International Disruptors: ‘The Power’ and ‘Poor Things’ VFX House Union Talks Expanding to Canada, AI and How They’re ‘Trying to Be Part of the Storytelling Process’

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, an article in which we highlight key leaders and companies outside the US that are disrupting the foreign market. This week we’re talking about visual effects powerhouse Union VFX, an independent company based in London and more recently Montreal that has quietly built a reputation over the past 15 years for producing some of the most seamless and invisible visual effects in the world. deliver world. Film and television world. We sat down with three of them to talk about how the company has grown, why it’s important to get VFX teams involved early, and what’s next for the company.

The best visual effects are the ones you don’t notice, which fit seamlessly into the plot and immerse the audience deeper into the narrator’s world. For example, if you watched Amazon Prime Video’s feminist sci-fi series The power Earlier this year, images of young women developing the ability to generate electricity within themselves felt real and almost tangible as their blood vessels pulsed beneath their skin before sparks flew from their bodies. And the company behind these deftly executed visual effects is Union VFX, a London and Montreal-based company that has quietly earned a reputation for delivering some of the smoothest and most invisible visual effects in the industry.

“Bee The power“One of our main tasks was to create ‘the power’ not as a superhero power, but with an organic, natural effect, and that was very difficult,” says Union CEO Lucy Cooper. “There are so many nuances in the way you do that, and the work we did probably passed you by, but would have had an impact on the way you consumed the images, with small impulses that were previously the women’s veins flowed to their fingertips.” The power” is actually visible. Everything required intelligent approaches that required weeks and months of research and development and finding ways to implement them.”

Founded in 2008 by Adam Gascoyne and Tim Caplan, Union is the sole VFX studio behind a number of award-winning film and television projects including The power, Sam Mendes’s Kingdom of LightMartin McDonaghs The Banshees of Inisherin And Three billboards outside Ebbing, MissouriAnd Mamma Mia! Here we go again. The company also worked closely with Danny Boyle’s creative team to create short films for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Netflix series have also been worked on The crownDisney+s Moon Knight Upcoming projects include the highly anticipated one from Yorgos Lanthimos Poor stuffwith Emma Stone and Andrew Haigh We are all strangerswith Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott and Claire Foy, Emerald Fennell’s Salt burns And The pigeon tunnel, a documentary about the writer John Le Carré. “These are projects that are really about stories, but maybe not what people would call visual effects films,” says Cooper.

According to Caplan, Gascoyne and Cooper, this latest plan is emblematic of everything Union has built over the past fifteen years: an agile and forward-thinking VFX house that “tries hard to be part of the storytelling process.”

“We are experienced filmmakers and it took a long time for people to adapt to this mindset, but the sooner we work with each department, the better the results, the further the budget goes and the bigger the film gets.” be,” says Caplan. “But in general, people are much more aware of it now.”

While the areas of post-production and visual effects are extremely important to the final versions of films and television series, they have long been considered a secondary aspect of a film’s journey, and film purists reject the idea that visual effects can alter reality. replace. Reality of a project.

But Union prides himself on working on a number of projects he describes as “non-traditional VFX films.”

“I don’t think you can really incorporate VFX into one type of film,” says Gascoyne. “There probably aren’t many films left that are made without some form of visual effects, and often it’s very invisible things that require a team the size of a film production team to create these things that blend seamlessly into the background of the recordings. It’s not always the big blockbusters and tentpole films that use VFX. Now the industry is using technology to facilitate storytelling, which is really at the heart of what we do.”

Humble beginnings

Gascoyne and Caplan have both worked at some of the UK’s biggest VFX houses, including Cinesite (where they first met), Framestore and The Mill, and have had experience working on several major projects such as Ridley Scotts. gladiatorthe first few episodes of the Harry Potter franchise, Mamma Mia! And Slumdog Millionaire. Concerned about the “top-heavy management” of many of these companies, the duo decided to join forces in 2008 and form Unie, with the goal of “uniting the creative and the technical.”

“We wanted to cut out a lot of the layers of politics in larger companies and get to the heart of the matter and work directly with the creatives in film and television to make it much easier and cleaner to manage,” says Caplan.

