Jul 23, 2023

Christopher Nolan credits and forgets over 80% of VFX staff -Oppenheimer

In a promotional junket for "Oppenheimer," director Christopher Nolan repeatedly pointed out that no CG was used in his latest film. That interpretation of his statement is inaccurate.

"Oppenheimer" may not use CG, but it does use digital VFX. Much of it is what is called "invisible VFX," a style of VFX often used in period and adult dramas that aims to make the setting believable but not draw attention to the VFX, as is often the case in superhero and action films. With invisible VFX, if the crew does their job well, the audience will not notice that VFX is being used.

While we do not know how Nolan used digital VFX in "Oppenheimer" and will not know until (and if) the breakdown of effects is released, it is a fact that VFX was used in this film. Also, the film's VFX studio was DNEG, which collaborated with Nolan for the eighth time.

UPDATE: DNEG provided further information to Cartoon Brew, explaining how compositing was the primary use of VFX on the film:

[Production VFX supervisor] Andrew Jackson spent several months of the project in Scott Fisher's workshop, working with him and his SFX crew to develop various simulations and effects. In the process, they shot a huge library of elements. They shot these explosions at high speed, slowed them down, and combined layers of footage in post-production. The final shots ranged from using raw elements as they were shot to complex composites of multiple shot elements. Almost every VFX shot in the film was recreated by combining only authentic elements. Chris Nolan insisted on keeping the VFX realistic and maintaining the raw feel of the actual footage.

Additionally, we learned that Nolan and Universal decided not to credit the majority of the film's VFX crew. In addition to VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson, the film's credits list 26 VFX staff members. Of these, 10 are supervisors and 15 are workers or support people. This does not make sense unless the ratio of supervisors to workers is particularly high and the management people are supervising a larger group of artists.

All told, Oppenheimer has a VFX crew of 27 people from @dneg (including the overall VFX supervisor). Looks like compositing only, no CG. Congrats @dneg. The film looks amazing. No spoilers or reviews right now. No spoilers or reviews now. pic.twitter.com/FSsE8MCbvJ

- Hugo Guerra (@HugoCGuerra) July 21, 2023

In fact, it was revealed that far more people worked on the film than are actually credited. The DNEG website has a scrolling list of the VFX staff who worked on "Oppenheimer," which totals over 160 people. Meanwhile, people on the Internet have created a spreadsheet in an attempt to correctly identify the roles of all the VFX staff on the film.

Complete list of VFX staff for "Oppenheimer" (from Dneg) pic.twitter.com/g24GGkfxKU

- dasNeves.vfx (@dasNeves_vfx) July 23, 2023

Thus, Universal and Christopher Nolan excluded over 80% of the film's VFX crew from the credits. Why? It certainly wasn't a question of running time; at 3 hours long, an extra 10 seconds of credits wouldn't have made a bit of difference to the audience. But it would have meant a great deal to the workers who could have been credited on the screen of a blockbuster film. (It is telling that many of the workers who were omitted from the credits worked at one of DNEG's facilities in India.)

The lack of credits for VFX crews is actually a fairly common practice in Hollywood, and since VFX artists are not unionized, there is no recourse for the workers and no penalty for the studios if credits are omitted or misrepresented.

In this day and age when literally everyone involved in the production of a film is credited, from craft services to child on-set teachers to "production babies" who don't even work on the film, the work of the VFX artist who makes the final image on the screen possible is ... is routinely omitted from the credits is completely incomprehensible.

Oppenheimer is yet another example of how live-action filmmakers like Nolan denigrate and misrepresent the work of VFX producers to the media, adding insult to injury by not recognizing them in the credits. The fact that over 125 people who contributed to Oppenheimer's success are not listed in the credits is a reminder of how corrupt and broken the VFX industry is, undermining and disrespecting workers at every turn.