Victor Perez on the journey to bring the VFX of Naples – New York to the screen.
The poet and creative visionary William Blake famously noted that “Energy is eternal delight.” Although Blake was creating in a time and space far, far away from the world of visual effects, the sense of joy that Blake defined suffuses the way in which Visual Effects Supervisor Victor Perez discusses his own work. In speaking with Victor, what emerges is a deep sense of passion for the work and a commitment to celebrating the artistry that visual effects can attain.
With the release in November 2024 of the feature film Naples – New York, directed by Academy Award winner Gabriele Salvatores, Victor Perez opens up in a deep dive conversation that offers a range of insights into his work on the film, as both Visual Effects Supervisor and in terms of the compositing work that he personally undertook.
Perez begins by noting that “If you use the right resources and mindset and you are lucky enough to collaborate with the right team, you can achieve really amazing things, and this film is a perfect example of working in a cost-efficient way. That doesn’t mean low cost. Cost effective is about being mindful of what you have and using the resources to the very best.
As an artist, limitations are what make you grow. Having everything you want as an artist is, to a certain degree, counterproductive. Limitations constrain you to use your imagination and solve problems in creative ways you would had never consider in the first place.”
Back to compositing roots
In telling the story of Naples – New York, the realm of visual effects became vital, and, in approaching the project, Victor understood that the palette of visual effects work would emphasise both the biggest vistas and the smallest details.
Of the breadth of scale that the film’s effects work brings to the screen, Victor takes the opportunity to reflect on his decision to personally undertake work on a significant amount of the film’s compositing requirements. In doing so, Victor expresses his passion for the work whilst also bringing into focus the practical demands of making a project happen with the resources made available.
Victor notes that “When I saw this opportunity on the film, and this huge number of shots that were extremely complicated, I designed the shots – as a former compositor – to be composited in a certain way. When we were filming, I knew that certain shots are going to be composited in a certain way. I really loved the compositing part of Naples – New York.
We have 523 shots, and I personally composited more than half of them. The other half were accomplished by five vendors.” Indeed, for Naples – New York, the ratio of VFX shots to footage, comprises almost half of the film, indeed a total of 63,560 frames of VFX were produced, comprising 44 minutes and 8 seconds of the film. “At the peak moment in the visual effects project we had 167 people working on the film’s visual effects. So, believe me, we needed to use an extremely cost-effective way for doing this.”
There’s a sense of delight in Victor’s recollections of his compositing work on Naples – New York: “I took the position of lead compositor, and it was thanks to my Associate VFX Supervisor Larisa Zhuravleva, as she was taking care of many tasks that I could delegate while in post-production, that I was able to take on the most complex shots in order to ease the workload for the studios. Whilst supervising the effects for the entire film, I was able to composite over 305 shots. I am still amazed that I was able to do that. I never in my life have attempted to do that before. They were not all super-complicated shots: some were clean ups, small DMP and CGI integrations, but others were massive full CGI shots, or puzzles that require imagination, study and research to complete them. However, as a VFX supervisor you find yourself sometimes arguing how to approach compositing tasks but how can you translate your sharp vision if you don’t master such an entangled technical and artistic craft? So, this was an opportunity to stop ‘preaching’ about compositing and to demonstrate it. I knew it was possible, but compositing 305 photorealistic shots in 6 months for an Oscar winner director that is my friend and trust me was frankly a frightening responsibility… until I remembered the true purpose of all this: to have fun, that’s why I chose to be an artist when I was a child; so I’m not going to leave the ‘adult stuff’ to get in the way to enjoy the process, I just want to create meaningful pictures hoping nobody notice my work and to approach it as I used to do it when I was child with my brother’s computer.”
Romance Meets Reality: Visualising Two Worlds
Some stories never really grow old and Naples – New York, which began as a screenplay by Tullio Pinelli and Federico Fellini, tells the ageless story of a journey to find a new life and confront its challenges.
A central element of Victor’s work for Naples – New York was supervising effects that would de-age each city. Victor explains that “We wanted to bring the audience into the life of Naples in the post-war period, in 1949. We referred to archive photography as a guide for how to most effectively combine and enhance scenes. We enhanced street scenes with CGI and digital matte paintings to create the environment work.” Further detailed work was undertaken in applying CGI in two ways: to remove real world elements from the contemporary world and also to blend practical locations with CGI elements to extend and expand practical sets that had been designed by Rita Rabassini and her team.
