Early in my career, we used to joke about how people thought visual effects were made.
There seemed to be this assumption that we had some magical button in our software that would do everything for us.
Push a button, and there’s your animation.
Move a slider, and suddenly you have a realistic explosion or some incredible visual effect.
We would laugh about it because we knew just how far that was from reality.
What people didn’t see were the countless hours of work behind those images.