[FRAMED] Lead Environment Artist, Cedric Moens de Hase, Melbourne
If you could travel back in time, which film, TV series, advert, or immersive project would you love to have worked on?
Monsters (G.E. 2010) — On the shooting, as well as in post-production as this movie shows how much both work together.
Which Framestore character do you feel you’re most like?
It’s not gonna do me any favour, but I’d say Tramp from “Lady and the Tramp”. I’ve always been a dog person, somehow I relate to them and get really attached to such characters in movies. You can kill any character, but don’t you dare touch the dog!
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
I like the Golden Compass / His Dark Materials world, for the concept of relationship/binds with the demons. But I have a looooong bucket list of places I want to explore in the real world before even starting to think of fictional ones. 😀
Your career highlight to date:
Receiving a direct, very positive director’s review of my work from one of my idols in the movie/VFX industry — Gareth Edwards.
Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in VFX?
Like most of us, I was creative, liked drawing, and also liked movies, technology and video games as a kid. But that’s not the real reason… To be fair, I joined this industry for the wrong reasons. I was a bit lost, I started pursuing a career in the Navy to be a Coast Guard and quickly changed my mind. Then I went volunteering around the world for a while trying to find myself, and came back home with only one certainty, I didn’t want to be back home. But reality caught up with me, I had to do something, so I joined a Graphic Design / Arch Viz school in my hometown, mainly because my best friend was there, it was cheap and it looked fun. Only after one or two years did I realise there was maybe a real career plan for me in Computer Graphics, and I looked into Visual Effects. I loved that I could live in different places around the world and get to work on some of the movies that I watched as a kid.
The DREAM project would entail:
A VFX artist as Director?! To me most of what makes a project a dream or a nightmare happens on shoot. Less of “Let’s fix this crap in post” and more “Wow that looks beautiful, let’s film it and add VFX onto it to serve the story”.
How do you explain what you do to someone who doesn’t work in VFX?
I usually simply say I replace the green/blue screen with whatever needs to be back there. I actually don’t really explain much, I like to keep a bit of Magic.
Describe your career journey into the exciting world of VFX.
Nothing fancy here, after completing a first degree in computer graphics, but still in Belgium (where I’m from) and with the perspective of a boring job in Archviz, I decided to go back to school in a private VFX school in France called ArtFx. I didn’t wait to graduate to look for jobs though, tried every internship opportunity I could find, went to London over the summer (a good excuse for me to go explore new places) and found my first VFX job as a short term contract over the summer while I was still a student. Once I graduated for the second time, I already had a foot in the industry, everything went so fast, and years passed by… I did a couple of studios in Europe and in the UK and checked off a few bucket list items like — working on a movie from my favourite director, working on a Star Wars project, etc etc… At some point, I had seen a lot of the UK’s beautiful countryside, and it was time to go explore further! Me and my partner both moved to Australia to join Framestore. 🙂
What does the day in the life of a Lead Environment Artist look like?
Thankfully, not all days are the same! But mostly, I get in a few morning meetings or individual catch-ups with artists on the shows, where I look at submissions. As much as I can, I try to find the potential problems we might encounter and the corresponding solutions for them. This is what drives what I’ll be looking into on a day-to-day basis. Creative problem-solving is probably what I enjoy the most, but then when I find solutions, I think it’s really important to go over them with the artists — to explain solutions and empower people! Though my everyday nemesis is TIME — most of the remaining part of my day is spent jumping around from one daily to another and having lots of meetings with other artists and departments — which is essential in Environment to communicate across departments. 🙂
Framestore is, to you, in three words:
Big, Opportunity and Pipeline. 😂
Best thing about your work environment?
No doubt, having a great and friendly team around as well as being able to chat freely with people not just as colleagues but as friends.
Framestore is great at:
Connecting people around the world! Since I joined Framestore, not so long ago, just over a year, I’ve been working and regularly chatting with people from every other location of ours.
Favourite artform?
I really enjoy aerial photography! I love Edward Burtynsky’s and Tom Hegen’s work. Nature when viewed from different angles can create such unexpected pieces of art.
Favourite image?
Hard to pick one, I like the Watermark series from Edwar Burtynsky, or also “Oil Bunkering #2”, those images have a big impact on me both creatively, and for the environmental cause they defend.
What’s your favourite movie/ series/ advert/ immersive experience and why?
I have not one but two favourite movies for different reasons.
The first one is ‘The Professional’, or as I would call it in French, ‘Leon’, from Luc Besson. It has nothing to do with what I do in Environments. It’s just storytelling and characters that moved me — good actors, a cool explosion, and it inspired the music ‘Matilda’ from Alt-J which I also love🙂. The other one I mentioned earlier is ‘Monsters’, because of the way it was filmed, how smart the VFX is, and how real and natural the scenes look.
What is the last piece of art that inspired you?
I recently read a book series called ‘Dark Eden’ by Chris Becket, thanks to a recommendation from a great colleague I was lucky to work with. It’s about people being trapped on another planet, basically back to the Stone Age, only there is no sun, so no perception of time as we know it. The only light that comes is from bioluminescent fauna and flora. For an environment artist, it was very inspiring!
How do you unlock your creativity?
My creativity comes from what I see around me in the real world. Like when I travel, I constantly think “Wow, this is cool! We could do this and that based on this rock formation.”
From where do you seek inspiration?
Same answer as above — Real world, travelling and just looking around.
Who in the industry do you admire most and why?
I feel like I’ve already said his name ten times and it can sound like propaganda, but the director Gareth Edwards. He was a VFX artist before so he can relate to us, and I just love his approach to VFX — the way he thinks, the vision he has etc. Visual Effects being so important, and sadly too often underestimated these days, I think more directors with proper VFX training/background would really make a huge difference to the movie industry. I hope one day, at my own level, I will be able to participate in that capacity.
Share the best piece of advice you’ve ever received:
Be humble. Whether you are very good at something, or not, be humble 🙂! Back at university and when I started my career I thought I needed to be the best at everything to succeed. I quickly got frustrated because everywhere I looked, and it hasn’t changed even now, I saw such talented people all around who were so much better than me. But it’s okay because that’s what’s beautiful about this industry — it’s just another opportunity to learn! And being humble drives people towards you, and it’s all about the people at the end🙂.
What tech/innovation could you not live without?
As we don’t really have the choice to live without it anyway now, I think AI can be super useful. I use chat GPT on a daily basis, for code snippets, as an all in one place for software documentation, or even to translate fancy words my Australian colleagues throw at me sometimes and I have no idea what they mean 😀. It’s a huge time saver for me and it would certainly make my days more complicated without it.
What tech/innovation deserves the hype?
I find innovations in cameras and optics fascinating (even though I understand little to nothing about it, as I decided it was too complicated for my brain). From the small cameras that everyone can buy now, like a little 360 camera that I recently acquired and have a lot of fun with, to the big movie set camera rigs that James Cameron develops for his Avatar movies. Everything that brings real life into pixels for us to have fun with, I think is worth the hype 🙂!
What tech do you need that hasn’t been invented yet?
A VFX artist > to production > to client translator.
We manage to understand ourselves most times, thankfully! But with everyone having their own domain of expertise, we just sometimes don’t speak the same language (in addition to really not speaking the same language 🥖) I’d love to write down, “Martin needs to fix the Udims on his model before we can republish and update the render” and production to receive “Reopen the asset task for half a day and assign Martin to it, then we can move on the shot task and render.” 🙂
Cedric Moens de Hase, you’ve been [FRAMED].
