Questions About Working With Us

The first question is always what's actually needed. That sounds obvious, but it's worth separating from the question of how we're eventually going to make it.

The starting point might be script pages, an effects breakdown or just a conversation about a scene. If production already has storyboards, visual references or an established aesthetic, that's very useful, but I don't expect someone to arrive with a fully resolved design before speaking to us. I'd often rather they didn't.

Once we understand the creative requirement we can start establishing the parameters around it. How is it being shot? What does it need to do? How important is it within the sequence? What's the schedule, and what sort of budget are we working within? There's no point in me disappearing for a week and designing something enormous and extraordinary if production could never afford to build it. That's wasted time for everyone.

So there are usually several overlapping conversations. Initially we're establishing the creative and practical problem, then there's normally a financial and logistical conversation with the producer or line producer. Once those parameters are understood we can get much deeper into the creative work with the director and, depending on the project, sometimes the writer and other departments.

But the first port of call can be very simple. Send me the script pages, tell me what you think you need, and we can start there.

The useful answer isn't really a particular number of weeks before photography. It's when someone asks: how do we do this?

Practical effects is an unusually broad field. We make prosthetics, puppets, fake bodies and body parts, physical gags, specialist props, creatures, mechanical rigs and strange one-off builds for optical shoots. There are also areas of physical special effects we don't provide ourselves. We're not the people you call for wind, rain, explosions or fire.

But production shouldn't need to understand those departmental boundaries before getting in touch. If there's something in the script that's impossible, dangerous, unusual or just difficult to put in front of a camera, that's enough reason to start a conversation.

Part of my job is knowing what kind of problem we're actually looking at. It might be something we fabricate. It might need another department. It might be a collaboration between us, stunts, SFX and VFX. Or the best solution may be something nobody had considered when the scene was written. You don't have to diagnose the problem before calling the person you're asking to solve it.

A script is very often where the conversation starts, but it's rare that the script contains everything I need to design the finished effect.

Storyboards help tremendously because suddenly we can see what production thinks the audience is going to see, and references establish texture, tone and aesthetic. But none of those things tell me the budget. They don't always tell me how much time we have to build the effect, how many times it needs to work, where it will be shot or what other departments need from it.

A storyboard might give me 90% of the answer, and that final 10% is vital.

The useful part of the process is combining the creative intention with the realities of production. Sometimes that confirms the original idea, and sometimes it leads us somewhere much more interesting.

The breadth of our involvement varies enormously from job to job.

At one end, I have makeup artists who come to us regularly because they need a particular piece fabricated. We make it, they apply it, and I may never work directly with the director at all.

At the other extreme, we can become involved before the concept has really been resolved. That happens particularly often in genre cinema. A director may know the tone they want, the result they want, and how they want an audience to feel, but they're not necessarily committed to the exact physical action that gets them there. That's where the job becomes particularly interesting.

I think of myself as a fabricator and technician when I'm in the workshop and the path is already known. Once we've decided what we're making there are plans, processes and technical problems to solve. But the moment the path itself is in question, I have to become a creative collaborator. Anyone can have an opinion about what ought to happen in a film. What's useful is being able to combine that creative instinct with an understanding of what can actually be achieved within the available money, time and physical constraints.

That collaboration can return on set as well. Perhaps the weather changes, or an actor suddenly isn't available, or some other circumstance makes the original plan impossible. At that point, being a good technician isn't enough, because the plan has gone out of the window. You have to go back to the fundamental questions. What story are we telling? What does the audience need to feel? What's important about this moment? If you understand those things you can pivot without losing the purpose of the scene.

That's one of the parts of this job I value most.

The idea that practical effects and VFX are natural rivals is fundamentally unhelpful. Unless a filmmaker is making a specific creative point about doing something entirely in-camera or entirely digitally, the best answer is very often somewhere between the two.

