Year End Special Interview – Johnny Gibson, VFX supervisor, Pixomondo

Year End Special Interview – Johnny Gibson, VFX supervisor, Pixomondo

December 18, 2019 – With 2019 coming to an end, VFX Online presents a series of Special Interviews that highlight some of the VFX and Animations artists’ favorite works of this past year. These interviews touch on their favorite VFX and Animated shows of 2019, memorable events from the last 12 months and artists’ expectations for 2020 in VFX/Animation.

Johnny Gibson has been instrumental in the production of groundbreaking visual effects and animation for feature films and television spanning over two decades. His recent work includes serving as the VFX Supervisor on Disney+’s The Mandalorian, Universal Picture’s The Hunt, the Starz television series Counterpart and the J.J. Abrams produced feature film, Overlord.

Johnny began his career in the military satellite and ballistic missiles industry in the early 1990s. He transitioned into the feature film visual effects industry, working at such prestigious companies as Digital Domain, Tippett and Rhythm and Hues.

His film credits include James Cameron’s Titanic, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Wachowskis’ The Matrix Revolutions, Michael Bay’s Transformers, three of Fox’s X-Men franchise offerings and Universal’s Skull Island: Reign of Kong.

Today, Johnny Gibson talks to VFX Online about his experience about VFX and Animation Industry.

// From Johnny Gibson, VFX supervisor, Pixomondo

How do you describe yourself professionally?

I hold my work to an exacting and high personal standard and ask for the same from my crew. I often find myself walking the line between leveraging levity to keep the crew focused and happy, and having to gruffly convey the gravity of each production problem.

I find that a little comedy goes a long way, especially when you are asking artists to blindly trust your vision and direction. But when folks start to lose focus, it is also important to me that the crew realizes what may not be working as well. Sugarcoating bad results is the same as lying to me. So quality wise, count on me to have a vision and shoot high, meaning to finesse specific composition, timing, expression, and overall realism that goes beyond client expectations.

I am in constant pursuit of improvement and refinement in my own judgement since the client is paying us not just to give them what they are asking for, but for our expertise to show them what great VFX work looks like. A great DP doesn’t ask the director where to put each light and what lens she wants. A great DP puts a great image in front of the director and then asks what she would like to change about it. Conversely, a great VFX Supervisor shouldn’t be targeting “just enough.” But perfection is a broad space, so I also study the client and how they respond to the visuals in order to narrow down and quantify expectations. My mantra is “First know your client. Then don’t ask them; show them.” Most often that saves time, money and sanity for everyone.

Also, expect me to stand by that ideal passionately, regardless of politics or process. Though I try to do enough of my homework to steer us down the direct path to completion, the quality of the work is the thing. That has earned me a badge of inflexibility sometimes, but otherwise why do this tense and sometimes thankless job? Even a ten-second commercial spot deserves to be seamless, well designed, and tasteful. And if all it takes for me to get those results is to tell someone something that either makes them feel great, or to give a critique that they don’t want to hear, then that’s what needs to happen. In the end I think the final results forgive my stubborn pursuit of excellence of our VFX craft.

What sparked your interest in visual effects?

My preteen world was one of imagination. Instead of playing with friends, I drew and painted too much for it to be healthy for a kid! I used to have “drawing parties” where I usually ended up being the sole attendee. The 1933 film version of King Kong, and then later Mary Poppins, were magical to me. I loved Poppins so much that after my first viewing, I was so upset that it was over and I refused to leave the theater. I didn’t want it to end so my parents let me watch it again. I didn’t know at the time that what set Poppins apart for me from the other films was the post Special FX (SPFX or VFX). I was just a child but I remember wanting to figure out why I loved King Kong and Mary Poppins so much. But that realization came later.

In 1977, I was the perfect age to fall in love with the original Star Wars. It was all wonder and depth and sharpness and beauty and perfection. Even then, it was clear to me that the quality and the scale of the work was head-and-shoulders above any VFX work I’d seen in movies before. It set the bar. It stood out. For those of us who remember the late 1970s, the queues wrapping around the theaters were largely in response to George Lucas’ and ILM’s groundbreaking VFX quality. Even as a pre-teen I was struck and moved by the realism of the VFX in Star Wars; so much so that my first hero was Star Wars VFX Supervisor John Dykstra, with whom I later worked on X-Men: First Class and other projects.

How did you enter in this industry? What was the key to getting inside?

Being passionate about it is key. And loving it enough to know everything about it and share that incessantly with anyone and everyone. I mean, studying its history, the techniques, their evolutions, the rise and fall of FX companies, the personalities, the tools, building model kits, doing stop-motion. I love it all, but I circled around the medium for a while before getting in to it. I certainly grew up with creativity and art, but I went to university and got an engineering degree in computer science, with the hopes that the effort might be purposed toward entertainment in some way. On the outset I was hoping to program and/or build camera/puppet motion control machines, discover new ways to manufacture miniatures, or design ways to shoot for background keying.

