La Pierre de Tear is a French-speaking association dedicated to The Wheel of Time and fantasy.
Camille and Cédric had the opportunity to interview Andy Scrase, VFX Supervisor for The Wheel of Time, you can find it on Youtube and Spotify.
Here is the transcript of that interview, you can find a transcript in french here.
P.S.: We have done our best to transcribe this interview. We apologise for any errors in English.
(Editor’s note : Be aware that for those who haven’t finished the books, there are a few spoilers. They are minor and lack context, but still appear in the interview.)
Transcription:
Cédric:
Today we welcome Andy Scrase, VFX Supervisor for the Wheel of Time series. Please Andy, correct me if I say anything incorrect.
Andy:
Doing great so far.
Cédric:
We are very glad to have you, Andy!
For those who are not familiar with him, Andy, as I said, you are the VFX Supervisor for the Wheel of Time series and you have a long career of almost 20 years in the VFX industry.
You have worked on a bunch of TV shows and movies.
In no particular order, in The Crown where you were awarded the Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects Award by the Visual Effects Society. You also have been nominated at the Emmys for the same show.
You also worked on a bunch of fantasy series and movies like His Dark Materials (À la Croisée des Mondes in French), multiple Harry Potter movies such as Deathly Hallows, Fantastic Beasts and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
But also movies like Mission Impossible or Interstellar.
Am I correct?
Andy:
You’re correct. Apart from Fantastic Beasts, I never worked on that one. I was kind of very true to working on just Harry Potter, but when I look back at it, it’s kind of quite special you’ve got to work on that.
I know they’re making the TV show now, but to work on the original films is great just because of the buzz around at the time.
Saying I’ve worked in the industry for nearly 20 years kind of suddenly smacks me around the face and makes me feel a bit old. So, thank you.
Cédric:
It’s the same for us, when we realize that it’s been 20 years since 2005 already.
You joined the Wheel of Time series starting at season 2, if I’m not mistaken, which saw drastic changes in the way the One Power is designed and rendered on screen. So it was a very striking change for all of our viewers.
I will give the mic to Camille who is impatient to ask you some questions.
Camille:
First of all, I would like to thank you for sharing your work on social media! It is so interesting and it helped us to understand your work process! So thank you very much!
Andy:
No problem. I like that as much as anyone when there’s a show or a film or something like that and finding out the creative process someone goes through from it.
I think that can sometimes be just as interesting as the final shot or the final film, whatever that may be.
I think just because of how I was educated in art or through the kind of art mediums that I’ve gone through, it was all about being heavily researching and justifing in terms of your designs and things. So I think I always became very interested then in the thought processes behind the way things looked in certain films or TV shows and I’ve definitely tried to carry that across into my career.
Camille:
Well, it was really great. So thank you!
So today, we will ask you a bunch of questions. Some of them are about your profession and others are about your work on The Wheel of Time.
So I will start with the first question.
Sometimes we are not aware of all the careers available to us when we leave school. I am very keen to share with young and old the professional careers of people from different backgrounds.
So can you tell us how you became VFX Supervisor?
What were the steps in your career path, what drove you into this path and what studies or training are recommended for this profession?
Andy:
I think for me it was a fairly straightforward process. Some take a very kind of roundabout way of coming to visual effects.
I think some I’ve known have come from dance, some have come from biochemical engineering, architecture. So there’s lots of different ways of doing it. But, you know, I had that art background and that really started from childhood, drawing.
My family is quite artistic, you know, on both sides. My dad can draw really well and on my mom’s side as well, very kind of artistic with different aspects. Drawing definitely being one of them.
And so that was kind of encouraged within me just because of seeing my father do it or my aunts, my mom’s sister, drawing.
And so I kind of fell into it that way because it was a really fun way of expressing imagination and things like that. It was a really fun thing to do as a kid.
I’ve definitely kind of looked at replicating the things I was watching. So, you will find that for a young Andy Scrase, there would be a lot of Thundercats (Cosmocats in French), He-Man (Musclor in French), MASK.
So, think of any kind of action 80s cartoon, I was there trying to replicate it, drawing it.