“We thought about how we could take the best of what we’ve learned over the past decade and try to integrate it into a business we can control, with clients we’ve already started building relationships with. said Gascoyne. “That was the origin of the idea: we wanted to develop a different approach on a different scale.”

Caplan adds: “We had strong ideas about how things could be done better, and those ideas are as true today as they were then. It’s very much the same ethos and mentality we’ve grown with.”

Union hired respected VFX supervisor Simon Hughes as creative director in 2012 and former marketing director of The Foundry Cooper as managing director in 2016. Cooper recalls admiring Union’s work from the start and was particularly impressed by the company’s early use of the Sneak composite tool.

“They built a pipeline in the UK that was very interesting because of the way artists used the technology that was available at the time,” she says.

Currently, Union employs 140 people in its London and Montreal offices (most of them in London), of which almost 40% are female, a large percentage compared to its competitors in the growing industry.

“The world of visual effects is growing and it requires more artists, which are very understandable and tangible,” says Caplan. “You know you have to complete a job on a schedule with x number of artists, but what really supports those artists and everything around them is communication about what’s needed and the production, administrative and editorial teams that surround it. and support them. It’s what made us the company we’ve become.”

Gascoyne agrees. “For us, it’s about keeping a really good core team that we’re developing, both on the artist side and on the production side, to know our strengths and play to them.” We’ve been very successful in retaining good people over long periods of time, and that’s exactly what we focus on.”

Next steps

As production budgets tighten in many countries and inflation rises, producers – whether working on the indie, studio or streaming side – have realized the importance of engaging in discussions with VFX producers earlier than before to house participate. This way of working has been organic and fruitful for Union and has many regular clients from top producers and directors such as McDonagh, Boyle, Kevin McDonald and Stephen Frears.

“We always try to solve everything in camera first,” says Caplan. “Our starting point is always: to say how things can best be done not to use us and talk to production crews about how to get everything they need on camera. Then we can jump in and get you what you need if it’s not there. I think that’s always the best approach because everyone wants to capture reality, then magnify it, and then use ourselves to solve those problems. It’s a smarter way to use their budgets.”

Gascoyne points out that many of her regular clients will involve Union in the first or second draft stages of scripts. “This enables us to identify the challenges they initially face and often launch projects before other departments join them. We encourage people to come to us as early as possible. By being involved in a director’s scouting when they’re looking for locations, we can recommend and help them.”

“The more we’re treated like another creative department, the better the outcome for everyone,” adds Cooper. “I think we can offer a variety of solutions to problems outside of these departments.”

Based in London’s Soho since its founding, Union expanded its reach into Canada earlier this year when it opened a new office in Montreal. “We’ve always been interested in exploring that,” notes Caplan, adding that they can now also take advantage of Canada’s 25 percent tax relief (in addition to the 25 percent tax relief in the United Kingdom).

“Having an office there will increase our long-term appeal,” Caplan said. “This gives clients the opportunity to work in both countries, but still work with our team. In that respect, it’s a win-win situation. It also broadens our horizons and it will be great to continue to grow our team there.”

The AI ​​question

When it comes to utilizing the new technologies available to the industry, Union is definitely at the forefront of all developments. They are not threatened by the popular topic of AI and see its introduction as a tool that can facilitate the efficiency of their work.

“We’re definitely exploring what’s possible with AI,” says Gascoyne. “I think it would be naive to think that it won’t be part of the future or many aspects of all industries. But we’re looking for ways to simplify things, take away some of the more mundane tasks and give people more time to do more interesting things. It’s more about achieving efficiency and leveraging technology than replacing people.”

Cooper adds: “Filmmaking does not stand still. The discussion about AI now is almost as if nothing else will change and AI will take over everything. But in our experience technology just evolves and then everyone’s ambitions evolve with what happens on the technical side. So with any kind of inadequacy, new problems and challenges arise, or more ambitious and creative ideas. For us, this is a kind of development that we do not expect to disappear. We expect to grow and expand our horizons with everything that happens, rather than exhausting it.”