ENDA Episode 17→ The time when the Endless Apprentice learned about overcoming challenges in the VFX world (Part 2)

The attitude of overcoming challenges was one of the first things that I learned in my first year studying VFX, but it took me time to get used to it.

I remember that time when I needed to recreate the effect of a timelapse from winter to spring in a previsualization as part of a final project. I had absolutely no idea how to do it, even if it was me who wrote the script of the previs.

“Brilliant ENDA! You got yourself into unnecessary problems” - That’s what I thought the first weeks and I considered for a while simplifying the effect, but I knew that if I did that I wouldn’t be able to tell the story as I wanted. It wasn’t until one night that I finally figured it out and the moment it worked on the screen I could not keep the emotion.

Another time was when I had to correct a shot for an advertisement where a woman inside a taxi came out of a dark tunnel and the change of lighting made the colors go wild on camera. I was with the same of idea of “This can’t be solved, they need to reshoot it”.

But the reality was that there was no more budget and it had to be solved in comp. It took lots of testing, rotoscoping, and color fixes, but in the end, the shot was approved and that work give me the opportunity to deal with more projects.

And more recently I was asked to simulate grass movement when a character walks on it. The initial thought was “This should be done by FX”, but then I remembered that they were asking the comp department for a reason, and with the short time it was understandable.

But in this case, there was an advantage: I’ve already dealt with other projects in the past. So what 2 or 3 years ago would have seemed impossible or would have taken me days to complete, was done and submitted after 2 or 3 hours.

It was especially after this last experience that I completely interiorized the learning of “It is not about if we can do it, but rather that we must”. We do hard stuff all the time because it gives us the experience to tackle challenges that are yet to come. For every difficult shot we solved today, we are gaining ground for others that would be 2 or 3 times harder.

So my advice will be: don’t be afraid when you face something you never done before, especially if you are still in school. Take it as an opportunity to learn how to face it and solve it.

As I wrote in the Grand Line series: the New World is out there, the Emperors exist, and if you want to overcome those walls, you need to surpass first your own limits in each project you work on.

What has been your biggest challenge so far?