And, you know, the 80s is a massive influence on my career. I’m pretty sure I tried to rip off as much as I could. I thought it was a great period to grow up in and there was so much originality and imagination within children’s programs at that time.
Now I think there was a lot of it that was kind of driven a bit by selling toys and things like that, but I’ll be honest, when you’re kind of going through the years 1 to 10 in the 80s, it was a great period to grow up in.
And so from that I tended to find I would then start to design my own characters. And it was always very much about drawing some sort of human or creature or something like that.
And then, from there, I kind of expanded over really to things like Batman and started designing these vehicles and things like that.
So you’re almost kind of going in a natural sort of production designer or costume designer or concept artist sort of trajectory at that point. And from there it led me on to —I wanting to carry that on further.
I thought that comic book art, comic book illustration, would be a career for me. It doesn’t pay as well. So I avoided that. But it was a natural sort of transition, you know.
I went into and did really well with art at GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), which is what you do towards the end of school in the UK.
And from that it’s A-levels where again I did art and that’s a stepping stone between school and university. When you go into art in the UK, you have to do this extra step. I don’t know if you still do, but between college and university, you had to go to art school and do an art foundation course where essentially you spend a year exploring different art disciplines, photography, fashion, graphic design, things like this.
And from there, you make your choice and you apply to university. And so because of my drawing background, I selected a degree at Portsmouth University in illustration.
It was from there I’d say “look, if you go to university and you don’t nail it, it’s not a problem.”
I came out with a 2:1 (Upper Second Class Honours: really good level, often considered equivalent to a “good grade” (around 13–15/20)), which is a pretty good grade. But I think I made a lot of mistakes at university.
It almost kind of makes you grow up a bit, knowing where you need to focus your time because obviously at university there are other social things going on. I would be honest, the great thing about it was it allowed me to explore a little bit about what I liked to do. And it was from there that I got into the whole digital side of art, using computers and other things.
I had kind of said to myself previously that I didn’t want to do it. It felt like cheating and you (Editor’s Note: Andy himself) didn’t realize it’s not cheating.
It kind of broadens your skill set in what you can do and opens up a lot more doors. So doing that was great. I think even my final piece I did for university really wasn’t that good. But I have kind of come on this journey. You start to learn about what’s required and the focus and ideas you need to have. And from there I went on to do a Master’s in digital moving image at London Metropolitan University, which again was focused more on using computers in artwork. And for that we looked at things like motion graphics. And visual effects came up.
During my Master’s, by which time I was 24 or 25, we got to have a day trip to Double Negative (DNEG). I had a look around there, and that’s actually the first VFX studio I worked at, where I began as a runner.
So as I said, this really was a natural transition and as computers became more involved in the arts and media side of the industry, I somewhat adjusted and jumped into that more.
So, for me, it just felt great. I think when I was at university, I never thought I’d go into visual effects. I always thought I’d go more into motion graphics. But, you know, once I finished my Master’s, that whole side of visual effects started to really appeal to me.
Obviously, there’s a certain glamour to film and TV making. Believe me when I say, the glamour only comes on award nights. Everything leading up to that is really, really hard and nowhere near as glamorous as what you think. [laughing]
But it’s visual effects. I think for me what appealed to me was it was becoming much more creative. It was being used a lot more in filmmaking and therefore, you know, the possibilities of what we could do in film and TV suddenly started to kind of explode and it hadn’t really happened before that.
I mean I graduated around 2004-2005 from my Master’s. So obviously visual effects in film had already taken off by then but it was really starting to branch out everywhere. And I think as well as it being very creative, I really like the idea of fooling the viewer and tricking them into believing that something was shot there in the camera at the time. [Editor’s note: for instance, the shot on the sand before seeing Moghedien in S03E1 right after Rand says that he wants to go to the Aiel Waste. See our article about VFX here]
And to this day, that’s still one of my favorite aspects of it. I’m not saying I nail it every single time, but I do like those moments where you do the invisible visual effects and the audience doesn’t know. Unfortunately the bad side of that is no one notices your work but at the same time, they do and they don’t. There’s always the saying that good visual effects are never noticed by the audience, that’s also a great sign so…
Cédric:
That’s something I noticed when I was reviewing the work you shared on your social media where we all see that. For instance, when there are explosions or magic happening. We know those are special effects and we can recognize them and appreciate the quality of them.