Addressing the defining aesthetic for the project, Victor explains that “As the VFX Supervisor, my goal was to fuse the neorealist and surrealist very well-known influences of Fellini / Pinelli, with the dramatic and powerful visual storytelling that [director] Gabriele Salvatores is known for. Everything was wrapped in a photorealistic look so that the VFX not to be noticed unless otherwise directed by Gabriele that for certain scenes he wanted to showcase a ‘Wonderland/Oz’ look of New York in the eyes of two poor kids. This blend of styles required not only technical precision but also deep collaboration and artists’ integrity to ensure that the visuals serve the story and not the other way around.”
The centrepiece for the recreation of Naples was a historically accurate depiction of the bustling San Vincenzo pier in the Port of Naples, complete with maritime traffic and its iconic lighthouse, captured in both day and night settings. Victor explains that “The goal was to preserve as much original footage as possible. However, sometimes large areas of the frame were digitally reconstructed to accurately depict Naples’ iconic skyline and its reflection in the sea. Occasionally, entire shots were crafted entirely in CGI to showcase perspectives that no longer exist but grounded in the aesthetics of the film, emulating the lenses used by the cinematographer, in line with the style of the director while preserving a neorealistic approach to the motion picture, so the virtual cinematography blends perfectly with the reality of the scene, crafting one of the most difficult tasks for VFX: to be unnoticed, the very core of the suspension of the disbelief, the art of covering the art.”
Whilst the recreation of Naples required challenging work for Victor and his team, the film’s most ambitious challenge was found in the recreation of 1949 New York; particularly given that the film was shot in Italy.
It’s fair to say that contemporary New York bears little resemblance to the 1949 version of itself and filming in New York itself was impractical for the Production of the movie. As such, Victor and the artists that he was supervising embarked on the ambitious task of transforming Trieste, a Mediterranean city in northern Italy, into the iconic American metropolis.
Initially sceptical of this approach, Victor found that whilst walking through Trieste, certain corners of the city’s architecture, with its blend of Eastern and Western European influences, provided an ideal foundation for constructing New York’s 1949 aesthetic. In turn, the production’s locations were carefully selected to incorporate Trieste’s elements that mirrored certain New York buildings. In doing so, the production was able to ensure a seamless interaction between the environment and the characters. Reconstructing New York for the film was clearly an immense undertaking and the team referred to archive material, including Julian Boilen’s photographic encyclopaedia documenting New York’s buildings from 1939 to 1941.
For the New York scenes, Victor explains that “The general rule that we worked to was this: from the ground up to three meters was Trieste, and everything above that was CGI. At times, the transformation process demanded such extensive modifications to the environment that little of the original footage remained. In these instances, our VFX team preserved only the actors, surrounding them with a fully reimagined backdrop to achieve the desired historical authenticity.”
Sometimes, the original footage shot during principal photography served as a mere reference for texture and lighting. Inspired by a note from a young Federico Fellini, who admitted to inventing New York based on films he loved, Perez chose to build the city from his own cinematic memories, rather than actually visit it for reference since he had never been to New York before filming this project. “In doing so,” Victor explains, “we created an idealized version that resonates with today’s audience. This visual style draws inspiration from Hollywood’s golden age, producing an artificial ‘soundstage studios’ look that created the feeling of a ‘Wonderland’ or of ‘Oz.’”
Enhancing creative interpretation, in order to accurately depict New York’s 1949 cityscape, Victor and his team researched historical archives, piecing together sections of Trieste that resembled buildings from the era. The result was a seamless integration of real and digital elements, creating a New York that was both authentic and fantastical, capturing the spirit of the film.
Departing Naples
A pivotal moment in the film is the Victory’s departure from the port of Naples at night. The standout shot of this sequence is the fully CGI depiction of the ship leaving the port towards the camera. It features a digital matte painting by Victor Perez, reconstructing the Vesuvio Mountain skyline and its villages at night in 1949, along with the historic lighthouse of San Vincenzo pier. The shot draws inspiration from two painters, the Russian Ivan Aivazovsky, admired by Perez for its depiction of the sea and light scattering underwater; and the Italian Canaletto, for his technique to create the illusion of detail in wide scale views. Perez personally lit and composited this shot, from inception to completion.
