Dream a little bigger
DNEG’S creative director, Paul Franklin, tells 3D World about his journey from sci-fi fan to VFX legend
Having worked in VFX since the Nineties, co-founded DNEG and won two Oscars for his work with cinematic auteur Christopher Nolan, Paul Franklin knows a thing or two about the discipline. 3D World caught up with him at BFX Festival 2019, to discuss his career so far, the relationship between art and science, as well as the future of the industry.
“I was always interested in sciencefiction films, TV shows and comic books,” Franklin says, reflecting on his journey into VFX. It wasn’t until his studies in fine art, initially at the Cheshire School of Art and Design before switching to the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, that the world of visual arts was opened up to him. “If I couldn’t be a real astronaut then the next best thing was building the worlds and environments that you see in films.”
Initially working on short films, theatre and magazine design, Franklin became enthralled with the emerging art of VFX, which was on the rise in the late 1980s. “Computers were turbo charging the VFX business and it brought together everything I was interested in,” he explains, “which was expressing myself visually, telling stories, animation, art design, filmmaking and working with technology.”
“Film was always my first love,” Franklin adds, “because of the way you can spend time telling a story and put the emphasis on that storytelling.” Franklin’s first shot at feature film VFX came with the 1995 thriller Hackers. Three years later he would join forces with a group of fellow VFX professionals to form DNEG, the renowned VFX and animation studio, born from a shared desire to work on feature film effects.
The team seized an opportunity to create VFX for Pitch Black, the 2000 film starring a then unknown Vin Diesel, and built their company around that. “We had already worked together for a few years at that point, so we all knew each other,” Franklin adds. “We hoped we might last a couple of years, just to get the movie done and maybe do another project, but here we all are 21 and a half years later.”
These days Franklin fulfils the role of creative director at DNEG, which sees him working across all of the studio’s projects. “I provide expertise and experience from my career, as well as working to design a creative response for our clients,” he explains. Franklin helps filmmakers to consider how they might tell their story visually, what ideas they could bring into play and what the right balance of VFX would be. “A lot of filmmakers out there are quite new to this and techniques are changing all the time. We’re always working to come up with new ideas for them, which allows us to be more innovative.”
Franklin has utilised this innovative approach to VFX on several films with director Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker often revered for his commitment to incamera effects. “Chris is a filmmaker who likes to put reality in front of the camera,” Franklin reflects, “objective reality that you can actually film.” This involves everything from elaborate sets to daring stunts and dramatic pyrotechnics.
“He knows so much about filmmaking techniques and he’s an expert in every area of the process,” Franklin continues. “The role of visual effects in his filmmaking is to extend his reach, to do the things that you can’t do for real, but they should always reference reality.” Most of the time this involves shooting something in-camera and then building on top of it with VFX. “It could be a shoot in downtown Chicago that we turn into Gotham City,” he adds, “or a stuntman being yanked on a wire becoming the extraordinary moment where Batman is pulled away by a train.”
For his 2014 sci-fi epic Interstellar,
Nolan and his crew headed to the harsh surroundings of Iceland to shoot on glaciers that could portray the unforgiving terrain of an alien world. “We wanted that harshness to appear on screen,” says Franklin, “and the way to do that is to go somewhere that offers you that. Then the visual effects team extend the environment and turn it into this extraordinary world you see in the film.”
DNEG’S work on Interstellar received widespread acclaim for its scientific accuracy, but Franklin maintains that it’s important to never lose sight of the story. “If you have an appreciation for how things work then you’re much more in control and can tell your story more effectively. Physics simulations and exploring scientific theories are very much a part of VFX, but we should never lose sight of storytelling and allow technology to take over.”