But for example, for The Crown, when I saw the work you’ve done adding crowds to a scene, things that if you don’t pay attention specifically to that, you don’t even recognize that “oh, actually those people don’t exist, they were added afterwards.” And it’s not actually the scene, it is more like with 10 people you can create a hundred or more in the final scene. And we don’t know these are special effects unless it is shown that it is the case.
So that is why the fooling part is very interesting because most of your work can’t even be seen by the average viewer as special effects.
Andy:
Yeah, I will just stop there. And this will be kind of a pet hate for visual effects artists.
It is the differentiation between Visual Effects and Special Effects.
Cédric:
Please enlighten me!
Andy:
If you ever say Special Effects to a Visual Effects person, I would tend to twitch a little bit.
Cédric:
Okay. Oh, my bad. [laugh]
Andy:
It happens so much. You know, I see it online, I see it in the media, all over the place.
You have to think that Visual Effects is predominantly a post-production process where we digitally input or put into the image something that wasn’t there when they shot it.
This is obviously done through computers.
Today, we also have virtual production and I’ve been very lucky to work on a big virtual production show on Netflix called 1899.
Where, you know, you’re shooting against a giant screen made up of lots of LED panels, that’s in-camera VFX. So your role kind of changes there, where you’re trying to get final VFX shots on set in-camera at the time.
But as I say, traditionally, visual effects are a post-production process. We put everything in afterwards.
Special Effects people (maybe they get annoyed by this as well) are the ones who do things on set. They do the practical ones like explosions, smoke, rain and things like this. That’s special effects.
And then obviously, as I said, visual effects is kind of more of a digital thing that doesn’t really exist in the area.
Cédric:
Yeah, so I was completely in the wrong here. This is a distinction that I never knew. I always thought that everything was called special effects. If they’re not practical effects, they’re just special effects. And I guess also in French there’s maybe even less of a distinction in the vernacular language. I didn’t know that visual effects was something very separate at this point but it was.
So you are specifically in post-production work.
Andy:
Correct.
But I mean one important thing to remember about visual effects is if it’s a post-production process it’s not just a discipline that is involved at the end of the filmmaking process. Nowadays, visual effects have to be involved right from the start. And I’m talking in script development because there are things that need to be known like “what’s possible?” or “how to shoot something?”.
So when it comes to pre-production, planning for the shoot, VFX has a really important part to play, especially on a big VFX show, in terms of how things are going to be done.
It’s important to maybe even establish design at that point because when it comes to the shoot, you might want some sort of interactive light to sell a visual effect.
In Wheel of Time, we had channeling. Most of the time we didn’t have interactive light because it was quite a subtle lighting that we could add in the production process. But there are bigger moments in season 3, like with Aviendha with her One Power Aiel spears. Those with flaming heads of fire.
Cédric:
So, you have to have a reflection on her.
Andy:
We did. On set, what we had were essentially these orange lights on the ends of the spears. I think you can see online, we posted a breakdown of it, done really well by Framestore [Editor’s note: a visual effects studio, see our article here].
We’re going to paint out essentially those bulbs on the end and replace them with digital fire spears (see video below 02:35).
That’s a really good example of how that effect worked so successfully because of that interactive light.
Because she’s in a dark environment with fire and then the lighting quality we got on set just completely helps sell the effect when it comes to post-production and delivering the shot.
Little bits like that are really, really important.
There are other VFX supervisors who are like that. Paul Lambert is the visual effects supervisor for Dune and later on Blade Runner 2049.
This is someone I worked with at DNEG. I was really lucky to work with him on the film The Huntsman: Winter’s War (in French Le Chasseur et la Reine des Glaces) and he’d just joined DNEG at that time. So I spent a whole shoot with him. He was great, really informative and a lovely guy.
But I love the way he works, his very natural look to his visual effects and he’s really big on getting those practical things in-camera to help you sell the shot.
The recent example for him I think would be with Dune. The sand screens that he did were genius because of the light bounce quality it gives and all the things you can get away with.
