Eames: Having first worked at Framestore a long time ago I feel like I kind of knew the ropes before it really evolved into the industry it is now here [in London]. I feel very fortunate to have been involved in the early part of that, where things did feel more experimental. I remember being interested to come back to the UK, having spent a few years in San Francisco, because London seemed very keen to develop its place in the industry. I worked for Millfilm at that point, and they were very much setting out to break into the west coast visual effects market.

There was a feeling that we got from west coast studios, the big studios, that we just weren’t well placed to do that work. So what I became involved in with a few other people at the time, was trying to produce a piece of work that could effectively present that we were able to do it. And on a small scale, we did that.

VFX Voice: What was the project?

Eames: It was based off an idea that Ridley Scott, who was part of The Mill at the time, had for a film called I Am Legend, which ended up being done years later by someone else. We imagined a scenario that involved us going out and shooting a real-world scene in Richmond Park. The plates showed some real deer, because they were relevant to the movie, but we added in a hero CG deer of our own. The idea was that we would show a client, and they wouldn’t know what they were looking at until we said, ‘Well, actually, that one is not real.’

We did that and we pulled it off, and we got our first piece of work for Babe: Pig in the City off the back of that. Universal kind of threw their hands up and said, ‘We didn’t realize you could do that over there.’ That was groundbreaking for us where we were in London. At that time, people in the industry here were trying to move out of, or rather extend what we already had, which was a strong foothold in the commercials market, but we hadn’t really made inroads to film at that point.