By then I’d fallen in love with VFX going back to its earliest days: especially with miniatures and stop motion animation. But I was steered away from the arts largely because I had a head full of potential in engineering. I don’t think my teachers and advisors understood that I only had that because I needed tech to become the creative person I saw in my heroes. Icons like Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Phil Tippett and Doug Trumbull set the standards for high profile artistry by building custom camera rigs, building computers from scratch, and designing special puppetry armatures.

I knew I needed to go to school to learn the hard stuff that I wouldn’t naturally learn by pursuing my own passions: drawing, sculpting or photography. People seem to often forget that, until the last century, artists had to make their own paint brushes and mix their own pigments. So I got into computers and engineering with the instinct of a creative professional. But I had no idea at the beginning of university that by graduation, in addition to doing research on hyperspectral light profiling, I would have written a simple CG ray tracer as well as a polygon modeler. Those types of tools became the same tools I would be using professionally through the 1990’s and into the new millennium.

I think my understanding of those tools pulled me back into the CG world when I was looking to get out of the defense industry jobs that I’d fallen into after graduation. My rep as the “CG guy” got me in the door to do a Saturday morning cell animated show called The Marvel Action Hour with Iron Man and the Fantastic Four for the studio that became Marvel Films. That was an extraordinarily valuable time for me. My many hours’ rotomating body motion, explosions, charged particle laser beams, and “CGI-ing” Iron Man’s armor forced me to quickly cultivate an animator’s understanding of motion on a per-frame basis. And if you’ve ever had the opportunity to do cell or stop motion animation, that’s no small thing. It was numbingly difficult to do for someone who was used to automation. But it was worth it for cultivating a deep appreciation and sense of motion.

Later, I was working at Disney as an engineer. I started to code fractals recreationally and actively tried to integrate Alias Poweranimator (a predecessor of Maya) into our work. One of the producers there, Geri Wong, noticed my passion and mentioned that one of her good friends, Gary Jackemuk, was working at a “new company” called Digital Domain. She set up that Gary and I meet on a group outing to Disneyland where we had plenty of time in the queues to idealize what DD was doing with the software that would become Nuke, and to talk all about CGI and fractals. Again, it was my passion for VFX that caught their attention. By the time I had a formal interview with DD, the supervisory staff had already all-but assigned me to a job.

I was then recruited by Shannan Burkley at DD to work on Dante’s Peak to try to help with the fractal textures for flowing lava CG FX. But in a double-stroke of fortune, on my first day at DD I not only met Markus Kurtz, who became one of my lifelong best friends, but the two of us were reassigned to work on Titanic and to help out on Fifth Element and Dante’s Peak. That was a good starting boost that I attribute mostly to the sharing of my personal passion with others. But I was really “into it” more than anything.

What was your favorite VFX and Animation Film of 2019?

I love VFX so much that it is often necessary to remind friends that it is only part of the equation. In in the end I am a creative. I write and have a deep appreciation for the plethora of necessary storytelling skills to bring to the screen a finely crafted cinematic narrative. So when someone asks a question like this, the answer may surprise you. I might have a favorite VFX feature that has horrible VFX in it. Or I may pity the VFX team that did incredible work on a poorly directed movie. If you are asking what feature I think had the best of the VFX that I’ve seen so far this year (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not yet released) then I would have to say that though The Irishman and Gemini Man had some unbelievable de-aging and face replacements on sometimes restricted budgets, and shows like Midway and Terminator: Dark Fate are huge in scope. But for me personally, Spiderman: Far From Home had some of those elements but also mixed in some incredibly-designed mind-bending and visually stunning sequences that must have taken some serious preparation and effort to pull off. Therefore, for me, so far its Spiderman. It most exemplifies the potential of the craft. But ask me again after Star Wars!

What was your favorite VFX and Animation Events/Conferences/Festivals of 2019?

My wife Anna and I screened the first two episodes of The Mandalorian with some friends at my home. That was fun.

What do you think will be the evolution of VFX and Animation Industry over the next few years?

We’ve already seen the results of adversarial machine learning on both predictive image rendering (deep fake FaceApp) and automated facial retargeting (DD’s Thanos). I think we will quickly be enabled by our tools to more naturally describe scenes that can be “imagined” by computers in order to render them, and motion estimated by computers that have been trained to look for good performances.

I think that directing VFX will become more like directing talented actors and actresses. You’ll be able to “tell” Shrek to pick up the box, hesitate, and run past Donkey, but with the “hesitant” attitude. You’ll be able to ask an AI character to lip-sync to a Helen Mirren performance and show the AI a video of her face to match her expressions. I believe that’s all near term: within the next decade.

Eventually we will be able to read a movie script to what is essentially an AI video game engine that will put some live options in front of us in VR from which to choose. The line, “…and then a lightning bolt strikes near Johnny…” in a script will cease to be realized as an FX artist’s task will become the task of finding video reference to “feed the machine.” The rest will just be selecting which results look the best. Essentially VFX will become less about the tools of the trade and more about the ability to imagine, visualize, and judge results.