I think working with people like that in the past has been great to realize how important it is to get things in-camera to really give you a good play to then create a very successful visual effects shot when it comes to post-production.
Cédric:
Well, thank you. That’s very interesting, very detailed answer. Thanks a lot for all of that.
This goes a little into the next question we wanted to ask. We are not very familiar with your profession and as I just showed you I know nothing about your profession, I don’t even know the correct terms. And sorry again for that! So, could you please explain to us how your business works? Do you work for yourself or do you hire artists for you? How are you recruited into a project?
Is there a specific series genre you like to work with?
Andy:
Well, it’s a lot of questions. Let me start from the beginning.
So, in terms of myself, I’m kind of my own company. And then I’m hired by a production to go work on a show and that is as a production visual effects supervisor or overall visual effects supervisor.
So you’re in charge of the visual effects for the entire show.
On Wheel of Time, for example, we had around 2,600 VFX shots on season 2.
Season 3 was around about 2,100 shots, maybe just under that.
And what you tend to do is you will then allocate groups of shots to different visual effects vendors.
Now I will talk about visual effects vendors. These are the people that actually create the work for you.
I started off at DNEG where I was for 10 years. So I worked my way up through there. Then I went to a company called One of Us who actually has an office in Paris. And then I went to Framestore, well known for Harry Potter and Paddington. They did Gravity, they’re really famous for that.
And they’re one of the top-tier VFX studios in the world, along with DNEG, for working on the biggest shows.
And that’s kind of – that’s where i kind of finished and then made that transition into we call client side, so you’re going to work for the production side, you move away from the VFX vendors.
I have that VFX vendor background, so I know who’s good at what and there are relationships I built up over the years. There are people who just work on and get into visual effects supervising a lot more that way.
But I think what’s been really a strength for me is knowing both sides of it. When I was going on set for films when I was a runner at DNEG, I was very fortunate I had this dual role where I was going on set and I got to work on the show in-house as well.
So you get to know the industry really well, how different sides of it operate. And so it’s these visual effects vendors who do all the work for us.
On season 3 for example, I had Framestore, One of Us, Outpost VFX and beloFX as well. And then we had an in-house team, they were called TPO, The Post Office. They did a lot of cleanup work to paint out things that shouldn’t be there or even lines from the wig or makeup cleanup, things like this. A lot of fixes that need to be done. So that’s kind of the process.
On Wheel of Time season 3, Framestore were the vendor I used for channeling, for example, and it’s good to put a whole collection of work with vendor, if you can. Because it keeps a consistency and a continuity. And they get to know the asset they’re working on, the asset here being channeling. They get to develop it and they really refine the look.
It was a shared asset on season 2 of Wheel of Time. It was shared between MPC [Editor’s note: MPC delivered over 700 shots and 55 assets across 20+ months], which unfortunately no longer exists, and Framestore.
So you can get a little bit of unevenness between the look of channeling. We managed to pretty much navigate through that. But I think when it came to season 3, I was like “no, I just want one vendor to take care of it.”
I think it’s always good to split your work up a little bit, to have people focusing on one area or another.
What was the other question actually? I’ve completely forgotten, it feels like forever.
Cédric:
Do you have a specific genre of films or series you like to work on?
Andy:
Fantasy or sci-fi, I think, is probably the most fun because creatively it’s the most enjoyable for me.
Because it’s kind of otherworldly and you’re coming up with things that don’t really exist at all. You’re dealing with creatures, magic and locations that are beyond anything real.
So that stuff becomes really fun, I think, for anyone in visual effects because it’s just that it feels little bit different from doing all the seamless work.
So The Wheel of Time was great because it’s a fantasy series, and you get to flex your creative muscles a bit more.
Camille:
And speaking of creativity, how did you come up with the idea of weaving? Did you talk first with Framestore and say “alright, I visualize that for the One Power,” or did they tell you something about it?
Andy:
There was a creative change made in the visual effects leadership team between seasons 1 and 2, as there were in some other departments on the show.
I’d seen the channeling, I’d read about what channeling was. It was something I spoke to Rafe Judkins, the showrunner, about—maybe revisiting and tweaking the design of it.
This is something you actually find when working in TV: the creativity is a little bit more on, say, the visual effects supervisor.
