Adam Gailey joined Luma last year and is the FX Supervisor at our Melbourne studio. Before Luma, Adam worked at major global VFX studios including Industrial Light and Magic, MPC, and DNEG and has contributed to award-winning films like Deepwater Horizon and Interstellar. Most recently at Luma, he led the FX department on Spider-Man: Far From Home for the epic Molten Man Battle that featured extensive FX.

We snatched Adam out of his busy day to get to know him a little bit better. Here, Adam tells us all about how he landed in the wild wild world of VFX, the time he walked around London studios handing out his demo reel, and the things in life that inspire him most.

Have a read!

Give us the 411. What’s your background and how did you get into VFX?

I spent a lot of my early life drawing or playing drums and by my early 20s, my time was divided pretty evenly between playing drums in various bands in the D.C. area and making large scale scratch panel murals and drawings. Eventually, I decided to leave my heavy metal dreams behind for Art school at VCU. I wanted to be a painter or a photographer but I wasn’t accepted into either discipline. My third choice was a program called Kinetic Imaging that focused on motion graphics, animation, and sound engineering. 

I moved to the UK to pursue a masters degree in Digital Effects at Bournemouth University where I was rigorously trained in Houdini. After graduating, I packed a bag full of my demo material and walked into every studio I knew of in London to pass out my reel and apply for work. I was hired by MPC as a dimensionalization artist and then by DNEG as a matchmover. After a while, the right people at DNEG became aware of my Houdini knowledge and I was transferred into the FX department. I was determined to learn everything I could about Effects and I invested a lot of my spare time into training myself to understand programming logic and the mathematical concepts related to CG. Most importantly though, I tried to emulate the other artists, mentors, and peers around me to understand how they were troubleshooting and solving challenging problems. I’ve been doing that ever since.

What’s a project you’re most proud of?

I think working on Interstellar was great. I was a lead FX TD at DNEG at the time and had the opportunity to do some really interesting FX work across the show. The Tesseract sequence at the end of the film turned out to be a really cool and iconic piece of VFX work, and I was happy to have had a chance to play a role in its development. Interstellar ended up winning an Oscar for best VFX, so it’s an easy one to be proud of.

What’s a recent film you watched that had impressive FX (in your view)?

I thought The Lion King was something of a VFX masterpiece. I think that movie is the new benchmark for what can be achieved with CG and VFX. The animals all looked fantastic and I was especially impressed with the CG environments.

What inspires you?

I love seeing a group of really good artists working together tirelessly to achieve something that has the potential to be bigger than the sum of its parts. There is a lot of work, planning, creative vision, and talent that goes into that effort, and I find the process and the product to be equally inspiring. I get a kick out of large, collective, creative endeavours whether it be making a big feature movie or composing/performing songs in a symphonic orchestra. 

I have been dabbling in piano for most of life. A few years ago I started taking it much more seriously and really started pouring the hours in. Playing the piano is constructive, challenging, and expressive. It can be a very relaxing, single-minded experience that is almost meditative in nature.

What excites you most about the future of VFX? Where do you see the industry going?

I see the industry becoming less film focused in the long run. I think long-form episodic story-telling and/or mini-series will become the new norm. There is a lot more opportunity for character and world development in episodic, narrative content. This allows people to become much more invested.

Music isn’t always background activity for me. In fact, I often will just sit and listen to an album while doing nothing else. I think the prospect of combining VFX and VR to create abstract, immersive experiences in a musical context is probably what excites me the most about the future. I think something more short form and abstract like an immersive dreamscape experience would be a pretty trippy way to engage with music.