Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1489831
12 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 this material. It is a new world because everybody now is working in this hybridized form…I believe this is modern filmmaking…Everybody worked as a singular team. It wasn't like, 'Okay, we're going to finish it and you'll get it.' There was no silo-ing. I think the process, to me, is as exciting as the result." VFX SUPERVISOR JASON SMITH ILM's Jason Smith served as the film's visual effects supervisor and says one of the first things he did, along with the showrunners, was map out the show and brainstorm on how they were going to meet its visual effects needs. "In some of those first weeks, Ron [Ames] and I stood at a white board, with our [list of] vendors that we wanted to work," he recalls. "And we just started listing the beats that we thought each one would be good at." Many studios, he points out, have the supervision and artistic skills to pull off difficult work. However, for The Rings of Power, the volume of shots required would present an additional challenge. "To pull off work at scale, with a large number of shots at a high, high quality bar and high difficulty — difficult creature work as a good example, or difficult environment, or especially difficult simulation work, like water and things like that — those kind of tasks, when you read them in the script, you can almost immediately start thinking of Ncam's Reality camera-tracking system provided realtime previs of CGI elements and set extensions in-camera on set. Eight top VFX vendors brought their expertise to the project.