Showrunners tend to be more like writers, more about emotions and feelings.
Usually, I’m more of a visual person.
I could see how passionate the fan base was, just from seeing things online. Passionate is an understatement.
I think that once I’d understood the material and the magic system of channeling, there was a certain expectation I felt was important to me. There is the textile type terminology with channeling – threads of One Power weaving
And for me, it always needed to be a light, emissive energy that was coming out, and I don’t think I made that any secret.
I was trying to find out, “hey, what could channeling be if I were to redesign it?” And that’s when I came across light painting, which had a real thread-like quality to it. And I’m pretty sure it was on a train ride I took between Berlin and Hamburg at the time. I came across this stuff and there was a real lightbulb moment—“That’s channeling!”—immediately when I saw the images.
(Editor’s note : Light painting, describe photographic techniques of moving a light source while taking a long-exposure photograph, either to illuminate a subject or space, or to shine light at the camera to ‘draw’, or by moving the camera itself during exposure of light sources. See exemple below)
Because of the introduction of color, because it was this glowing energy, because I could have this movement going around someone with it. So, I think I advertised that pretty well—that light painting was a big reference for me for channeling in the show.
And from there, I just took it on. I stuck quite closely to the books with the colors we used. Again, I noticed that was a comment coming up from the audience. They really wanted to see the colors, and it’s a really important part of the show.
And it helps to sell the magic system in a way.
It helps people understand which elemental parts of the One Power are used to create a certain effect. So I definitely leaned into that.
And then the finishing touch was introducing a secondary layer to the threads of the One Power that represented the element being used.
By that I mean, for fire channeling, little fiery embers came off. For water channeling, we had spray droplets. For earth, it was dust. Air had a very subtle distortion going around it, kind of warping the image. And for spirit, we kept it pretty clean—it had an almost prism-like coloring to it.
So as I say, the fan base had a strong influence on the work I did.
This is the film and TV business, and you really want your work to appeal to audiences. That was my outlook on it.
So because of the audience’s expectations, I didn’t want to create something completely abstract—something different from what everyone imagined when they read it. I wanted to create something closer to what I imagine people thought of when they pictured channeling, because it uses Robert Jordan’s descriptions.
And so that was again very deliberately something true to the novels themselves.
Cédric:
In my humble opinion, I think you really nailed what it felt like to read about the One Power.
Not only the colors, but as you said, all the effects. The way it comes from the ground, from the air. All the variations: how it’s used and how it moves, what type of power, who handles it.
If it’s the True Power, for example, with Lanfear at the end of Season 3.
All those differences! You really saw the complexity of it and all the logic behind it. And as a reader, when you see the scene you can understand what type of weave is used just by looking at the visuals themselves.
So to me it is already an outstanding work you have done.
Andy:
I’m glad you liked it. Thanks. Made it worthwhile.
Cédric:
Yeah, it did. Clearly it did.
And actually, when we saw how good those weaves were, we were wondering: did you actually read the whole of The Wheel of Time or just a few books?
Andy:
I went all the way up to The Shadow Rising [Editor’s note: Book 4]. So I was keeping up with the show. And obviously I had a certain amount of spoilers because I had to read ahead in a way or find out the kind of synopsis behind some of the other books.
Cédric:
Yes, things like the True Power don’t appear until later books.
Andy:
Exactly. We had our book expert on the show who talked about these things. I really wasn’t worried about finding them out.
But as I say, the books are important to refer to and that was always my starting point for anything I was doing. And in all honesty Rafe pushed that with me a lot. “What does the book say about it?” He wanted me to pursue that.
I took a bit of creative license. Technically I think the way the corruption—and I will say corruption instead of taint because it’s how we’ve always referred to it—within male channeling and then the look of the True Power is really supposed to be the other way around. I think the corruption within male channeling is supposed to be a bit more oil-slicky, which we did in season 2.
But for me it didn’t quite feel right.
Cédric:
It’s one of those things that’s very difficult to adapt because technically the taint, as it’s explained in the books, is some kind of a layer that’s between you and the One Power. You have to reach through it to then channel the One Power.
And it’s explained only in the minds of the people who are channeling in the books.