Visual effects are exceptionally useful alongside practical effects. We can put something genuinely physical in front of the camera, with real texture, real light and real interaction, without having to design the entire shot around hiding every puppeteer, cable, rod or mechanical rig. VFX can remove those things. It can hide an edit, composite an element, allow us to shoot at a different scale or speed, or allow an object to appear to float, levitate or behave in ways that aren't physically possible.

The important distinction is between using digital tools to support photographed material and asking VFX to generate an entire convincing object from nothing. The "G" in CGI is generated. Creating a completely synthetic three-dimensional asset, putting it convincingly into moving photography and making an audience believe it belongs there can become enormously expensive.

Sometimes that's absolutely the correct solution. Sometimes the correct solution is entirely practical. But very often there's a meeting point between the two that gives production the strongest image for the available budget.

I've worked hand in hand with VFX companies many times, because keeping the departments separate, or worse, allowing them to behave as though they're in competition, doesn't serve the film. No other departments work like that. Practical and visual effects are no different. We're all on the same team, and the question isn't which department wins. It's what best serves the story.

We've made everything from very quick individual pieces to extremely complicated transformations, and the intended use changes how those things should be designed.

Sometimes speed is the priority. Sometimes it's disguise. Sometimes it's medical or real-world accuracy. Sometimes the piece needs to withstand extremely close scrutiny, and sometimes what matters is that we can reproduce it quickly and consistently every morning for weeks.

There isn't a single definition of the best prosthetic independent of the production using it. What matters is establishing the hierarchy of needs. Once we know what's most important, we can design towards it.

There isn't a meaningful universal lead time, because "a prosthetic" can mean wildly different things.

We have a substantial library, so sometimes the right starting point already exists. In those circumstances we can occasionally turn something around in a couple of days, or even the same day.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you might be asking for a completely bespoke head, an extensive transformation or a full suit. Now we're potentially talking about scanning or casting, design, sculpting, mould-making, fabrication, painting, hair work, fittings and camera tests. That can mean weeks or months.

So the slightly boring but accurate answer is: as early as possible. The earlier we're involved, the more choices production has.

Our default assumption is essentially the worst-case scenario: someone is going to put a macro lens on it, shoot it in 8K and project it onto an IMAX screen. Everyone will be able to see everything.

Obviously not every object in a film needs to withstand that. If production tells me something is thirty feet behind the actor, in darkness, out of focus and only appears for half a second, we can have a sensible conversation about whether microscopic detail is a useful place to spend money. Maybe that object is primarily about silhouette. That's fine.

But it needs to be an informed decision. Unless we're specifically told otherwise, I have to assume the camera may scrutinise the work.

"Life cast" actually describes quite a wide range of processes. Casting a face isn't the same as casting a complete head. A body is different again, and so is a hand, foot or leg.

Not everything necessarily requires the original performer either. If we're making something where an exact anatomical fit isn't important, an existing generic form may be perfectly adequate. If we're producing something like an orthotic where joints need to align precisely with the performer's anatomy, then we need extremely accurate information.

Traditionally we'd bring the actor in, take extensive reference photographs and measurements, carry out the appropriate skin tests and take an impression using materials such as silicone or alginate. They can then leave while we do all the rather less glamorous work of turning that information into the finished piece.

Increasingly, though, we're scanning rather than life casting. It's fast, we can travel to the performer, and if an actor isn't in the UK we can sometimes work with trusted third parties rather than unnecessarily flying our own crew around the world.

Once the piece exists, the fitting process depends on what it has to do. Something straightforward may only require a relatively late test, while a complicated active gag or extensive prosthetic may need earlier fittings.

Those tests aren't solely for us. They're often very useful for cinematography as well. The lighting and camera departments get to see what the material actually does, how it catches light and how it behaves, before they're under the pressure of the shooting day.

Safety always wins. There are lots of competing priorities in prosthetic design, but that one isn't negotiable.

After that it becomes a balancing act. Obviously the piece needs to look right and serve the narrative, but it also needs to be affordable, repeatable where necessary and practical to apply and remove. There's no point designing an extraordinary makeup that takes twelve hours to apply and five hours to remove if that leaves production two hours in which to shoot the scene. You've solved the wrong problem.