Crowds: Recreating 1949 New York
For the film’s depiction of old New York, Victor breaks down the work and he begins by saying that “New York’s bustling crowds were a signature element and recreating them within budget constraints required innovative solutions. For this, we used a blend of techniques: CGI crowds, sprites (extras filmed against blue screens), and crowd replication reusing different takes of the same shot or similar shots to duplicate the people. We collaborated with Xsens for motion capture and Italian 3D scan studio Wondar that scanned all our extras on location, to create realistic animated crowd elements to enhance the city’s scope. We then added crowd replication and for this compositing-oriented task we sourced different takes of the same shot for the crowds gathering in front of the Court of New York. Further CGI crowd elements were developed by Serbian based VFX company Cicero, crafting the most detailed models for closer shots. Victor adds that “Actual extra actors were scanned on set using photogrammetry to create 3D models, which were then animated with motion capture data to populate the streets of New York. We then created thousands of crowd elements using CGI that were both procedurally randomised and hand positioned exactly where we needed.”
The film’s protagonists embark on a journey of exploration, meeting characters who enrich their quest for belonging in a perplexing place, ultimately discovering what they have yearned for all their lives. To achieve this look, a delicate balance between photorealism and stylization was required and Victor makes that point that “It was important for me that Trieste was somehow recognizable in this film, even if the locations were meant to be elsewhere. Fellini noted in his treatment that he never visited New York before writing this film, so he invented it. I needed to incorporate this foundation of using what was familiar to him and fill the ‘gaps’ with the memory of the films he loved. Designing these sequences was incredibly fun, and I believe the audience will experience this ‘alienation effect’—a sense of familiarity yet newness, a place reminiscent of a half-remembered dream. Knowing [director] Gabriele Salvatores and his theatrical influences well, I wanted to honour them by drawing from Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. I used CGI to achieve an effect that is physically plausible yet reminiscent of an old film’s backdrop or Hollywood golden age contemporary to young Fellini.”
As a film about journeys of distance and of the human heart, a crucial part of Naples – New York depicts the voyage to America, aboard the Victory; a transatlantic ship that the children manage to board illegally, to travel from Naples to New York. These scenes were filmed on the legendary Brod Mira Galeb (Ship of Peace, Seagull). Measuring 117 meters in length and 15 meters in width. The Galeb is now decommissioned and functions as a museum anchored in the port of Rijeka, Croatia. The filming took place on location, and the ship never moved from its berth.
Victor’s VFX team produced significant elements to create the ocean and the ship on its waves by using physically plausible water simulation. Victor recalls how “The VFX team meticulously reconstructed certain areas of the ship using historical photographs, maintaining its original essence while converting some cargo features into passenger spaces. However, sequences showing the ship at sea required a complete recreation using CGI, as the actual vessel was stationary. CGI was used to generate every scene featuring the ocean outside the ship, with detailed water simulations capturing the dynamics of the massive vessel interacting with over 25 square kilometres of open sea, complete with splashes and trails.”
The filming process to realise the sea voyage was particularly complex, involving the setup of a segmented 100-square-meter mobile bluescreen that had to be repositioned for each camera angle onboard. This was often done from the decks or the pier using massive cranes, to accommodate both daytime and night-time shoots in an area notorious for its wind currents.
Making Metaphors
For Victor, the film’s aesthetic offered “opportunities to create visual metaphors that heightened emotional moments, maintaining the film’s grounded realism.”
Fascinatingly, and as a reminder of how filmmakers look to the work of others for influence and reference, this creative choice is reflected in the film’s recurring visual theme of reflections, beginning with an homage to Ken Ralston’s famous mirror shot in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact (1996). Victor breaks down a particular shot to illustrate the point, saying that “In Naples – New York, we watch as the camera seamlessly transitions through a puddle’s reflection, capturing the protagonists’ view of the Chrysler Building and emerging into New York’s chaotic streets, all in one continuous take. This shot, which comprises a collage of buildings from both Trieste and New York, signifies a shift from reality to the “America of possibilities” as Fellini described it, like Alice through the looking glass.”
