‘Make Ireland a hub37 for TV and movie FX’
Homegrown visual effects firms wowing in big-name productions
THE Dublin-based company behind the special effects on the hit Disney+ series Shogun are striving to make Ireland a ‘hub’ of visual effects.
It comes in the same week that Oscar-winning Element Pictures launched their screenwriting festival across the city, in a bid to instigate more Irish-owned film and TV productions here.
The team at SSVFX, an arm of Ireland’s leading post-production company Screen Scene, were the main visual effects (visual FX) providers on the Japan-set historical drama.
The company also worked on such major films and TV productions as The Irishman, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Stranger Things and
Game of Thrones.
‘They work on the shows we all know’
The managing director of Screen Scene, Jake Walshe, is also the chairman of the Digital Effects Association of Ireland, which is comprised of his company and five others.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Our plan is that we would see Ireland as being a hub, if you like, for visual effects.’
He said the six companies are ‘effectively all working at a very high level for US clients, European clients – the shows everyone would know on the streamers or terrestrial TV’.
Some Irish viewers will have been surprised to see a harp logo in the credits for Shogun
– its makers were able to avail of Government incentives here by hiring the Irish company – but the company is ‘very well known within the visual effects community worldwide,’ Mr Walshe said.
He describes the company as ‘geography agnostic’.
‘Our business model is to bring the work back into our studio in Dublin and work on it. We work with international clients and technology enables us to work with them and do reviews and all that [remotely], even though a lot of them may be [based] in the US.’
SSVFX do ‘some’ indigenous work, though their clout in the industry means they mainly target bigger shows.
‘We’ve worked on shows for RTÉ, but they tend to be smaller visual effects shows as you’d imagine, so their budgets are smaller,’ Mr Walshe explained. ‘Our model is to go to the bigger shows – like Shogun, HBO shows, Game of Thrones – that go for a lot of seasons.’
Mr Walshe said he ‘would love to see more indigenous production happening’ here but added that it ‘has to be of a certain scale, from our point of view’.
He said Screen Ireland and the Government could still do more to incentivise film and TV production here, citing a scheme announced in the UK two weeks ago whereby film productions with a budget of under £15m (€17.5m) can get a 40% tax break.
‘That’s the sort of thing Screen Ireland and the Government need to look at as a way of putting the charge under that side of the business,’ Mr Walshe said.
Shogun stars actor Cosmo Jarvis – who was opposite Barry Keoghan in the 2019 crime thriller Calm With Horses – as the English sailor John Blackthorne, who ends up shipwrecked in Japan.
The series, based on James Clavell’s bestselling historical novel, has been warmly received by critics, with its visuals garnering particular praise.