Visually in the TV show, I don’t think it would be very easy to show that distinction and it’s better to see the power weaves coming from the environment as you have shown.
It’s better that way. And showing those weaves tainted with this effect, this black effect—it is way better to show the taint, I think.
Andy:
I like the idea of making it feel dirty. It was like a black soot coming in. It was corrupting… I tried to refer to it as a virus that was spreading, taking over the channeling. The idea was that it kind of built the longer the male channelled. In our case it’s always Rand in the show.
The more the corruption starts to take over and almost drowns out the light-emissive qualities of the threads of the One Power.
The True Power, if I remember correctly, is almost a kind of pure blackness. It almost sucks life away, but I wanted something that felt a bit more icky. Something that felt sinister, like it’s from a horror movie.
That was definitely something Rafe wanted to see for the True Power—something that felt like it’s out of a horror movie. If you have seen season 2, there is that moment with a certain Darkfriend [Editor’s note: Lanfear is even a Forsaken! As said at the beginning of the article: full spoilers here] who heals herself. And how it appears at that moment… it comes up through the floorboards, again into the horror suggestions that do exist within The Wheel of Time. And we wanted to translate that across into the True Power.
And then when we get into season 3, the True Power makes more of an appearance, especially towards the end. And that’s where it gets a much more sinister look.
So the horror aspect was such a big component we wanted to bring in. I did see it compared to Venom, a little bit, from Spider-Man, but that’s going to happen sometimes. But I thought our stuff had this kind of wild uncontrollability to it which I think looked really good.
Cédric:
Yeah, that was a very good job. Both were very distinct, and the True Power usage affects you in the books, but not in the same way as the madness does with the saidin taint.
So it was a very interesting effect. And also the eyes effect on Lanfear when she self-heals in season 2.
Andy:
Yes, that is pretty true to the book. The black flecks that appear in the whites of the eyes. I like the idea of them being pulled towards the iris. Like if you have ever seen metal filaments and you put a magnet over them, it kind of pulls. That was kind of my thought process behind that. I really liked these black flecks being sucked in towards the iris, pulled in by force.
It’s a really cool look actually. I really liked it. Only clear once you’re close up, but I thought it paid off when we did that.
Camille:
Well, you had such great ideas. That’s really cool to talk about.
I was wondering, do you have a scene or scenes that you are particularly proud of?
Or did you have some big challenges in your work during the filming of The Wheel of Time?
Andy:
Yes. Two scenes I think stick out to me.
One was season 8… Oh season 2! Season 8, you would have loved that. [laughing] I know something you guys don’t. [Editor’s note: we wish!]
Episode 8, season 2, we had Moiraine on the beach. She started channeling, I think probably the most amount of channeling we’d seen in the show at that point.
That I thought was a good mark of establishing where channeling was by the end of season 2.
Which it was—I thought it was quite a startling comparison, how much more spectacular it looked. And it was really fun to work with Rosamund Pike on that, talking about what the channeler was doing.
Because it was based on what she was telling me emotionally. She was doing that with her performance, her body movement, things like that.
So there was a lot more of a relationship then between me as the effects supervisor and the cast member performing—being Rosamund—who was really invested in the show.
And I thought that really stood out.
I see lots of people doing illustrations of it that appear online. So it feels really nice that people are doing that, I feel humbled by it.
And then I think in season 3, channeling looked even better.
There were a couple of moments in that one. I did love Aviendha with her One Power spears, when she was fighting in episode 6.
But in the same episode, at the end, Rand has a moment where he reaches for the One Power and he tries to bring Alsera back to life, and that was great again. It relates to a moment in The Shadow Rising, I think, which happens in the Stone of Tear. He collapses a roof and there’s a girl killed.
I read that in the books. I just really liked the way that turned out. These threads—all these different threads of different powers—channeling into Alsera and the corruption mixing into it. And seeing Rand lost within it. Again, we had a great performance to play off there with Josha [Editor’s note: Josha Stradowski], who plays Rand.
In both instances I’m talking about here, I had a great performance to play off. It is really important to sell the effect.
So two contrasting moments there: one really powerful and awe-inspiring, and one which is sinister, quite somber and dark.
