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Tim Webber – VFX Supervisor (Framestore)

Tim joined Framestore in 1988 after an outstanding academic record in Maths, Physics and Art. He rapidly became the driving force behind the Company’s push into Digital Film and Television, developing Framestore’s virtual camera and motion rig systems.

Since second unit directing on the Hallmark production of Merlin, Tim has been guiding the company in new directions while supervising some of the most technically and artistically challenging projects. These include, the CG baby in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Two-Face Harvey Dent in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Spike Jonze’s highly original CG characters in Where the Wild Things Are, James Cameron’s incredible Avatar, and the Medusa in Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans.

He was Warner Brothers’ VFX Supervisor on Alfonso Cuarón’s space thriller, Gravity, for which he won a VFX BAFTA and Oscar. The ground-breaking techniques involved in the film were wholly realised by Tim and the Framestore team. below is a video demonstrating the challenges faced when creating the visual effects for Gravity:

Tim Webber along with Framestore have gone on to creating outstanding works for blockbuster movies and won many upon many awards for their work.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have a masterclass on Visual Effects presented by Tim Webber himself, It was a thoroughly exciting and informative masterclass which is focused a lot on my chosen art form. Tim Webber brought in personal exclusive behind the scenes content for films such as Children of Men, The Dark Knight and Gravity. I learnt a lot about “invisible effects” which were greatly surprising and shocking to find out out what elements of films were actually CGI when you would easily think think they were real.

Seeing exclusive visual effect breakdowns of the ‘giving birth’ scene in Children of Men showed the challenges they faced and the planning approach they had to pull off the well known three and a half minute handheld shot of a woman giving birth to a newborn baby.

Tim Webber explained how they broke the shot down into two but joined them with a hidden cut, but this allowed for the mother to be fully able to walk around in the first half but then get into position with the prosthetic legs for when the child is being born. Throughout the entirety of the film the newborn baby is shown in 20 unique shots and is always computer generated but looks photo-realistic and truly incredible.

We next had the opportunity to see the approach to creating Harvey Dent’s ‘Two-Face’ visual effect in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. ‘Two-Face’ is shown a total of 120 individual times throughout the film, all creating astonishing digital make up to the character of Harvey Dent. Tim Webber exposed the raw footage to some shots showing the marker points that were applied to the face to be tracked in post production and providing a reference for the digital make-up to “stick” to the face as though it was really there.

The biggest challenge was to make the effect look realistic to go along with Nolan’s realistic style throughout the rest of the film but they didn’t want the effect to be physically realistic in a way that will gross out the audience, as well as this they had to research muscle movements in the face and how the facial muscles and skin would move in relation to the intact half of the face so that the effect is believable and responds to the actions from the actor.

Lastly we were shown behind the scenes footage of Gravity. Tim Webber being the VFX Supervisor for the film was on set of Gravity for the majority of its filming as the story could not be made without visual effects and the technological advances of this generations special effects.

Gravity was a big project for the company, taking 3 years to complete, creating impossible scenes above the atmosphere that required over a year of pre-production planning. A pre-visualisation for the entire film including interactive lighting was created to work out all the algorithms, camera movement, character placement and mechanics in order to recreate the feel of zero gravity in the surroundings captured in the film. Alfonso Cuarón’s signature long shots made for incredibly complex techniques to be used including a robot arm which controlled the camera to absolute pin point precision paired with rigs that suspended and manipulated Sandra Bullock through imaginary setting that would later be created in post production. And that was the most challenging part of it all, the fact that the settings did not exist and had to be imagined, but Framestore pulled it off magnificently and ended up with an award winning film with ground-breaking visual effect technology.

Tim said one thing which had the biggest impact for me and that was when he said: “When effects go unnoticed and people exit the cinema questioning how they managed to get a film crew in space or have a baby be born on screen do you know that you have done a good job” and for me, he couldn’t be more right. I never looked at Visual Effects that way but the whole concept of effects that seem invisible and get unnoticed are those that are the most successful.