sent from: London, UK. destination: Los Angeles, California, USA

Listening to the podcast of BBC Radio Four’s culture program “Front Row” for April 5th, and in the review of ‘Mirror Mirror’ they said that the opening scene played out in silhouettes which they said was the best part of the film and while it appeared to be stop motion, “but it’s probably all done with computer”, dismissively. Then later – “the good thing about fairy tales from the Hollywood perspective is they’re out of copyright, so they’re very cheap, they don’t like spending much money on stories, do they, it’s more about effects than story.” As much as I rail against the current state of affairs in the VFX industry, I feel as though this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how effects fit in into the current movie studio framework. Firstly, effects are made by people, by artists, not computers. Secondly, while VFX probably do take up a larger % of budgets than they used to, the cost per shot has decreased, and relative complexity has increased hugely in the last 10 years. Studios are not throwing money at VFX. It is a struggle with low, low margins and made with a lot of unpaid sweat and toil from a lot of dedicated people wanting to put the most compelling image on-screen.