Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Charlie Frail. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Charlie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Visual Effects is a vast artistic landscape with many different disciplines. Animation, Rigging, Asset Creation, Environments, Lighting, Matte Painting, Compositing, and more. Every discipline is a chasm to explore, but each only forms one small piece of the puzzle that produces blockbuster quality movies.

In the first few years of my career, I put a lot of effort into diving deep on only a few disciplines, opposed to a jack of all trades approach. I believe this had the benefit of faster employment, as most of the visual effects industry is built around specialized artists, especially at the junior to mid artist levels.

I began my vfx journey focusing on matte painting until I produced a quality ‘junior artist’ level reel. That landed me my first job at MPC in Montreal, where I saw the opportunity to expand my skillset in asset creation and environment work. This focus on asset creation took me through my first two films, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

It was on my third film, Aquaman, that I experienced another shift. I was introduced to a program called Houdini, which we’ve begun using more and more in VFX in recent years due to it’s ability to manage complex scenes at scale. Through the creation of Atlantis, I learned how to use the program, but more critically, I learned the fundamentals behind creating large environments in a procedural manner.

This became my primary skillset that I would exercise on a daily basis at work. As my abilities continued to grow and work slowly became easier, it freed up mental energy to begin diving into other disciplines in my free time. I now find myself to be a bit of a jack-of-all trades, but I’m not sure I would have been able to reach this point if I hadn’t dug deep into a couple of disciplines first.

There are a few lessons to be gleaned from my own artistic journey that can hopefully be of assistance to others. Firstly, focusing in on a specialized skill is typically a better path at the beginning than gaining experience in multiple different areas. It leads to finding a job faster in my experience. Employment has one HUGE benefit in regard to skill gain; if you find yourself at a job where you’re able to exercise a skill that you value for 8 hours and get paid for it, that puts your creative development miles ahead of others.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Most movies these days utilize vfx to varying degrees, yet seemingly few people know how to actually do visual effects. This observation along with my general love of movies and filmmaking is what pushed me to dedicate myself to the field.

While the type and amount of work I contribute has evolved over the years, the problems I solve have remained universal. Whether I’m creating a militarized camp for His Dark Materials, the city of Knowhere for Guardian’s of the Galaxy v3, or an alien desert planet for Zach Snyder’s upcoming Rebel Moon, I’m constantly trying to solve a few problems in unison. How do I satisfy the client’s briefing, elevate the story, and ultimately make something both photoreal and artistically pleasing?

One of my favorite experiences in addressing these challenges was on Joker in which we created all of the blood in the film in CG. What we came to refer to as the ‘blood smile’ shot remains one of my favorite shots I’ve ever worked on. Joaqun Phoenix stands atop a police car amidst a riot when he sticks his fingers into his bleeding mouth and smears the blood up his cheeks into a haunting image of the joker smiling. Not only are the visual effects in that shot beautiful and invisible, but it elevates this wonderfully terrifying character arc by creating an image of the Joker’s madness and glee amongst chaos and violence.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson that I have to continually relearn is that happiness, pride, and self image do not come from external sources. Upon reaching a point in my career in which I was regularly working on large intellectual properties, be it for Marvel or DC or Disney or whoever, I realized that I wasn’t as happy as I could be. Learning to step away from work and build my life outside of my artistic value became extremely important to me, and the wonderful thing is that stepping away can reinvigorate your work. If art imitates life, how can you create if you aren’t getting out there and living.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

At it’s core, I derive a lot of life purpose from being an artist. Creating beautiful things to relate to, converse with, and affect other humans is a central part of how I relate to the world.

On a day to day grind level, I really enjoy that my work produces a visible piece of product that I can feel a large amount of creative ownership over. I feel immense pride when viewing my completed work, akin to an 8 year-old getting their spelling test pinned to the fridge. I’ve made something that exists and represents me even when I’m not there. My art will be around longer than myself, and I think that’s beautiful.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviecharlie/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-frail-35263a139/

Image Credits
His Dark Materials Guardians of the Galaxy v3 Rebel Moon Joker