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

Lautaro, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

Visual effects it’s a bit of a niche career path and not many people are familiar with it. In my case it was my major at school and it is where I started to learn about it. Truth is that we are exposed to visual effects from a very young age. Almost every time we watch tv or a movie there are visual effects. If they are done right they tend to be invisible or at least make you believe they belong in a certain environment. I believe that it is a bit of the magic of movies, it allows directors to add or remove things, bend reality, create impossible places, and the options are almost endless. As I mentioned before I learned in school and we started with basic camera tricks, the sort of tricks that were done in old movies like “Trip to the Moon.” We went from the basics to more specific things like 3D models, characters, simulations, and green screens. Like most disciplines it takes a lot of practice to learn to do things to a production level. When I started working I realized that I was not up to speed with my school knowledge, but I had a good base.

Knowing what I know now there were a few things that I could’ve been done to speed up my learning process, but sometimes circumstances take us on longer journeys. The studio in which I always worked for is a small team and we tend to have very tight deadlines. These deadlines do not allow the more junior people like me the time to figure out how to do something and don’t allow slower workflows. We need things to be done quickly and as close to perfect as possible. It was difficult for me to have the chance to work on more complex things that would take me time to figure out. I did lose some time in my first years just because I wasn’t given the chance to try. Another thing that slowed me down was to do things right. At the beginning in most VFX compositors careers we start doing roto, which is a simple and tedious task. It is similar to a restaurant in which the new hire starts by washing dishes. In my case I wanted to show that I was useful and capable so I got very fast and very good at doing roto. This meant that I every roto coming our way was sent to me because I was one of the best ones at it. These type of things we might not realize as newbies to the industry but did stall my progress a bit.

Visual effects tries to fool the human eye, which is a very difficult task considering that it’s our most developed sense. In the array of VFX careers I do compositing, which is sort of the last person to grab all the assets and put together a cohesive image. For us compositors, the most essential skill is observation. We are trying to replicate reality and fool our audience into believing things that are not real. I think it takes years to master and tons of practice.

Lautaro, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a Visual Effects Artist, specifically a compositor. The work that we do consists of combining all the different assets of a shot and putting it together in an image that’s believable to the audience. For example, we receive a cg (computer generated) dragon that’s already animated, a simulation of the fire, and a cg background of a mountain. We are in charge of combining these 3 to make it look “real”. We have to make sure that the colors match, the shadows, lighting, the atmosphere, clouds, there are many factors to consider, but ultimately we have to make the image look believable.

My journey started a few miles away in the country Argentina, where I was born. I played tennis from a young age and became quite serious about it. Around age 14 I realized that I would not make it pro, but there was the possibility of coming to the U.S. with an athletic scholarship and do my university degree here. I was very fond of this idea so I worked really hard to make it. In 2016 I started college in this beautiful country in a school in Kansas where I did my gen-eds and in 2018 I transferred to SCAD Atlanta. In SCAD I started my visual effects major while also being the captain of the tennis team.

In 2020 when the pandemic hit, I was not done with my studies, but of course all sports were cancelled until further notice. I had to make a decision if I wanted to stay alone the U.S. or go home and be with my family. As I was close to finishing my degree and looking for jobs/internships I decided to stay. As we all know the job market was not great at that moment and many people were getting laid off. I was a bit “lucky” to find an internship that later became my job because it was an atypical situation. For some reason, I left the VFX 101 class for my senior year, and was doing it during COVID. I said “lucky” because even though it was a 100 level class I still was disciplined enough to attend every class. Most of my discipline comes from playing sports at a high level. In one of these classes there was an alumni that attended and was telling us about her experience in the industry. I mentioned that I was looking for an internship and she later contacted me saying that there was a studio she knew looking for an intern. I got in contact with the studio and started working right away. The studio is called Mod Creations and it is where I’ve done almost all the work I have. We tend to do music videos so in the pandemic we were still in business. Some of the work we have done at Mod Creations involves music videos for artists like Drake, Travis Scott, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Camila Cabello, Jlo, Ciara, Sabrina Carpenter. Also commercials for brands like Yves Saint Laurent, Reebok, Acura, Tumi, noom. Our work has been awarded and nominated for multiple awards like MTV VMAs, BET Awards, Emmys, and billions of views on YouTube. My most proud achievement was to work on the Super Bowl LV Halftime show by The Weeknd. We worked on the first minute of the show before it transitions to live performance. It was the most stressful, but incredibly rewarding feeling I’ve had in my career. Seeing it on tv with the people from the office was unexplainable.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I don’t consider myself an artist, but I do think I’m a creative. I think the most rewarding part about it is to care about what I’m putting out into the world to see. I care about my craft, and that makes me go the extra mile. I believe many creatives will agree on this, we tend to stay longer hours and maybe work extra so we can be proud of the product we deliver. In my case most projects tend to be stressful and we work long hours, but when it’s done and out for the world to see it is very rewarding knowing that millions of people are looking at the product we put out. I don’t know if I would feel this way punching numbers in a spreadsheet.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think non-creatives tend to struggle to understand how the creative process goes. They tend to misjudge how difficult or how long it takes to make changes on things. Sometimes it feels like for them we press a button and it’s fixed. We all know that is very far from the creative process. If you ask creative people, I’m sure 95% will say that they have been asked to do work for free, many have been and are being underpaid and overworked. We tend to be disrespected in that aspect. It is our fault as well because we allow it, and we want to do what we love so we accept unfavorable terms. I think that non-creatives should start thinking about creatives as their tattoo artists. We are all aware that if we want to get a good tattoo it’s okay to pay a bit more, do proper research, and let the artist take its time with it. Rushed and cheap will not be good and ultimately will have to be redone for the premium price, so why bother.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lautaromonardo.wixsite.com/lautaromonardo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lautaro-monardo-396915179/

Image Credits

All images belong to Mod Creations Inc