Reflections on FMX 2026

A round up of chatting to Roland Emmerich, Then & Now sessions, and AI.

FMX 2026 was an incredible conference, for a reason you might not expect. There were awesome sessions. There were up-to-minute technical discussions. But the huge, huge thing at the conference was the community.

We are at a strange cross-roads in VFX right now. There’s now doubting things are changing. However, when people get together at an event like FMX, you are quickly reminded about how important the community is, how much people love sharing what they do, and how passionate they are. I’d encourage everyone to attend FMX just to get this ‘vibe’ each year.

Then & Now highlights

For me, an obvious highlight of the event was getting to interview Roland Emmerich on stage about the 30th anniversary of Independence Day, where he was particularly candid about the production of the film. I then also introduced him at a special screening of the film, where he and Volker Engel did a very fun intro to the movie. The audience at this screening stayed for the whole credits, and cheered at Roland’s name, and then also cheered at Volker’s.

(left) Volker Engel and (right) Roland Emmerich at the ID4 screening.

I also had a blast on stage for my other ‘Then & Now’ presentations, which included with Rejean Gagne on the history of Softimage, Andy Kaiser on his stop-motion animated and VistaVision shot film The Lighthouse Keeper, and with Hugo Guerra for our LIVE VFX Notes podcast on the greatest VFX shot in history (it was one involving Davy Jones, by the way).

The conference would not be possible without the dedicated work of the FMX team – big shout-out to Patricia Rohr, Vanessa Steinmann, Bernd Haasis and Mario Müller (his last year at FMX – Mario, I can’t thank you enough for supporting ‘Then & Now’ each year). Looking forward to working with incoming project manager Agon Ushaku on future FMXes.

Project Hail May a stand-out

Framestore visual effects supervisor Stuart Penn’s talk at FMX on Project Hail Mary was one of the best talks I’ve seen. Period. The planning the studio was involved in, and the way they helped bring Rocky to the screen, was something else. Framestore 2D supervisor Jonni Isaacs also presented in a Foundry session on the use of Nuke in the film by the studio, and we were all gobsmacked at the intricate details involved in dealing with the Xenonite. Gobsmacked.

A.I.

Something has changed with the discussion of A.I. in VFX. Whereas once it was the sworn enemy of visual effects, there’s now clearly a shift to embracing the use of A.I. and ML workflows (with genAI still involving some scepticism). What this means is, VFX artists are clamouring for information about how A.I. can help them, and there’s no shortage of tools out there to try. I found sessions at FMX that showcased real-world examples of the use of A.I. in VFX much more interesting than general panel discussions about the ‘state of A.I.’. It’s harder to be general with this stuff, I think, although those panels did sum up the ‘hype’ pretty well.