Visual Effects Quotes

My name is Raquel Welch. I am here for visual effects, and I have two of them.

The most important thing is that you have to have the visual effects working for you, instead of you working for the visual effects.

The thrill of doing visual effects doesn't exist.

There are so many films now where you know the story is a supporting role to the visual effects.

The best visual effects are when you shoot as much of what you can in camera. And it's really good for the actor's performance to have something real.

Special effects movies have taken over the universe. That and scary movies.

There is a reality to the way the actors play the scenes, given that there is a real, animatronic, moving robot in the room. So the level of nuance and realism in performance was higher because we built the real ones, and it keeps the visual effects guys honest.

I think naturally I'm a very visual kind of person. If I wasn't in filmmaking, I'd be in something related to visuals. And I used to actually work as a visual-effects artist.

I think that if you're creating an environment completely or...in my research, what I've learned is that if it's a CG world or a lot of visual effects, you're almost better doing that in post.

Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.

One of my first things I was fascinated with when I got on set was how does Grant do all this Flash stuff? it looks so good as the end product, but how does the special effects team work? How does the visual effects team work?

Today, with computer-generated visual effects, everything is possible. So we've seen everything. If it can be imagined, it can be put on screen.

So many film makers are scared of visual effects - which is no crime.

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.

Sometimes the guys who run the visual effects shop will bury it in and not tell us. We'll be in the middle of the edit, watching it for the fifth or sixth time, and we'll be like, "What's that big W on that building? I don't think we can do that. We haven't asked DC." And then, they take it out.

In the work of Seurat, you can see the dots of neutral colors carrying the form and then the dots of more intense color that make the color texture. It is a totally different principle that than of the Impressionists who used broken color to imitate visual effect.

I think that it drives from an emotional connection with everybody that pulls you through all of those events, whether it's the events or what would be more the action, or I guess the visual effects side of it. So it always starts with me from - emotionally - 'Why do you care about the people who are going through what they're going through?' Because it takes a hell of a lot to put them through that. So you better care for them when they're doing it.

What you can do with visual effects is enhance the look of the character, but the actual integrity of the emotional performance and the way the character's facial expressions work, that is what is going to be created on the day with other actors and the director.

Acting is primarily is where I want to go. But seeing how the visual effects guys work, and the special effects guys and the art department guys, how they work and seeing their visions is really interesting. I don't think those guys get the recognition they deserve.

It's more fun if you can control things like lighting and make special effects in the darkroom.

The violence you witness is Denzel doing it and we're taking some visual effects and doing some things and you see something happen it's happening in front of you as opposed to cutting away and doing a bunch of tricks. It's in front of you. So it's hard not to make it a hard "R" if you see a guy get punched and teeth wind up in someone's knuckles.

The creation of the island, or the impression of the island, as it changes in the mind of the character also came in to play... there was another very important collaborator, Rob Legato, on special visual effects. And then ultimately there's Thelma Schoonmaker, who keeps me focused during the editing of the picture.

You set up the look, the visual effects and the sets, and that's awesome, but I enjoy the casting most of all. That's where you really get to define the show.

The image isn't just created with the camera. That's just part one. The editor gets an imprint. The colorist does something to it. Visual effects does something to it. It's not just what you capture that people are going to see. The image gets made in many ways. In production and then in post.

The capacity to create [visual] effects in the computer has made the job easier, but it has also introduced the complexity that you can with a few more keystrokes generate such a busy canvas that the eye doesn't know where to go. You lose human scale on an event and you're just wowed by the kinetics and the visualization. But, often in those cases I feel you lose touch with the human characters and what it is that they would feel and how they might feel, and that's still the most important part.

It's a world creation show [Shadowhunters], so we've gotta work hard in the physical production capacity with the visual effects, the sets and everything. It's not just the real world with two people chatting in a diner. That's tough on a television budget.

After I script the movie, I have to storyboard it out, I have to budget it, and I have to understand if I can afford all those visual effects or not.

In my opinion, visual effects are great when it compliments a good story, and action is great when it compliments a good story, but just to have them for the sake of having them, it gets a little boring, especially if you're talking a TV series. At least with a movie that's an hour and a half to two hours, you see it and you're impressed, and then you're out. With a series, if it's only that, week after week after week, there's nothing there to bring you back. You have to get invested in the characters and care about them and want to follow them.

During the preproduction when I'm shooting and then once we wrap we go away. And then the visual effects guys take over. And then they add all those little bits and pieces. They come up with ideas during the cut in the editing, and they said while would be really cool if we did this thing here where the blade pops out. So then you see the movie and say wow that's a really neat idea. I wish we would have thought of that.

The main prank that we play with props is for people's birthdays. The special effects people will put a little explosive in the cake so it blows up in their face - that's always fun to play on a guest star, or one of the trainees or someone who's new.

We've been working on the visual effects for a year, so we're trying to raise the bar. Stuff will absolutely come out at the screen, but it will absolutely not look as bad as that tire in Final Destination.

And this movie [Real Steel] definitely looks like nothing else I've made, which was the point. I think also, Evangeline and Hugh are such a fantastic... Their chemistry is so genuine. And also it's a good balance to all those visual effects. It'll give you more of the tone.

In movies, you can basically buy the audience into the theater. If you spend enough money on visual effects, even if you are lacking in story and character, you might still pull it off.

The g-forces increased and I wasn't able to continue to hold the camera against the window, so I had to lay it back against my chest, but still continued to photograph the re-entry until there was no more unusual visual effects of the energy in the atmosphere. And it was very comforting to understand that the people in Houston, the controllers, had very high confidence that we were on the right path.

It's difficult to choose between these art forms. Iconography is entirely different from the style of the 15th century masters, who were experts in foreshortening and perspective. The technical skill and visual effects of painters like Uccello have to be admired. They achieved a level of artistry that has never been surpassed, in my opinion.

Certain Academy Awards like Sound and Visual Effects and Editing are sometimes referred to as technical awards. They're not technical awards. They're given for artistic decisions. And sometimes we make them better than others, and I guess we made a couple of good ones on this one.

I don't necessarily think there's a difference in terms of how the film industry and the ad industry view visual effects. If visual effects (or the lack thereof) are used as a tool to strengthen an idea, they're great. If they are meant to carry more of a load in the absence of a concept, they're a waste and a distraction.