Both of those stand out to me. I really liked how they turned out.
Camille:
Speaking of this scene with Alsera, we heard that Josha just improvised it. Is it not a problem for you, improvisation from the actors? Because I think you have the script too, so you know what will happen—and if some actors just improvise…
Andy:
No, it’s not a problem. In fact, you generally know what’s going on.
As I’ve learned over the years—you know, certain directors talk about it. I’ve been really lucky to work on Christopher Nolan shows. And if you ever hear him speak about it, it’s about putting trust in your actor or actress.
By this point in the show, you’ve got two—you’ve got Rosamund and Josha who know their roles so well, you almost like that unpredictability about what you’re going to get. You’ve got a certain trust that they’re going to deliver something that’s a great performance, that you can play off of.
I kind of react to the performance they give me. And it goes from there. So that foundation of a good performance is really important. The fact that I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do isn’t a problem. You can’t be too rigid, I think, in filmmaking in general. We do things like storyboards and stuff like that, but I’ve learned that things change on the day. There are certain decisions that get changed and made. So it’s not too much of a problem.
My involvement with planning on season 2 and season 3 for the shoot was minimal. Unfortunately, season 2 because I joined so late during the show, and season 3 I couldn’t get involved too much because I had a massive overlap of doing the shots for season 2 while the shoot for season 3 was happening.
So I had to put my faith in other people to sort it out. But me being reactionary to what we were getting in plates was an aspect I had to embrace in the show.
But it didn’t bother me too much. It gave some great moments.
Camille:
So for instance, for the cold opening of season 3, there was choreography for the actors and also the stunts during the battle against the Black Ajah in the Hall of the Tower.
Did you have to adapt to this choreography to add the One Power? Did they already know what kind of weave they would do and then you just had to add them in post-production?
Andy:
There is a little bit of background to this.
I spoke with our movement coach, Scarlett Mackmin, who works with the cast on their body movements, especially when it comes to channeling.
So what she tended to do was send me a video of what someone was going to do for a certain move. Whether it’s like a Black Ajah fireball, for example, where she was doing very short sharp movements for the Black Ajah.
So I already had that idea in my mind and my thought process could start, asking myself: “What are we going to do for that?”
I was reacting to what they were showing me, but I had a good idea—or almost a warning—about what was going to happen. So then I could already start thinking about how we were going to get our VFX to work with it.
Cédric:
Nice.
As you said, the community is very vocal and very passionate. Between season 2 and 3, was there any fan feedback that you incorporated into the visual design?
Andy:
You know what? I can’t remember—there was such a blurring of that time between season 2 and season 3 that I didn’t really have time to take it all on board.
I think I paid a little bit more attention to feedback after season 3, because I was busy.
You can only focus on the work at the time. It was more to do with my own feedback in my mind about what I wanted.
And I think with any kind of sequel or season progression, you have a certain amount of artistic license to improve things and make them look better.
When you look at the first Harry Potter film and the last Harry Potter film—how things look. There is an evolution that happens there.
And I think audiences allow for that, they don’t necessarily reject it.
And so we always looked to evolve. The challenge is obviously lots of other aspects of the show.
When I looked at the channeling I wanted to get things like these accents, these brighter points that went through the channeling—it really helped convey the idea of movement. And I wanted less of the really small ones, more of the large ones.
I liked it when we had almost kind of a breakup of transparency along the threads of the One Power as well. So these are things that pushed me more into season 3.
And then there was one other aspect. When I read the books, there was a weaving of threads that happens and there are also flows of threads. So I always thought: “Okay, it sounds like there are two different ways you can create a One Power event.”
It’s using flows or it’s weaving threads together. And I thought: “Okay, I can use that.” I liked the idea there was some scope for maneuverability there in the way you did it. So you’ll notice there are certain things they do where threads weave together into a certain pattern.
Definitely Black Ajah fireballs did it. When Alanna is creating her fog to enshroud the Whitecloak campaign, that’s very much a plaited weave she does there.
There are other moments where we use flows of the One Power. Rand especially is a big kind of “flow of the One Power” person rather than anything intricate in terms of weaves.
So that was, I think, sort of the evolution I was doing.
