Supervision in VFX. Do artists prefer the carrot or the stick?
Which do you think works best?
As an Asset Supervisor in the VFX industry, I am presented with work from our team on a daily basis. My role is to review the content and ensure it is creatively and technically suitable to pass down the pipeline to downstream departments.
From directors, in-house supervisors, and artists to the general film audience, it is easy for all of us to point out flaws in the work we see.
In post-production receiving a list of fixes for the next day is something we have all experienced. You work on the notes but know that the next session in dailies you will get another list, just as long. You can feel your supervisor's frustration. They have scrutinized your work every day for five weeks, and it's still not hitting the mark. You have addressed every note but feel that the number of notes isn't decreasing between sessions. Are you the problem, or do they simply have too high expectations of you? Either way, you have mentally checked out and want this assignment to just go away.
Conversely, from the supervision side you have critiqued this thing to death. You keep kicking it back to the artist and they just don’t get it! Perhaps we have overestimated the artist and they can’t get this work done, maybe we just need to reassign the work to someone else?
Has the supervisor done their job? Well, yes and no, they have given the artist notes, they have submitted their critiques and it is quite likely that every version was slightly better than the last. But by what margin?
The goal of a supervisor is to achieve final quality with the fewest revisions possible, as smoothly as possible. One approach I think worth evaluating is this:
It is quite easy to offer critique of what you don't like. What is much harder is to let people know what you DO like.
It takes more confidence to commit to what you think is working well. This kind of direction is more valuable to an artist than a shopping list of tiny niggles that never ends. Letting an artist know what you find appealing will result in them steering more towards the things you do like than the things you don’t.
Is a modeler hitting the primary, secondary and tertiary details of their sculpt on a specific area but missing that finer detail on another. Use the successful part to inform the rest of the model.
Does the texture artist really nail the scale of some streaky watermarks on a the side of a mechs helmet but not the dirt splashes on its legs? In this case use the helmet as scale reference to drive the legs.
Do you just think it looks cool? Then bloody well say so! You may not even be able to describe why you like it (This is a skill in of itself) but that is still useful feedback to give.
Have you ever seen someone approve work by saying ‘This is fine’, ‘That will do’? Using this language is a surefire way for to tank the morale of VFX artists. If you are approving something I really hope you like what you see, if that is the case then you should really tell the artist how you feel about their work!
With this we build motivation and give positive guidance over negative. To know what IS working is the real skill we need to develop. We have to frame our notes in a way that builds on the success of the artist rather than their failures.
I find most people prefer the carrot to the stick.
The review process from a supervisor point of view needs to be more than a description or praise I feel. The artist probably would like some examples of what you’re talking about. I tend to try to find images that support what I’m talking about and send those over. or spend a minute and actually throw something together in Maya and take a few images of a little bit of modeling. I did to kind of emphasize what I’m talking about. I think artist are just visual creatures and need to see what the goal is. My two cents.