is such an exciting industry to be part of, and because of evolving technology every advancement comes with the potential to tell stories in new and exciting ways.
Routes into VFX aren’t always obvious, so we put a lot of effort into our schools outreach, opening our studios’ doors for school-age kids on career discovery days. Our Launchpad internships and apprenticeships target school leavers, graduates and entry-level professionals, and are all about training a strong pipeline of industry-ready talent.
Looking ahead, I think AI will continue to make its mark and dominate many conversations. Framestore will continue to leverage Directed AI techniques as powerful tools that, in the hands of our artists, bring a client’s vision to life. We have the technological infrastructure and expertise in deploying large-scale compute resources globally to enable us to efficiently manage the demands of training AI models. These models are built by us to ensure transparency, repeatability and responsible data provenance tracking.
We’ve always combined exceptional talent with technology, art and science, which leaves us well placed to drive this innovation. One of the places I suspect we’ll see some impact in the near term is in our pre-production services, particularly previs and postvis. This will bring even more scope to the planning and preparation elements of shot composition and sequence design with better image clarity. This enhances creative decision-making, and thereby improves the effectiveness of shoot days and delivery of final VFX.
We also expect radiance fields and Gaussian splatting to become part of the VFX tool kit. We’re already using this tech on a couple of projects to manipulate environments and capture 3D movement of performers. While the uses are limited at the moment, we’re pushing what can be done with them and expect that to grow. These technologies will result in even greater collaboration between filmmaking crafts, with our artists giving production designers, SFX, choreographers, costume designers and others the ability to test multiple concepts and ideas at speed, before anything is made or anyone even sets foot on a set, and then to realise the final shots in post-production.
Framestore was also integral in the development of Wonka – read about it in this article.
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Definition
