Florian Dehmel - VFX Supervisor at Sehsucht

Started as a Compositor in 2008, Florian Dehmel quickly became a VFX Supervisor at Sehsucht (formerly LIGA 01). He mostly works on Commercials but also supervised the work on the feature film “The Bloom of Yesterday” in 2016. With the spots for Innogames “Elvenar”, he has also dived into the role as director. For the “Penny – Fine Day” commercial he supervised the whole postproduction process from concept to final delivery. Florian was a guest speaker on CGA Warmup event, breaking down the visual effects on Penny commercial.

Belgrade had a whole green and organic makeover on “Penny – Natürlich für Alle” commercial with some fine work from you as VFX Supervisor and post from Sehsucht. What was the scope of work and what are the challenges on the project?

For the main edit and some “cutdowns”, we worked on 50 VFX-shots in total with very different kind of tasks to be done in post. The shooting took place in Berlin and Belgrade, which was with over 6 locations and 4 shooting days the main spot of the production. The bridge and the main intersection in the TVC were the two locations we did the most work on. Although we had pretty packed shooting days, everything went pretty smooth. The local crew worked professional and everybody was very helpful when there were questions or spontaneous tasks to manage.

As a VFX Supervisor, you had to be involved in every little bit of this production. What are your responsibilities on the commercial like Penny?

As a VFX Supervisor, I like to work closely with the director to bring his vision to life. First of all my main responsibility is to make sure that all the technical things run smoothly. Starting with documenting the camera parameters, shooting HDRs and placing tracking markers. On location, I am the ears and eyes for the whole team back at the office, so I need to make sure that every technical aspect is taken care of and document everything as tidy as possible. Therefore I work closely with the 1st AD, the DoP and for example the production design department. On the other hand, there is a huge creative part as things evolve during the process and we often like to pitch our own ideas to the director.

How did you get the idea to do a shoot in Belgrade and how was your collaboration with the local production service company Emote?

Personally, I wasn’t involved in the planning process directly. But from what I know the director was looking for variety in architecture to play with. Also, the European look of the city, the availability of cast and crew and of course the weather conditions helped a lot for choosing Belgrad as main shooting location.

What kind of preparation did you have to do the pre-production for the location shooting?

We had already some drone footage and photos from the location scouting, which we used for our initial styleframes. During tech recce, I took further pictures and did first measurements to layout the first CG-setups.

Can you tell us a bit about your team at Sehsucht?

The team at Sehsucht is a very family like bunch of people who share the passion for the craft of VFX and Animation. We have a nice mixture of young and experienced people. Besides producers and management staff the artists are split into 3 departments. The 3D department consists mostly of specialized people like animators, modelling, lighting and simulation artists. Then there is the art department which crafts all the nice concepts and styleframes. The 3rd being the compositing department, which I belong to.

From all previous projects that you had a chance to work at LIGA 01 and Sehsucht, which one you enjoyed the most?

Uff, this is really hard to tell. I think one of the most fulfilling and rewarding experience was when I switched from artist to supervisor. It was one of the first projects where I had the chance to lead a bigger team, which was split over 2 cities (Hamburg and Munich). The timing from start to finish was 6 weeks, and we had live action shooting and motion capture for 2 TVCs. I had the feeling that I was just talking the whole day, jumping from one meeting to another without any progress. But in the end it all worked out, I did learn a lot and the client was very happy and thankful.

Are you missing the grand old days of being a compositing artist? 🙂

I really don’t have to, because sometimes there is still a chance for me to do some comp work. Now we have more people who also do VFX supervision, so from time to time I jump back to Nuke. Especially look development is a field where I like to work hands on.