More about Eolan Power....
We were curious to hear more about Eolan and the work he does at NVIZ, so we asked him a few more questions.
What do you do?
I'm a Real-Time Supervisor at NVIZ, mostly focused on Environments and AR assets. I design and build all sorts of weird and (hopefully) wonderful things for the Unreal Engine, but I'm also a generalist, so I often use more traditional workflows and do a lot of in house promotional stuff too.
What did you study?
I did film studies at Kingston University and then took several different filmmaking courses, ending up at Central Film School, where I learned to direct, write, edit and shoot. This has been a great base of skills for what I do now.
What was your path into the industry?
I started out of film school as a filmmaker/videographer, working on whatever I could. After a lot of that kind of work, I was hired as a director and started working for an independent TV station. I then took a job as a Previs asset builder because I wanted to get closer to bigger projects and films. I had adopted Unreal Engine as a pitching tool, so I think my combination of skills was quite unusual. I was brought in at NVIZ first as an environment artist and then eventually moved into a supervising position.
What’s a typical day for you?
Depending on production requirements, I'm either whittling away at an Unreal project, editing, or pitching for new clients. I tend to work on self contained projects.
Who’s your favourite filmmaker/visual artist? Why?
Stanley Kubrick, I've even named my cat after him. There's not been many filmmakers that commanded as authoritative a tone of voice as Kubrick, and none that match his attention to detail with the weight of meaning his stories carried.
Is there a show you are working on right now that you can talk about.
I'm currently working on a fully playable game for an unannounced Netflix film which is quite a fascinating project.
Are you exploring any new workflows, personally and company-wide?
Currently investigating the route to After Effects out of Unreal and how those two pipelines can complement each other. A Lot of what we build leads to “in engine” asset delivery, but for design/pitch there’s a lot of useful tools and experiments that we can feed back into the engine. Plus there’s increasing demand for real-time VFX compositing so I'm quite interested in that specifically.
What do you think is the most important development in visualisation recently
Scanning and capturing data for geo and animation. It's already changing things but as the tools get better and the workflows become more practiced it's starting to become a really interesting way of making assets.
What do you think the future of visualisation will look like?
More time and emphasis on design with less technical debt to worry about. More compatibility with Open timelines leading to consistency across packages. Assets becoming their own self contained object that's platform agnostic, long term, can only lead to easier collaboration and opens the various workflows to each other's benefits.
What’s your work highpoint/achievement/proudest moment?
FNWC probably! It was great to have been doing such crazy stuff live, if a bit scary!
What’s special about NVIZ?
The people and the work we do. NVIZ has been open to developing me, and letting me expand briefs where possible, and I think they've shown a lot of faith and patience. I've also naturally learned alot from the traditional VFX crew at NVIZ and continue to absorb as much as I can from the millions of years of experience around me (not too far off!)! I also try to learn design lessons from NVIZ’s extremely talented stable of artists. The fact that we work in small teams, closely and openly with project leads means I get the opportunity to do that.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received, or would like to give to aspiring visual artists?
My Grandad used to tell my Dad all the time “Don't pray for talent, pray for thick skin”. I think it's good guidance for the harder parts of VFX.