What was the most unusual comment or feedback you received in 2019?

That would go to Richard Bluff, Lucasfilm’s VFX Supervisor for The Mandalorian. We were in a video conference review and I had just cracked a joke mocking a highly obvious error in judgement that I had made. I don’t remember what the joke was but everyone laughed out loud except for him. He paused a moment, smiled, and said in his proper British accent, “Yeah, okay. You guys are cool. You are all invited back for next season.” I guess he liked the joke?

What is your best professional memory or professional experience of 2019?

We were all a little punchy near the end of the shoot for The Hunt in Louisiana. Weather had landed hard on us and I was running back and forth in the downpour between the VFX element shooting stage and the main shooting stage through a few inches of flooding. We knew we were running late, so the day was looking oppressive and long. We were all exhausted and restless. I was sitting across from one of the writer/producers, Nick Cuse, near the video village, watching the slow progress in the feed, when Hilary Swank walked up and started juggling these foam grapefruit-sized stunt prop stair bannister knobs she’d found next to us, and yelling out to the room how she liked juggling. “I really like this! This is really good for you!” She wanted Nick to try so she started showing him how to juggle. Hilary is a great juggler and a patient instructor, so of course Nick eventually got it. Then I joined in and I got a few pointers. Hilary Swank gave us juggling lessons. And then the day didn’t seem so bad.

Any special achievements for 2019?

As ever with VFX, just surviving is its own reward. But no matter how hard the job is, it is still an honor that someone is paying us to do what we used to do for fun. How cool is that?!

What are your expectations for 2020?

I have high hopes for a well-supported and decent chunk of the second season of The Mandalorian. The first season was such fun and the Lucasfilm creative team was a dream to work with.

What advice would you give to someone who wishes to get in to this industry?

Only start if you are serious about it, young enough to do it, love it more than personal hygiene and sleep put together, and care less about getting paid than creating something that has a slim chance of being cut into a movie. Don’t start if you think that the VFX in Ultraviolet were good. That’s just asking to crash and burn.

The entertainment industry is chaotic and rough. It is often unfair, especially to the less-senior creatives. The VFX industry also has no union so you will need to be prepared to fend for yourself. Grow a thick skin first. After that, you are going to have to know at least a little bit about everything in VFX: from photography to display color to CGI to compositing to computers.

I sometimes find that students of the VFX craft choose it because they think that CG or VFX is going to be easy or approachable. If anyone can download Maya, Houdini and Nuke and get started in their garage, it should be easy right? It is not. Do not make that mistake. That line of logic will trick you and you will end up resenting the craft. The availability of the tools of the craft define neither the craft nor the competition for the work within it. Think of it like the following: Anyone can get a driver’s license buy a car, and take it for a spin. No problem. But does that qualify you to race at Le Mans? Obviously not. It takes years of experience to even have a microscopic chance at that.

Then, in addition, to be competent enough to compete for a job, you are going to have to likely do one of two things. Either specialize in order to make it clear in which department you don’t mind spending a good chunk of your youth in, or become a generalist and spend a few extra years learning everything there is to know about a large section of the VFX discipline. The latter is much more difficult but better work will be available to you later overall. Either way you are going to have to really demonstrate your skills before anyone will hire you.

Like Le Mans, there is a lot of competition to earn the right to get behind the wheel. Make a video reel that blatantly focuses only on your strengths. You won’t have a name yet so you are going to have to strut your stuff. No one knows or cares who you are, so you must show us. And a good reel is better than a great resume. Make it cool. Make it entertaining. Tell a story. Make us laugh. Give us a funky beat. Show off. But don’t show us your flaws. Your ability to discern what looks good enough to present is part of the job later and should be part of your show reel presentation. If you show us weak work, then we will expect to have to manage you more than the next person. Since we are all creatives, we don’t care to manage you. Don’t make us think we have to. Narrow, but good, work makes for a better reel than weak, but broad, work. No one cares that you can do everything if you can’t do anything well.

Be ready to defend your work. If you have a good technical explanation of your process, that means to us that you understand and can reproduce your excellence. “I don’t know, I just hit the render button,” is generally a bad answer to any question, especially in an interview scenario. I know that all sounds tough, but I figured if you are asking, and if you have read this far, you want the reality without the happy sugar coating. I hope it helps.

What is your Holiday Greeting Message for Christmas 2019 and New Year 2020?

May you see truth behind the glitz and glamour that all the world is offering your eye this season. May you find inspiration in its beauty, seek understanding in its dark depth, and find solace in the in-between of God’s graceful build. Then party like you aren’t waking up until January 2nd, 2020.

We would like to thank Johnny Gibson for taking the time to talk to us. If you would like to know more about him, check him out on and IMDB.