A call for arms to the special effects crew: Stop being so secret!

Does the name Bill Westenhofer tell you something?

No? He’s won an Oscar. As a matter of fact he’s won two, one for The Golden Compass and another one for Life of Pi. If you look him up at IMDb you can see that he’s been in the business since the mid 90’s, contributing to a whole lot of movies. But apart from that there’s no information about him whatsoever. You see Bill Westenhofer works with special effects. And for some reason, the stars in this business – as opposed to the actors and directors – remain completely anonymous. They are the ones that add magic to movies. And we don’t bother to even learn their names.

I’m not better than anyone else. The closest I come is that I know that Weta Workshop did a ton of special effects for the LOTR movies. This is only because of the extensive extra material that came with the DVDs, where you could see that geeky, enthusiastic and charming representative guide us through their studios. But I still haven’t learned his name.

Reasons for anonymity
Special effects are essential to many movies of today. There are limits of what they can do of course. No matter how good your special effects are, they can’t save the movie from being slaughtered by the critics if the writing is awful. On the other hand, I would argue that badly made special effects are distracting and off-putting and can pull down the impression of a from other aspects decent movie.

It’s as if special effects have become a hygiene factor. We’ve been so spoiled with the development over the years that we don’t marvel at them the way we used to. And maybe this is one of the reasons why special effect workers don’t get the recognition they deserve.

Another hold-back could be lack of knowledge in the audience. For someone who doesn’t work in film industry, it’s not easy to say what is what in a film production. If a movie looks great, is it because of the art direction, the cinematography or the visual effects? Over 200 people are listed as involved in the special effects of The Fellowship of the Ring and the much smaller production Moon still lists some 70 people working on the visual effects. If I want to give some love to the responsible wizard of a certain film, how can I possibly tell which person deserves the most praise when they wear titles as visual effects manager, supervisor and executive producer?

One thing that I also think works against the potential fame of special effects staff is that not every viewer wants to know about the machinery and the tricks that have been used to create the illusion. We’re there to be deceived and enchanted, we want to believe that the world we’re presented is “real”. Too much talk about some guy who programmed this in a computer might take away a bit of the spell.

A call for arms
So should special effect workers just resign and silently accept a situation where the lack of recognition leads to consequences such as the close-down of the studio that worked with the celebrated Life of Pi?

No! On the contrary! Those people need to stand up and make their voices heard. If they were interrupted at the Oscar award ceremony, there are other ways. Think marketing. Think branding. Think public relations. For some reason movies are still sold with taglines such as “by the producers of [insert movie name]”.  I don’t get this at all. Is a producer really a selling point to the normal movie goer? Who knows what a producer does for a movie? If you’re marketing a high tech science fiction movie, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to hint that the special effects were made by the same people who did a certain spectacularly looking movie? I think so.

What they need is an agent. They need someone who can fight for their names to come up earlier in the text credits rather than in the end, when the text is too small to read and everyone has left the theatre anyway. They need someone who can help them to write a bio at IMDb.

A lot of effort is put into special effects. But if you guys and girls want to get recognized for the work you do, you need to start communicating with the world, letting us know of your existence.

This post is a part of a blogathon run by the Swedish film blogging network Filmspanarna. The theme was “special effects”. Here’s a list of links to the other participants (all other posts in Swedish):

Addepladde
Except fear – filmblogg
Fiffis filmtajm
Fripps filmrevyer
Jojjenito
Mode+film
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