A shout-out to all those VFX artists you see in the credits

…and where you can learn more about individual VFX roles.

I recently got the chance to write this article for Polygon (my first time contributing to that publication):

What the VFX people you see while waiting for Marvel post-credits scenes actually do

It was a story inspired by a posting by VFX artist and Twitter user DradakVFX, who had color-coded some of the artists listed in the credits to Avengers: Endgame and identified their roles and departments.

VFX artists form such a huge part of the credits roll on these big superhero films, but often they’re bunched together, and audiences rarely get a chance to know what each person did on the film, so it was a big deal that DradakVFX had identified the different roles. In the Polygon article, I took his role classifications and outlined what these actually involved; roles such as rotoscoping, texturing, and compositing, which perhaps usually go over the heads of most mainstream audiences.

The reaction to the article has been fantastic, from VFX artists, filmgoers, and others. Artists in this industry don’t always get the recognition I think they deserve, and unfortunately regularly miss out on actually getting into the credit list in the first place. I hope the article helped inform lots of people about what goes into the making of these big films.

If you want to learn more about individual VFX roles, I’d recommend a few places to check out:

The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures

Screenskills page on visual effects

The Rookies best visual effects schools listing (use this to go to particular schools which have good outlines of different VFX roles in studios)

I hope to identify even more individual roles that different people play in the visual effects process in upcoming articles on befores & afters – stay tuned!