Latest update October 21st, 2015 12:41 PM
Korean VFX Studios Are Ready To Go Big In China
By Hua Yang
More eyes are turning from China’s soaring box office receipts to its visual effects (VFX) industry, especially with recent successes of MONSTER HUNT and MONKEY KING: HERO IS BACK.
A growing number of CG-heavy local movies have emerged. Anyone who has been paying close attention to the credits of these movies will have noticed that South Korean visual effects company has been a key player.
Appealing market
“Korean film market is really small. The quality and quantity of visual effects are not that big. But in China, it is much bigger,” said Yun Junshik-raul, VFX Producer at Dexter Studios and Executive Director of Dexter China.
Dexter Studio, founded in 2012, has been active in China’s visual effects scene, spearheading VFX works for blockbusters including THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN and THE MONKEY KING.
Yun noted that Koreans are not that fancy with fantasy films or creature films. “It has not been there yet. In Korea, everything is more like either modern days or old days. But in China, there are more CG-heavy fantasy films,” he said.
More importantly, he said, the biggest budget for a Korean film is probably $1.5 million, but normally the budget of visual effects in China is somewhere between 10 million to 20 million yuan ($1.6 million to $3.2 million). And it is getting more.
Not just the end
“Some people in China think VFX is just the end, the post-production. But it is not; it is the whole thing,” said John Dietz, who has worked as the VFX Executive Producer on a slate of Chinese films, such as WOLF TOTEM and ZHONG KUI: SNOW GIRL AND THE DARK CRYSTAL.
Visual effects starts at the pre-production stage when the groundwork for a new project is laid, usually including the early pre-visualizations and working out some of the technologies that will be needed.
In Canada and Hollywood, filmmaking companies hire visual effects supervisors to take control of the project, who will later distribute the work to other VFX companies. “They won’t just hire one company and have it do all the work. They move pieces around,” said Dietz.
“Most of Canada and Hollywood VFX companies are post-production only. And most western companies only do partial work; they don’t do the whole work because they are expensive. But in Korea, production companies hire visual effects company, which could be responsible of the whole project as we have in-house supervisors. And Korean vendors usually take the whole project,” said Yun.
Hurdles encountered
Production-wise, Yun pointed out that in China, not many directors and producers have already had experience with visual effects movies. “So usually we will help them to understand how the visual effects work. As the director has to shoot with nothing sometimes, we have to make the director confident of what he is shooting,” he added.
This sometimes leads to trust issues. “Actually a lot of people ask us to do a test before hiring us as they do not understand our capability of visual effects. But most of the times the test involves budget and usually the test people are asking costs a lot, bigger than the normal project budget,” Yun said.
“Everyone is saying that you haven’t done tigers before. They are worried if we could make it. But to make a real animal, it may take several months and needs 20 people to work on it all the time, which would cost a lot, like hundreds of thousands dollars,” he explained.
Park Sung-yong, VFX Executive Producer at Macrograph, noted that the tightness of the post-production schedule in China sometimes put them under great pressure. “It’s very important to set a schedule with a consideration of the time needed for the post-production. We feel lack of time in every project, but especially, the Chinese projects’ schedules are set very tight that the post-productions get very short amount of time at some projects. To get the best quality output, it’s essential for us to secure enough time, but it’s very hard to do when the schedule is set too tight,” he said.
Macrograph has participated in a bunch of Chinese projects including JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS, THE MONKEY KING and ZHONGKUI: SNOW GIRL AND THE DARK CRYSTAL.
Move pieces around
“Hollywood studios have already had a system for VFX. They have been making big VFX films for 25 years. So you have directors that are used to spending $100 million on a project,” said Dietz.
But in China, he noted it hasn’t been there yet and there has to be someone who knows the big picture. “It is necessary for producers to figure out what they want and how many money they could spend on VFX.”
“Korean VFX companies have a different business model than Hollywood. They charge differently. In Hollywood, they mostly charge by shots. If you change the shots, the contract changes. Korean vendors usually charge by a project,” Dietz added.
However, Dietz pointed out more Chinese film studios are starting to move pieces around. “Right now I’m doing a movie in China that has about 2000 VFX shots. And about 400, those easier ones, go to places in Beijing, with Korean vendors doing some and Canada doing the rest,” he said. “The market is booming. There has been more money, which enables different things to happen.”
Park, on the other hand, believes the boundaries between the nations are reducing in the film market. “Korean, Chinese, and the Hollywood films are getting investments from the world market and internationally professional workers and companies are participating more on the same stage. Through the improvement of the Internet and interaction between the nations, the cultural barrier has decreased.”
Moreover, Park noted that the world standardization of film production system has set the base for cooperation between studios located in different countries. “There will always be differences in the capital and the scale of the production, but there will be more collaboration between the countries. The advancement of VFX is progressing with Chinese market in the center. The VFX in China will be able to keep advancing with the world standardized techniques and worldwide sense.”
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