Cebas catch up with one of the few woman VFX Technical Director, Stefanie Blatt, of ScanlineVFX Vancouver!
Hi, everyone! My name is Stefanie Blatt. I am a FX Artist from Germany, who is always on the move to discover another company where ever my work leads me internationally. Currently I am living in Vancouver, working for ScanlineVFX as FX TD. Before coming to Canada, I had also worked in Shanghai (China), Australia (Melbourne), Germany, London (England) and Greece. The VFX industry gave me the opportunity to work in different companies around the world and to get to know different pipelines, working environments and project management. Furthermore, I find it a great opportunity to get to know many talented artists that share the same interests as me, and to see how they approach things in a different way than I would.
My background in the FX started back in the year 2009. I finished my studies in Digital Media at the University of Arts in Bremen, including one semester abroad in New Zealand at the Unitec University of Auckland. Right after my studies I step into the industry with an internship at Pixomondo in Shanghai. During the internship I got more and more interested in the FX Department, watching the artists doing their magic.
Following another fruitful year later I got my first job offer to work on the feature movie: Journey 2, The Mysterious Island at Pixomondo, Berlin. Over time I began work for several feature films and TV Commercials in a variety of major companies like Pixomondo (Shanghai, Berlin), Celluloid (Berlin), Ixor (Athens), PostFaust (Athens), Iloura (Melbourne), MPC (London) and currently at ScanlineVFX (Vancouver). Some bigger projects that I truly enjoyed doing in feature films were, “The Guardians of the Galaxy”,” The Great Gatsby”, “Underworld 4”, and the TV series “Game of Thrones”.
FX Reel 2015 from Stefanie Blatt on Vimeo.
In order to learn the ropes of VFX, I started out with a lot of self-studying and research. Eventually, I got familiar with particles and rigid body simulations, fire / smoke simulations and liquid simulations as well. Simultaneously with my initial learning, I was working on small tv-commercial projects, which gave me the ability to expand my current knowledge by discovering new techniques and resolving problems fast.
To achieve my goals I have been using 3ds Max, Particle Flow, FumeFX, Krakatoa and RealFlow. In order to have true procedural and dynamic particles systems inside 3DMax, I became interested with Thinking Particles, which gives me absolute control and flexibility with creating things out of particles.
By the time, I also was into Maya and Houdini and working with different companies, I became familiar as well with their own in-house tools which is nothing short of amazing!
Cebas: Welcome to the Cebas Interview, Stefanie, let's start with your recent projects: anything that you've enjoyed creating or something significant to your achievements or your company that you'd like to tell us about?
Stefanie: I really enjoyed creating the TV Commercial “28 Black”, an energy drink. The commercial was created within a short period of one month for the company 'Pure'. We were a just small team: Two compositors, one generalist and myself as the FX artist.
I was responsible for the 'ice breaking',.. 'ice ground collisions',.. 'debris in flight',.. the particles of 'water droplets' sliding down the cans,.. 'cold smoke haze' and the 'liquid simulations'. I had much fun doing it.
For the creation of the ice dynamics and water droplets I used Thinking Particles. RealFlow for the fluid simulations and FumeFX for some cold ice smoke.
Stefanie: Another project I have done lately with Thinking Particles was the TV-Commercial “Skybet”, for the company PostFaust. Here I did the FX for the debris breaking of the stone statues. Additionally I created also some secondary passes with FumeFx and Krakatoa.
Skybet " What if ? " TVC | FX breakdown from Stefanie Blatt on Vimeo.
Stefanie: My first project with Thinking Particles was the “growing Plant”. That was a self learning RnD project to discover destructions with Thinking Particles combined with an animated plant that I did with the plugin GrowFX, which was new for me as well. The scene I rendered with Vray and I used Nuke for compositing.
During the working progress I recognized that it was quite tricky to simulate the interaction with GrowFX and TP so after some testing, I decided to build a low res geometry made out of spheres, which I used to create collisions with the ground geometry.
Later on I started using Thinking Particles for feature films like ‘Journey 2’ (of Dwayne Johnson The Rock fame). In that movie I was responsible to create water streams and bubble effects from huge rocks, falling in the sea. I used Thinking Particles to create particles, which then I used for emission of smoke using FumeFx.
Cebas: What do you find usually are the most difficult aspects of 3d/ fx design work - is it technology or artistic creativity? - and how do you resolve it?
Stefanie: I love the artistic part of my work where I am able to create whatever ideas that comes into mind. That’s why I enjoy doing VFX, because you can make things come alive! Almost real that wouldn’t have existed in reality. But usually I spend most of the time in the technical part of solving problems, such as finding a faster and easier solution to speed up the current workflow - this can be quite challenging, but ultimately, very rewarding.
Cebas: Can you give us a step-by-step breakdown of a typical shot/image that you do? Do you use MaxScript/ any scripting at all?
Stefanie: I usually start with the research of resources and references relative to the desired effect that I would like to achieve. In order to be sure it is headed in the correct direction and to avoid a kick back, I normally discuss with the client or supervisor about the ideas and we select the way to go forward. As soon as the direction is clear, I would start getting all the needed assets in place before I start working on the shot. To speed up my workflow, I am using MaxScript to help me out with repetitive work, which would take otherwise way more hours or even days without the knowledge of scripting.
Cebas: How straightforward was it? In your view, what is your wish for cebas software to achieve that is not currently doing for you?
Stefanie: I would like to see a change in the way TP is caching. It will be great if TP can write the cache out frame by frame, so you don’t loose all your cache, in case Max is crashing or the cache file is corrupted. And another doable idea would be to add an option to continue the cache from a user defined Frame.
Cebas: Would you say that it is kind of a lonely world within the visual effects / fx industry for yourself as a woman fx artists? I suppose this is more prominent in film industry fx than say, in commercial art or design work?
Stefanie: Since you mentioned that, woman are quite rare as FX artists. I remember a moment, when I was working on my first feature film. When I introduced myself to the artists, someone asked me: “Are you sure you didn’t got lost in the wrong department?! I have never seen so far a female artist doing FX. That’s kind of unique.” Meeting up a female FX Artist is quite rare, even at the big studios. Mostly they are concentrated at the compositing, animation or texturing departments. But despite of that, I wouldn’t say that the FX industry is kind of a lonely world for a woman in FX. I have met so many great artists all around the world that are now good friends and we have learned a lot from each other. Since in this industry people moved a lot and the majority are far away from their own home country, it is quite easy to find some company as well outside from work for activities, like bicycle tours, hiking and so on.
Cebas: If you did find a ‘rarity’ of women fx artists - what is your opinion on how this has happened or continued to happen?
Stefanie: I think the main reason is, because the FX job is quite technical and has to do a lot with mathematics and logic, no offence girls :) Furthermore , the job as a FX artist is not really family friendly, if you have to travel from one country to the next country and you have to do a lot of overtime… it is stressful to the family. Another reason might be that most women don’t want to spend all day long in front of the computer. But on the other hand I have experienced over the last 2 years more and more female fx artists joining the industry.
Cebas: What projects can we expect from you in the future (if you're able to tell us).
Stefanie: Currently I am working in Scanline VFX (Vancouver) using mainly Thinking Particles to create particle effects for a feature film. Unfortunately I can’t share anything more detail yet about this project, since it is still in production.
Thank you Stefanie Blatt for your time and effort in doing this Testimonial for cebas! We look forward to supporting you with more amazing VFX operators in the future.