With the growing demand for visual effects, one of the biggest challenges facing the visual effects industry is bringing in and training up future generations of talent. These days, visual effects aren't just the preserve of your typical action-packed effects-heavy films like Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia. They're also increasingly used for 'invisible' effects in all kinds of movies, like the work we did recreating Boston for the romantic comedy Leap Year. And the recent trend towards producing stereo 3D movies effectively doubles the amount of visual effects work needed on each stereo 3D project. These are just some of the factors driving demand for visual effects and this means there's also growing demand for talented new artists.

But attracting talented young people into the industry and training them up so that they have the skills and experience needed for the job isn't easy. It's very difficult for people who are new to the industry to get valuable on-the-job experience, making it hard for them to kick-start their careers. If the industry doesn't make a long-term commitment to addressing these issues now, companies like Cinesite will soon find themselves facing an enormous skills gap.

In early spring 2010, at the same time as completing work on Marmaduke, Cinesite was creating ancient Persian cities for Prince Of Persia and giant mythological Scorpioch creatures for Clash Of The Titans.  That is one of the great things about the visual effects business, the diversity of what we do.

We worked on Marmaduke (Twentieth Century Fox) for almost a year, creating over 650 talking animal shots, which resulted in the creation of a mixture of ten live-action dogs and cats that have had CGI work seamlessly blended into their faces.

As managing director of Cinesite, Kodak's visual effects subsidiary, it's very gratifying for me when my team is recognised by the industry for their tremendous creativity, artistry and technical skills.

While we are known primarily for our feature film visual effects, Cinesite has had notable success for high-end television work, particularly over recent years. 

At Cinesite, we’re committed to developing the next generation of visual effects talent.  As such, we just launched our new Inspire Programme, an annual internship for graduates. We devised the Inspire Programme in response to a lack of formalised visual effects internship programmes for students.

Inspire offers a six-week paid placement at the company’s Soho facility and the opportunity to gain invaluable experience working alongside some of the industry’s most experienced visual effects professionals on blockbuster films.

Antony Hunt
Managing Director
Executive Visual Effects Producer
Visual Effects Supervisor

Managing Director Antony Hunt, joined Cinesite (Europe) Ltd in early 2003 and has worked on numerous feature films including those with award winning visual effects; Gladiator (Oscar) and The Golden Compass (Oscar and BAFTA).