How Impossible Worlds are Created

During the Spanish Advertising and Film Production Conference VFX artist Lucía Peralta took to the stage.

Lucia began her career in art direction before switching to the 'dark side', as she phrased it - the world of VFX.

There is a tendency to think that visual effects are only for large productions, but according to Lucia that is not the case. She explained how the sector has evolved: just five years ago it was a very different industry to the one it is now. Effects finished something that was already nearly finished. Today, it is not about finishing or filling, but about creating and designing from scratch.

On Matte Painting, Lucia sad: "In the world of matte painting it's becoming more common that you receive a sparse set and a blue screen. The design of the environments increasingly becomes the responsibility of post production and it is used to define the look."

The 2015 Jungle Book won an Oscar for best visual effects. It was filmed in Los Angeles with puppets, a pool and a child. It was a post production process that lasted more than two years. Lucia worked on the project in London, where they started as 12 people and ended up at 80 when the post production came to an end.

Nothing was real, it was all designed; every plant, every rock, every animal ... This involved incredible technical complexity. These were hyper realistic digital shots.

Using Aquaman as an example, Lucia said: "All shots were blue screen with men running over rooftops. The town did not exist, but was customised for that sequence. All the projects begin with a brief. In this case the brief was: 'we really like the town of Erice in Sicily, but we want it to be on the coast of Scopello'."

She defined the most important phases of this complex process: References - nothing is more realistic than reality itself. Assets - creating the pieces of the puzzle. Layout - the geography of the environment and the creation of a world for camera. Camera movements must be taken into account. Nothing is unplanned. Environment - building the digital world.

Special thanks: Lucía Peralta and Deluxe, sponsor of this panel