Working notes from a low-budget VFX project
A low-budget VFX pipeline, start to finish
These are notes from a proof-of-concept short: roughly eight minutes of VFX for a Welsh-language folk-horror film, made on a small budget. They cover the planning, the kit, the software settings and what we learned along the way.
£135
per second of finished VFX, including R&D
~8 min
of VFX in a 15-minute film
5 days
of principal photography
100+
iterations on the trickiest shots
The pipeline, step by step
01
Pre-production & previs
Design thinking, digital twins and low-cost previs.
Open → 02On-location capture
Getting the lighting, scale, colour and metadata you need.
Open → 03Build it, don't buy it
Homemade reference gear and budget drones.
Open → 043D scanning
Photogrammetry, LiDAR and Gaussian splats compared.
Open → 05Software & settings
Blender, DaVinci Resolve and the colour pipeline.
Open → 06Add-ons & tools
The plug-ins and apps we actually used.
Open → 07Formats & colour
EXR, colour transforms and metadata.
Open → 08AI tools & limits
Uisato, Seedance and what AI can and can't do.
Open → 09Hard limits & lessons
Hardware realities and what the project cost.
Open →