I loved the way of the thread in season 2. I wanted to see how we could use it more and apply more of what happens in the books in season 3.
And that was where we introduced more specific weave designs appearing for certain things.
Camille:
I wanted to know, you work on the effects but do you also work on the colorimetry? Because we can see the difference in the video you posted on YouTube. We can see that the color of the image is different. Do you work on something else?
Andy:
We have essentially our kind of on-set parade which is worked out by the DOPs (Directors of Photography) and their DITs (Editor’s note: Digital Imaging Technician) on set, and that’s carried across to us in post-production.
At the end of that post-production process, once we’ve done visual effects, it goes into what we call the grade and you have the colorist—and that’s the person who gives us the color timing when you’re doing film.
I’m only used to digital nowadays. They take it into the suite and they play around and push around the colors, the contrast. They put little subtle windows to brighten areas, to bring your attention to things like this.
As I say, I think it’s quite interesting to show in the breakdown reels I’ve done: the grading we work on, and then once it goes into grade how that changes. It tends to be made a bit more contrasty, a bit more punchy.
As a rule of thumb, when things go into the grade, that can have a very dramatic effect on things like channeling, which is a light-emissive object. So we have to be very careful with that.
So there are certain steps along the process where I want to see again: this is how channeling looks now, how it’s going to look in the grade.
And sometimes you have to reverse-engineer stuff and make adjustments to your shots to then roll them back into the grade because you know it’s going to come out a certain way.
Camille :
All right. Well, let’s end this interview on a fun note if you want. If you could slip into any character from The Wheel of Time, who would you be?
Andy :
Um, I don’t know. It would probably be someone like Mat. I would say he’s not my favorite character, but there’s something interesting about Mat because of his ability with luck. I think that’s quite a cool sort of gift to have that luck being on your side with certain things. So, I think maybe, you know, slipping into his character would be kind of fun to see how certain scenarios play out.
Cédric :
Mat is the main character of the series, but he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t want to be.
Camille :
Yeah, he’s one of my favorite characters actually. You have to keep reading the books, he’s really really great.
Andy :
Yeah, and I think he’s really popular with a lot of the readers. I actually love the way that Dónal Finn played him in season 2 and season 3. I thought he captured him really well.
Cédric :
Yeah, he did an amazing job indeed. And it’s hard because Mat is very unlikable at the beginning of the series on purpose and he gets better and better. He evolves a lot as a character. So yeah, keep reading and you’ll see you made the right choice.
Andy :
I agree, he does start off a little whiny, as a few of them are, and then obviously they kind of grow up throughout the books.
Camille :
And finally, do you have any advice for those who dream of walking in VFX?
Andy :
Yeah. Nothing’s impossible as I’d say. I come from a little Essex countryside village where it’s very kind of sleepy, quiet. I think if you’ve got your idea or your mindset on what you want to achieve, it’s about working out how you get there, and then implementing that and have the drive and determination to do it. Because that’s really really important, that drive and determination to succeed at it and achieve with it.
Within kind of being realistic, I don’t think I can go and play professional football now but it’s having that kind of something you really want to do. Believing you can do it and then having that determination, that purpose, that assertiveness to go and do it. That’s really important because that’s what will take you there to what you want to achieve.
And that’s what happened with me, working in visual effects, from someone who fell in love with the film making process and something like Batman (1989). That was the trigger for me watching that, seeing how that was made and then running with that all the way up until where I find myself now in my job, which I feel really lucky to do because it doesn’t really feel like a job. And I think that it’s really enjoyable and I feel extremely fortunate. There’s a lot of hard work to get there. I don’t deny that.
Camille :
A huge thank you for answering all our questions, Andy. It’s great to be able to chat with an artist like you and to be able to highlight other professions that can sometimes be less known. So, as I said, we will post this interview on Spotify, YouTube and we will write articles [Editor’s note: in French and in English] about it too. And what can we say? We wish you all the best and we keep our fingers crossed that you can return to the set of season 4 of The Wheel of Time.
Andy :
[laugh] Well, we will see, but I mean, if I was Mat, that would probably happen in some shape form or another. Anyway, thank you very much for having me on. It’s great to talk to you.
Cédric :
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.