Here is the Eng­lish ver­sion of an inter­view that is appear­ing in Slovenia’s top news­pa­per.  I wanted to share it with you!

You vis­ited Slove­nia a few weeks ago mostly for plea­sure; is Slove­nia also the coun­try you work in?

I do my work online so I can do it any­where in the world. I have a few out­sources that I use in Slove­nia.  I’m try­ing to build the whole infra­struc­ture there to get some films going…Slovenia is so beau­ti­ful and the rest of the world doesn’t know too much about it.  I’m also build­ing a tal­ented team to help me man­age my online busi­nesses.  Most entre­pre­neurs out­source to the Philip­pines or India.  But I like Slove­nia peo­ple the best!

Your short movies ‘The Night of Broc­coli’ and ‘Get Lost’ could be under­stood as deal­ing with dis­like, or even hatred, towards broc­coli and dirty socks, on the other hand Rose talks about magic and long­ing for love… What is your main theme? Is it strong affection?

The key for me was mak­ing it really visual. The movies I liked grow­ing up were Dis­ney movies and early Spiel­berg movies (Raiders of the lost Ark and ET). Dis­ney movies they were able to fully trans­form you in a fan­tasy world. Whereas Spiel­berg actu­ally did oppo­site; he took the ordi­nary world and went out of his way intro­duces magic to it.

I was also fas­ci­nated  with cre­at­ing some sort of mag­i­cal ele­ment, whether that is the ani­mated char­ac­ter or just the world that is so styl­ized. Amelie is good exam­ple of this.  It takes place in the real world of Paris but is so hyper visu­ally styl­ized that it becomes almost like a fable. The main thing is that I like to have this visual whimsy that guys like Tim Bur­ton have.  Sec­ondly I just like the lit­tle guy,.  The every­day per­son who is against the odds that are impos­si­ble to beat. That is when the con­flict is the high­est and you want to see if he is going to win.

Is mak­ing adver­tise­ment clips for brands like Coca Cola, or work­ing on major Hol­ly­wood films some­how con­nected with mak­ing short movies?

Those are dif­fer­ent worlds – ani­ma­tion and visual effects are dif­fer­ent than other forms of film­mak­ing. I’m involved in bunch of dif­fer­ent types of film­mak­ing. Right now I’m in the entre­pre­neur realm, because I’m tak­ing my 15 years of expe­ri­ence on line and teach­ing it.

I ‘m also cre­at­ing a web pres­ence so I can seed money through places like Kick starter. That is a crowd sourc­ing web­site where any­one can invest a small amount of money to sup­port artist projects they are excited about. I believe the future of film­mak­ing is cre­at­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with audi­ences on-line before you tell the story.  You can use the inter­net as a tool to com­mu­ni­cate with fans and make the movie they want to see.  Most movies don’t do this…the stu­dio execs try to fig­ure out what the lat­est 3 big hits are and re-create them.  Audi­ences want some­thing fresh…look at all the big hits – Para­nor­mal Activ­ity, Avatar, Star Wars, Gone With The Wind, Snow White.   They were fresh for the time they came out.    The inter­net lets us develop the movie with the fans to make sure it’s some­thing they’re going to be excited by.   So I’m really embrac­ing the tool of the inter­ne­tand how amaz­ing tech­nol­ogy is for mod­ern storytellers.

How dif­fer­ent would Lord of the Rings, or any other mod­ern movie be, if it didn’t fea­ture visual effects and animation?

In Lord of the Rings I was one of the key ani­ma­tors, so when you see Gol­lum talk­ing, that is par­tially my work. If ani­ma­tors were not there then Gol­lum would not be in the movie.  We would watch just actors in make up like you see in movies prior to Lord of the Rings.  Yoda in the orig­i­nal Star Wars was a puppet..whereas the newer ones fea­tures a dig­i­tal Yoda.  That allowed him to jump and flip and move a lot more.

In other words; the ver­sion of Lord of the Rings that you see would have never been made with­out the work of visual effect artist and ani­ma­tors. The Fast and the Furi­ous is more of an action film.   It exists in an urban envi­ron­ment so it did not really require spe­cial effects. All the spe­cial effects in that film were aug­ment­ing the stunt work. What I did there is pre-visualization. It is mak­ing 3D story boards. It almost looks like a video game cin­e­matic. It is a cost effec­tive way for the pro­duc­ers to pre­plan out the shoot. It is a lot cheaper to have an ani­ma­tion team work­ing for $12,000 a week than huge film crew for $100,000 a day!

Is there still any movie made today with­out spe­cial effects?

Every movie, even TV shows, has some sort of visual effect done to it. At the sim­plest level there is thing called color grad­ing, where they take all the dif­fer­ent shots of some film and match the col­ors in it (for exam­ple if you have 20 shots of girl in red dress, the color of that pre­cise dress changes in shots.  The red will look different…like she’s wear­ing a dif­fer­ent cos­tume.  A dig­i­tal artist needs to cor­rect this).  Every sin­gle movie needs that and this is a form of visual effects

The other extreme is for exam­ple Pixar movies – where every­thing seen has been designed by artist. Every step is cre­ated on a dig­i­tal level.

In the past, spe­cial effects were cre­ated man­u­ally by cor­rect­ing and aug­ment­ing scenes frame by frame – how is it made today?

It is basi­cally like going into Pho­to­shop, and instead of work­ing in a still image, you do it in motion.  So when you start hav­ing motion you could see if your work is mov­ing in a mat­ter you want it to – you also see if the things are not work­ing. It is a highly skilled thing to do. That’s why it costs so much to do visual effects, it is so time consuming.

In the past there was opti­cal printer – it was in use until the time around Juras­sic Park. That was never per­fect. If you watch Empire Strikes Back, there is a scene where a space­ship flies over the snow.  Since this was done before dig­i­tal com­posit­ing you could see through the space­ship.  This is because they could not cut the per­fect match, so it is translucent.

We are now lucky that we have visual effects; it makes revi­sions so much eas­ier which means its afford­able – that is why every TV show has visual effects in it.

Do illus­tra­tors and visual effect artists have some­thing in common?

Illus­tra­tors and dig­i­tal artists are pretty much the same, they just work with dif­fer­ent medium. Dig­i­tal artist aug­ments what­ever is shot on film by using clas­si­cal skills applied with motion.  The illus­tra­tor is using paint and col­ors to cre­ate a sin­gle, sill image. So it is sim­i­lar skill sets.

What are you up to in future?

I just started my on-line site named Suc­cess­ful Ani­ma­tor (Http://SuccessfulAnimator.com), where I teach ani­ma­tion and visual effects. It is really awe­some. I have been teach­ing for the past 10 years at all the top ani­ma­tions schools in the world and I real­ized that – I mean those schools are big, so they have money to fly me out and have me talk -  but the other thou­sand schools, or peo­ple, do not have access to qual­ity infor­ma­tion on filmmaking.

So I started this project so any­one, in any part of the world, could get infor­ma­tion and skills to make their dreams hap­pen. I allow any­one to watch the process of cre­at­ing, to be part of my thoughts as I do ani­ma­tions. It is rev­o­lu­tion­ary, because nobody in ani­ma­tion world has made it yet.   You can check it out…there’s a lot of free con­tent up.  Also see my per­sonal blog, http://MikeLMurphy.com to see what I’m up to!