The Ian Report #492 - 789 is a Magic Number

(A screen capture from Project London showing The Goose landing at Icaria's floating restaurant.)

AH! We've been meeting with sound design guys this week—I AM SO PUMPED! These guys are brilliant! And I'm not just saying this! I was uncertain about how this was all going to go down; uncertainty has turned to pumped-itude! -More on this later, once we get the team all together!

So... I just counted. The opening reel (that is, the first 9 minutes of the film) has 140 VFX shots. That's 15 per minute, or one VFX shot every 4 seconds. For 9 minutes.

Admittedly, the opening reel is a bit more VFX intensive than most (though not all) of the film, but still. The whole film has 789 VFX shots (give or take a dozen). Whoa.

The thing is; as most folks reading this are already totally aware, the only thing that number is representative of is the number of VFX shots. It has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the film, or the story, or even how much work has gone into the reel (Though... I mean... it's a lot. Months and months and months on just scene 8 alone. Just that some of the VFX shots took a matter of seconds, and some took days, that's my point).

A lot of times I hear things like, "They should have spent more time on script, and less on VFX", as if it's this trade-off that has to occur. As if you have to pick; you can either have good story, or good visuals- DECIDE! It's a comparison that's always kinda perplexed me, cause honestly it's apples and oranges.

Mmmmm.... things soon to come will be rad!

Ian Hubert
Writer Director

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