Performer comfort matters. Application time matters. So do crew hours, continuity, durability, budget and what the camera actually sees. It's a Venn diagram, and somewhere in the middle is the right piece for that particular production.

"Animatronic" tends to be used as a catch-all term for almost anything that moves, but there are lots of ways to make a creature perform. We make passive puppets and dummies, cable-controlled puppets, rod puppets, direct-linkage mechanisms, hand puppets and wearables.

And yes, we make animatronics. I love animatronics, they're tremendous fun. But computer-controlled animatronics inevitably add complexity. They take longer, more things can go wrong, and they can require a larger crew on the shooting day to operate and maintain them. Somebody has to pay for all of that.

So the question isn't what's the most sophisticated mechanism we can fit inside this. It's what this thing actually needs to do in the shot. Sometimes a rod, cable or human hand will give you a better performance, more reliably, for considerably less money.

If full animatronics genuinely serve the shot, terrific, we'll do that. Technology is a means, not the objective.

Most of what we make is bespoke. We have a massive library, and drawing from that can be enormously useful where cost or speed is important, but our bread and butter is one-offs: unique pieces, new designs and things that haven't been seen before.

There's a slight qualification to the word "one-off", because film production has an unfortunate habit of destroying things. If the hero version is going to be thrown through a window, smashed over somebody's head or covered in something that makes it unusable for take two, then the sensible one-off may actually involve several pieces. That's part of the planning.

But creating something specifically for the needs of a production, something that didn't previously exist, is really our raison d'être.

I'm slightly cautious about taking over somebody else's work, and partly that's practical. If somebody hands me a complicated puppet, I don't necessarily know what's happening under the hood. I don't know how the mechanisms were built, what materials were used, what has already failed or what compromises were made during fabrication. Until we get our hands on it, it can be extremely difficult to quote responsibly.

There's also an authorship issue. I don't like taking credit for other people's work, and once several companies have modified the same object the line between who did what can become blurry.

None of that means we won't do it. It simply means the sensible starting point is usually a survey. Let us see what exists, let us understand it, and then we can tell you what can be changed, how we'd approach it and what that's realistically going to cost.

A hero prop and a working prop can absolutely be the same thing.

A display piece is more often passive, essentially a sculpture, although even that isn't an absolute rule. We've made pieces for galleries, advertising, live events and shop windows, and some of those are mechanical.

Interestingly, a mechanical display piece can sometimes be a more demanding engineering problem than a film prop. A film mechanism may need to work for a few days or perhaps a couple of weeks, and it can often be taken away, repaired, adjusted and returned to set. A kinetic display may need to operate thousands and thousands of times with almost no intervention.

So these labels only tell you so much. The useful questions are: how close will the audience or camera get? Is it handled? Does it move? How many times does it need to work? Can it be maintained? What happens if it fails? The answers determine the build.

We're London based, and probably around seventy per cent of our work happens somewhere in the UK. But we travel. We've worked across Europe and much further afield, including America, Canada, India and Korea.

The practical question isn't really whether we work internationally, because we do. It's what the particular production requires, what needs to travel, and whether it makes more sense to move people, equipment, finished pieces or some combination of the three.

Fabrication is only part of the process. If production has an established makeup team and simply wants us to supply pieces for them to apply, that's absolutely fine, and we do that regularly.

But as standard, if we've created an effect that needs specialist operation or support, we expect either to be there ourselves or to provide someone from our team. A physical effect isn't necessarily finished when it leaves the workshop. It may need operating, maintaining, touching up, repairing or resetting between takes.

And when something unexpected happens, because something unexpected always happens eventually, having someone there who understands exactly how the effect was built can make the difference between a minor adjustment and losing the shot.

You always need a contingency plan, but contingency doesn't mean blindly making enormous quantities of everything. If the shooting schedule only gives production time for two takes, building ten complete resets isn't responsible planning. It's just spending money that could have been useful somewhere else.

