Be sure to check out the new book VFX Artistry by Spencer Drate and Judith Salavetz. A visual tour of how the studios create their magic. Featuring a foreword by Jakob.

Get it now from Amazon.com

Make sure to read the foreword by Jakob featured in VFX Artistry listed below.

FOREWORD:
In the beginning, there was imagination. When we first gained consciousness, there must have been precious little knowledge around. We were basically guided by instincts but besides that, we must have been pretty perplexed. Our brains must have compensated the lack of understandable facts by making up stories. Those early stories attempted to explain what reason couldn’t readily grasp. Occurrences in the outside world as well as our innermost, sometimes inexplicable thoughts and dreams were ascribed mystical, imaginative meanings. The arch of those stories became part of our reality. Archetypes made our lives a little more understandable, and through mythology, we attempted to find a larger purpose for our lives.

As a kid in Sweden, I learned everything about the old Norse Gods. I was taught that in the past, people believed that whenever there was a big thunder, it was the mighty Thor riding the sky with his power girdle and iron gloves, throwing his mighty hammer to create striking bolts of lightning. I thought it was cool. Man, those Vikings were really loopy. To be fair, we have to consider that they hadn’t heard much about discharge of accumulated atmospheric electricity.

But imagined realities can sometimes help to anchor us. Like Einstein’s famous fudge factor, the stories can be what make the equation work. From an existential point of view, it may be better to live in a fantastic, slightly made up but somewhat understandable reality than one that is totally opaque.

Besides the ability to fill in the blanks when reason grinds to a halt, imagination is essential when we try to figure out how things work. It allows us to experiment with different ideas and get a better perspective on life. In the game of imagination it is much, much better to be original, weird and passionate than to be right and true. The ability to inspire and project a different reality is essential for human progress. Imagination, and nothing else, makes us ask “what if?” and “why not”.

People with open minds and lots of creativity are therefore vital if you want to initiate change. But before we go ahead and randomly change stuff, it’s important to be able to conjure images of a better life and more interesting future. If you can’t imagine where you’re going, there is no urge to go there at all. However unbelievable and far-fetched the stories of Jules Verne were, they surely inspired us to dream of an amazingly different tomorrow. I’m sure that thousands of kids became explorers and scientists just because of him. The true genius of a visionary mind is the ability to project and inspire.

Still, finding explanations for what we can’t comprehend, and inspire us to move on is not all that our creative mind can do. Imagination – and its physical manifestation that we call magic – is essential for our wellbeing. To have the ability to stretch our minds and imagine a different life is a powerful antidote to hardship and suffering. You see it clearly in hard times, when we seem to flock to theatres and movies. It gives us a chance to take flight and trade our worries for a journey to magical places. The stories take us to other places where we can feel strong, righteous and happy.

No wonder that Magic, in whatever form, have fascinated people for thousands of years. In the past, magic was conjured through primitive, but cleverly hidden effects that depended on distractions to mask the fib that made the wonderful deception possible. Magicians were behind the first rudimentary special effects in the movies. Looking at them today, they seem pretty transparent and it’s hard to believe that anyone actually bought the deceit. But back then, we were still very much in awe of the large screen and not much was needed to make us believe. If the monster was scary enough – and the musical score made that abundantly clear – few people noticed, or cared, that it clearly was made out of papier-mâché and that a 2×4 was sticking out at the bottom. To eyes not yet used to visual tricks and minds that wanted to believe, that imaginary beast was real. The wish to believe in wonder is the best friend of all visual effects. Only cynics deny themselves the joy of being carried away.

Even simple setups had the power to capture our imagination. Everybody have heard about the infamous first screening of the Lumiere brothers train film where the audience stampeded out of the theatre in panic as the train seemed to overtake them. Amusingly, in that case the only effect was a cleverly positioned camera. But to the virgin eye still not familiar to movement on a 2-dimensional plane, it was all too real. As our eyes have become more used to primitive filmic tricks, visual artists are working hard to find new ways to amaze us with their visions. The first goal has always been to make the effect look more real. Robotic monsters and matte paintings was largely retired when rapid development in computer graphics made it possible to enhance and manipulate the visual experience in new ways. Those early computer generated visual effects have my son in stitches, but back then it worked wonders. Perhaps the effects were so over the top that they blindsided us.

All too soon, all that over the top CGI started to wear off. Here lies the true challenge in visualizing fantastic images; as soon as you have seen the effect on a screen, you know that it was all made up. It can still inspire our imagination the way a fantastic book does, but when the fantastic gets juxtaposed with the known world – it can lose some of its imaginative powers. Is it maybe so that the more you try to visualize the fantastic, the more common it becomes?

To counter this dulling effect, today’s visual effects are carefully incorporating physics of real life, and the best effects are carefully inserted into the world we live in. It makes sense that a slightly enhanced reality is much more believable than one that is totally over the top. The movie Blade Runner set the stage by showing a future where levitating ships and video pay-phones were worn and riddled with graffiti. 25 years later, computing power has increased about 30 thousand times, but it still stands out as one of the most amazing trips into the future. Seamless integration of effects and reality is incredibly powerful.

But what makes the visual effects field so endlessly fascinating is that you can never stay still. Renewal is a must since the ultimate achievement is to make us believe in imagination, and that can only happen if we see something that our minds haven’t already processed and filed under: Effects, comma, Visuals. Great storytellers and ingenious image-makers are well aware of this as they try to find new ways to open our minds to fantastic experiences. But in the end, it is not about showing us something that we haven’t seen before. We only get truly moved when the images tell a story that we haven’t heard before.

The most important thing is that we never lose the ability to believe. If we do, we’ll get old and gray. Whenever you hear a child tell a story and you sense that fantastic power of imagination, pray that she will be able to remain that spark. If she can stay that way, floating above the gravitational pull of life, her stories will be beautiful and true and at the end of the story, we will all be fine.

-Jakob Trollbäck