Directors Want VFX, Costume and Simulation Skills — SkimNews
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- Behind Their Lens convened five directors at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival—Sophy Romvari, Josie Rourke and Toy Story 5 co-director Kenna Harris among them—to compare team-sports paths into directing and ways to communicate locations and vision across different crews.
- Josie Rourke said she dropped digital castles from Mary Queen of Scots after an architect friend judged they would not “stand up,” and has since worked to communicate better with VFX teams about cost-sensitive choices.
- Kenna Harris said understanding simulation would help her discuss clothing folds more collaboratively, noting that even at “a really fancy studio like Pixar,” believable cloth bunching remains difficult at feature scale.
- Sophy Romvari said her first collaboration with costume designer Maria Katarina on Blue Heron revealed costume’s importance to continuity and aesthetics as well as actors’ safety and comfort.
- Blue Heron moves between a late-’90s setting and a more contemporary timeline, using changes in clothing and comfort to articulate feelings its characters cannot say themselves.
Why it matters: For directors and VFX teams, the five-director panel turned collaboration into a budget issue: Rourke’s deleted *Mary Queen of Scots* castles exposed how effects choices can hide cost, while Harris said technical gaps such as clothing simulation still complicate studio work. Better dialogue affects both spending and whether ambitious images read as convincing.
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