That's an important distinction for me. There's a temptation in effects work to regard over-delivery as a virtue in itself: more pieces, more backups, more engineering, more detail. But somebody pays for all of that, and ultimately it's the client.

I'd rather understand what production genuinely needs. How many takes are realistic? How quickly can we reset? What has to match perfectly for continuity? What can be cleaned, what can be repaired, what absolutely needs a duplicate, and where would a failure genuinely jeopardise the shooting day? Then we put the resources there.

The objective is not to make the most stuff. It's to make sure production has everything it needs to get the sequence in the can.

Everything's urgent, and shoot dates are always fixed. That's film production. So I don't really think of a fixed deadline as an unusual constraint; it's one of the fundamental parameters of the job.

The important thing is being realistic about what can happen between now and that date. If something genuinely requires six weeks and we've got four, pretending otherwise doesn't help anybody.

The useful conversation is what we're actually trying to achieve. Can we change the mechanism? Can we change the action? Can we approach the sequence differently while preserving the important narrative beat?

A deadline is a creative parameter just as much as a technical one. The answer isn't always finding a way to make the original idea faster. Sometimes it's finding a better idea for the circumstances.

My ideal situation is very simple: tell me how much money we've got and let me pitch the best version of the sequence I can achieve for that amount.

I understand why some producers are uncomfortable doing that, particularly if we haven't worked together before. Traditionally you don't show the person quoting the job exactly what you've allowed for their line item. But I genuinely think openness produces better work. If production can't give me the exact number I'll ask for a broad indication of scale, and I have enough experience to extrapolate quite a lot from that.

Then we start talking about priorities. If I'm doing an entire film with multiple effects I'll often ask the director to establish a hierarchy. Which moments really matter?

You can read a breakdown and assume everything described deserves the maximum possible level of detail, but that's not how films work. Pacing determines what we see. Editing determines what we see. Lighting determines what we see. Most importantly, whose experience the scene belongs to determines what we see.

If someone gets their head cut off, is the scene about the person whose head is being cut off, or about somebody else witnessing it? Those can require completely different effects. Understanding that lets us put the money where the audience will actually feel it.

The honest answer is that all of them benefit from as much warning and communication as possible.

Anything involving stunts needs particularly early discussion. I've worked with stunt departments for years and I'm very familiar with their requirements, but I'm not a stunt coordinator, and they may have needs I haven't predicted. That's exactly why the conversation has to happen before we've committed to a design.

The worst possible outcome would be making something that puts somebody in danger. But even short of that, we don't want to spend production's money building something that can't be used because it conflicts with the stunt methodology. The same applies to physical SFX if they're working with fire, compressed air or other systems.

And it isn't only the departments people traditionally associate with safety. I want to talk to costume, to makeup, to VFX. I want to know if we're both solving the same problem in different ways before production pays for both of us to do it.

Communication is paramount at every level. There isn't really a department on a film that benefits from operating in isolation.

It's almost unheard of for the first conceived version of an effect to be exactly what finally gets filmed. That's not a failure of planning, that's filmmaking.

Perhaps I suggest something and the director gets excited about it, so it becomes part of the sequence. Perhaps the original idea would take six weeks to build and we have four. Now we have to ask a more useful question than whether we can somehow build the six-week thing in four weeks. We ask how we tell the same story, how we meet the same requirements, and how we preserve the tone, the character moment and the audience response while changing the physical method.

Those conversations should happen before production becomes unnecessarily committed to a particular shot or technique. The earlier we have them, the more creative options remain available.

It can be useful to think about practical effects as magic tricks. They're illusions, and every illusion has physical constraints.

Perhaps a puppet needs six people standing immediately outside the frame to operate it, but the director wants to pan left at the end of the shot. That's a problem, but it's not necessarily a reason to abandon the puppet. Talk to VFX. Maybe they can paint out the puppeteers, maybe we hide an edit, maybe we shoot the creature as a separate element and composite it into the finished shot.

