Origin Story: From Indie Filmmaker to VFX Innovator
by Founder and Chief Pixel Pusher Paul DeNigris
In a way, VFX has always been part of my journey in the film industry. I’m a child of the Spielberg-Lucas blockbuster era which means Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were the one-two punch that sparked my love of movies and my interest in being a filmmaker. My earliest movies were Lego stop-motion sci-fi shorts. The stories I wrote growing up were all giant sci-fi epics filled with robots and spaceships and alien worlds. But then I went to film school and was introduced to film noir and the French New Wave and all of cinema history. I graduated right in the middle of the 90’s indie film movement that gave us Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. So suddenly I went from wanting to be the next Spielberg to wanting to be one of those guys, making cool indie crime movies. But VFX was always still in the forefront of my mind and my first gig out of college was selling computer systems for digital animation and having to train clients on how to use software like LightWave 3D, which at the time was being used to make VFX for shows like The X-Files and Star Trek. So I dove deep into LightWave and it was that skill set that moved me out west from New York and really got me into the game.
But parallel to that I was writing what would become my indie crime feature The Falls, which a few years later I scraped some money together to produce. My two worlds - VFX artist and filmmaker - really gelled on that film, which ended up having almost 250 VFX shots because I knew I had that set of tools in my toolbox to help stretch my budget. We shot that film in 2001 - and no indie films were really using VFX at that time, much less having 200+ VFX shots in them. From that point on, every film I made had visual effects as part of its inherent design. I’d write material that I specifically knew I’d need VFX to accomplish, sometimes even writing stuff where I wasn’t quite sure if we had the VFX skill to make it happen. So the urge to tell the stories I wanted to tell drove my growth as a VFX artist and also established my reputation among my indie film community as “the VFX guy.”
Flash-forward some years and indie film burnout was real. I felt like I no longer had anything in the tank, or anything left that I wanted to say as a filmmaker. But visual effects continued to have a hold on me, and I had done a very successful stint at a VFX house in Los Angeles that really helped me hone my skills and gave me the confidence to run my own shop. So that’s when I decided to hang up my spurs as a director, open Foxtrot X-Ray, and focus on helping other filmmakers use VFX the way I had, as a tool to help better tell their stories.