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Writer, director and visual effects artist Jeff Desom is best known for bringing his VFX magic to the Daniels’ Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Working between L.A. and Luxembourg, he combines live-action, found footage and digital effects.
Right now, Desom is back in his native country as a member of the Mohammad Rasoulof-led jury at the 15th edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival, along with the likes of screenwriter Paul Laverty and Danish star Trine Dyrholm.
The big success of Everything Everywhere, starring Michelle Yeoh, changed his work significantly, the creative told THR on the sidelines of the festival. “I didn’t do visual effects as my main job. I was a director, a writer, and visual effects work was just a means to an end,” he explained. “I was doing a lot of it for my own projects, and I’d never really done it for someone else’s project until the Daniels came along. We have been friends for a long time, and I had done visual effects for them before, but only on music videos.”
The Daniels assembled a bespoke VFX team. “They asked Zak Stoltz, the visual effects supervisor, and Ben Brewer and Ethan Feldbau. They were the other core team members who were also directors before,” Desom recalled. “They asked: ‘Hey, do you guys want to do the visual effects instead of us using a big company?’ There are so many out there that have an army of visual effects artists. And they had done a movie that way before, and the experience was okay, but they lacked a bit of the direct contact.”
The scale and innovation of the movie meant a lot of work and new approaches. “It was 500 shots and four people — you do the math,” the expert said with a smile. “You’ve seen the movie. There’s a lot of them, and nothing is straightforward. Everybody knew it was a very special film. I remember seeing the first rough cut. I’d never worked on a movie before that was so ambitious in its ideas and execution, and so it was very daunting. But we would have never expected that the film would go on this trajectory.”
The success of the film also meant a lot of work offers and requests. “Directing is not off the table, and I still like writing and trying to get projects done, and I’ve done some music videos in the meantime,” Desom told THR. “But the success of the movie brought us so much work individually that we decided we needed to pull all those requests together and filter out what we wanted to work on. So we created a company called Pretend VFX and started to see what we are interested in doing, and also pick projects that we can actually do. And we’ve been very busy ever since. This year we’ve already got two features that we’re working on,” he added, though he can’t share details on them as yet.
With artificial intelligence being the hot-button issue of the day in Hollywood and beyond, how does Desom feel about AI? In the VFX space, “at the moment, the traditional pipeline is still what is most stable and trusted,” he explained. “It’s a very iterative process, and directors require very particular revisions of certain elements, and AI is still at a stage where it’s still better, more time effective and just safe to use the old method. But you know it’s going to get to a point where AI will [become more common in VFX]. You can see a tsunami wave coming.”
The expert continued: “Things are going to change. But it’s hard to predict how…. It’s very hard to position oneself right now and say, ‘OK, I think we should focus on this area of the process.’ Because AI is not just going to change visual effects. It’s going to change the work of the cameraman, the director, everyone. It’s going to affect every part of the process, if not replace certain things. What’s very interesting to see at the moment is what it can simplify, especially processes that are tiresome, very time-consuming, and aren’t very creative. You know, it would be great to have AI as a tool there.”
Of course, that is not the case across the board. “There are also other things where you are wondering how much of the creative work is going to be replaced with this technology that is actually trained on people’s creative work. That feels a little icky. Once it gets to a point where you are using AI to render something that is a final product where you are not sure where it comes from. Is it ethically sourced? Do I have any ownership of that?”
Concluded Desom: “Everybody is praising AI as a tool, but you must have [a considered approach]. At the end of the day, you might be robbing a bank, and you’re not realizing it. You are complicit in a crime essentially, in something that, if it was done human to human, it would be frowned upon.”