Perhaps something needs to levitate. Perhaps its mass needs to change, or it needs to move more slowly than physics allows. Those are all places where digital tools can free practical effects from their physical limitations.

Sometimes the conversation ends with everyone agreeing that the shot should be completely practical. Sometimes we conclude that it makes far more sense for VFX to do the whole thing and we should keep our hands off it. That's fine too.

My priority isn't making sure there's a practical effect in every possible shot. My priority is the film.

For me, the ultimate measure of an effect is audience response.

I see extraordinary behind-the-scenes tests from people throughout our industry. Beautiful sculpture, beautiful paintwork, extraordinary fabrication. Then sometimes I see the finished film and I'm saddened by how little of that work actually reaches the screen.

That feels like money spent poorly. It takes time to sculpt to that level and time to paint to that level, and somebody paid for those hours. If none of it makes the cut, there's often been a breakdown somewhere in communication between what was being made and what the film actually needed.

A successful effect looks on screen the way we expected it to look and has the impact on the audience we intended it to have.

Sometimes you get an early indication on set. They call cut and suddenly you hear people at the monitors going, "Oh my God." You get cheers and whoops from Video Village. That's incredibly gratifying.

But the cinema audience is what really counts. I've had people faint during screenings of films I've worked on. When I was younger I thought those stories were basically mythology, the sort of thing sensationalist grindhouse promoters claimed had happened to make their films sound dangerous. Then it happened, and it is incredibly pleasing. Not because making somebody faint is the objective, obviously, but because in the context of those particular genre films it tells you the effect landed. It got through the screen. That's the job.

If somebody tells me we can't afford the version we've discussed, my first instinct isn't to ask how we make exactly the same thing more cheaply, because there are only so many answers to that. Do it worse, or pay people less. Neither is acceptable.

Instead I want to talk about what we're actually doing in the scene. You can read the words on the page literally. You can look at the storyboard and know we're shooting from a particular side. You can turn the entire thing into a list of technical requirements. But that isn't storytelling. It becomes storytelling when you ask what the scene means.

What argument is the film making? What conflict is the character experiencing? Why is this happening to this person? What does it tell us about the world they inhabit, or about the choices they've made? What does it force them to confront about themselves? Even in the most pulpy grindhouse horror, those questions matter.

If we drill down far enough we get to the heart of why the effect exists, and then we can strip away the superfluous. Something completely different on paper may tell exactly the same story. It may create the same environment for the character, force the same decision and give the audience the same release, shock, confrontation or closure.

That's where budget limitations can actually become creatively useful. The question isn't how we explode this head more cheaply. It's why we're exploding the head. Answer that properly and you know what you can change without betraying the scene.

I'm a fabricator and technician when I'm in the workshop and we know the path. Once we've established what we're doing, the work becomes increasingly practical. There are drawings, moulds, mechanisms, materials, schedules and all the other technical problems involved in turning an idea into a physical thing.

But the second the path itself is in question, I need to be a creative collaborator. That's where much of the pre-production work happens. Anyone can have an opinion about what should happen in a film. What's useful is having an opinion informed by a broad understanding of how these processes actually work. I can say not only "what if we did this?" but also whether "this" is physically achievable, what it might cost, how long it will take and what complications it creates for the shooting day.

Once we've solved those questions I can put the creative hat down for a while and become a technician again.

Then we arrive on set, and sometimes reality destroys the plan. Bad weather, actor availability, a location problem, some unforeseen act of God. Now the diagram isn't useful any more. A technician, by definition, works from a plan, so if the plan is gone you need to become creative again.

You go back to first principles. What's the heart of the scene? What story are we trying to tell? What reaction do we want from the audience? If you've understood those things from the beginning, you can pivot without losing what made the effect worth doing in the first place.

That's a large part of what I believe I bring to a production. Not simply the ability to build the thing we planned, but the ability to understand why we planned it, and therefore help find another way when circumstances demand it.