Field guide · 09

Hard limits & lessons

What a low-cost pipeline can and cannot get around, and the habits that let us make the VFX work at roughly £135 per second.

A low-cost pipeline is only as good as your access to hardware

This is the honest catch. You can build a lovely scene on a modest machine, but you hit walls:

• Render power. A good scene on a £4,000 workstation still bottlenecks at render time. Larger partners have render farms.
• Calibrated colour. Without professional displays and a grading suite, keeping monitors consistent is a constant battle.
• AI compute. Local AI models want machines costing around £15,000, and cloud AI has hard limits (see AI tools & limits).

We would skip the LED volume

We priced an LED volume at about £10,000 for a five-day dry hire of a screen barely bigger than a projector screen, which was not usable for us. Small volumes are a compromise, and only really pay off with a large screen, plenty of crew and time. For us, shooting on location and then scanning and doing previs worked better than going volume-first, and we would think hard before choosing a volume next time.

Partner up for what you cannot own

Working alongside an established studio, in our case Tinopolis with funding from Media Cymru, gave us access to more than just equipment such as grading suites, render power and audio dubbing. It also gave us access to people: how to light and shoot quickly, how to mix sound properly, and how to stay calm when things go wrong. Borrow expertise, not just kit.

Habits that paid off

• Document everything and keep version control. You forget how much you did, and good notes mean you can rebuild faster next time.
• Prototype roughly. Quick, scrappy iterations beat polishing too early.
• Capture broadly. Spare assets give you options later, and free material for wraparound content.
• Work procedurally. Re-skin and re-roll instead of re-modelling.

The numbers

• A roughly 15-minute film, about 8 minutes of which has VFX, shot in 5 days.
• Around £60,000 to £65,000 all in (salaries, assets and travel; computing and grading were available through the partner studio).
• About £135 per second of VFX, including all the R&D. For comparison, indie VFX is often quoted at £400 to £600 per second.
• A much smaller environmental footprint than a typical shoot, thanks to a tiny crew, a single location, two electric vehicles and one diesel van, and charging on renewable energy. (We are still working out the exact figure.)