Reimagining Traumatic Reality
In contrast to the dreamlike images that were produced in order to evoke the idea that Fellini had of America, Naples – New York opens with a powerful sequence depicting the collapse of the protagonist’s house. The sequence is anchored in very real-world reference points.
The long-take sequence of 1668 frames transitions from an extreme-wide shot of the event to an extreme-close-up of the eyes of the protagonist by stitching two plates with different lensing, capturing the horror of the collapse and Victor Perez aimed to connect Naples and New York through this first scene in just one take; highlighting the universal human struggle during such catastrophic events.
At its visually dynamic best, a film can offer a range of individual shots that stay with audiences beyond the film itself. One such image in Naples – New York is inspired directly by two very real-world frames of reference: one being a still photograph that entered the public consciousness in the aftermath of 9/11 and the other being an experience that Victor Perez directly drew upon. Victor explains the direct connection between film image and real life: “The set was surrounded by 200 square meters of bluescreen, which was replaced with CGI sections of the house inspired by my photographs from the L’Aquila Earthquake. My photos showed partially intact and completely destroyed sections. I was in L’Aquila (Italy) during the earthquake and my very own house collapsed right behind me. I made it out right in time before the house imploded. I saw images that recalled at that very moment the fall of the World Trade Center in New York. They are images that will persist in my memory forever and I was compelled to put this experience on the screen.”
The images that Victor describes here draw parallels between the bombed houses of Naples and the events of 9/11 in New York, with a nod to Stan Honda’s iconic photograph of Marcy Borders, known as The Dust Lady.
Victor explains that “I wanted to make the collapse of the house in Naples feel immediate and relatable to the audience, something that has been incorporated as kind of pop culture, an image that is both beautiful and horrifying; entering the drama of the film from a wide perspective to a personal tragedy in front of the eyes of the girl by the end of the shot. The sequence was shot in two takes—one wide and one close—and stitched together with VFX.”
The set, located on the backlot of Cinecittà studios in Rome, was massive and captured without any dust, which was later added digitally. Production designer Rita Rabassini ensured the debris had real weight and dust, with actors and stunts interacting with tons of actual rubble.
Following the house’s collapse, the aftermath was rendered in CGI for all the environments and backgrounds, capturing the devastation and chaos. This scene drew inspiration from Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique, honouring Naples’ rich artistic heritage and distinctive aesthetics. The intent was to convey not just destruction but emotional depth, using shadows and light to emphasize the moment.
Small Scale, Big Emotion
From the big picture images of cities and oceans that feature in the film, the work of Victor Perez and his team also produced shots on a small and emotive scale. Victor recalls work for a shot of the character of Celestina underwater: “We couldn’t shoot a 9-year-old actor underwater at night due to safety concerns. A dry-for-wet solution was beyond our resources–especially due to the long hair of the character and the clothes– and could have resulted in a mediocre outcome. Instead, I proposed a story-based solution that Gabriele loved: capturing only her hand drifting down. This powerful moment was crucial for the film’s emotional climax, as evident from the edit. However, executing this solution months after principal photography wrapped proved challenging and costly, so I literally knocked my neighbour’s door for help. I filmed her daughter’s hand in my living room dressing her with a jacket of mine and my camera gear. To mimic water caustics, I used a glass tray from my kitchen. The entire process took 30 minutes. The shot was completed using a photograph of someone’s hair in a bathtub from a commercial stock library, combined with footage from a surfer’s body camera underwater.”
Realising this shot prompts Victor to relate it to the entire production: “With a creative approach, some painting and compositing magic, it became one of the film’s most emotional shots. Overcoming limitations with creativity is part of our job, and part of the fun. It represents the very spirit of Neorealism, where directors like Rosellini used whatever they had available to tell stories. A lack in budget doesn’t mean a lack of vision or possibilities. In the beginning the client suggested to use AI to generate the ‘impossible’ shots but I’m not going to let a computer have all the fun while I ‘fix’ its problems… I work the other way around leaving the boring technicalities to the computer while I tell a story. Here it was all made by humans. I would prefer AI to do the cleaning at home while I produce art instead of me washing while the computer creates! [laughs] I’m not saying it’s wrong, it just makes no sense for me in this context.”
Machine Learning (ML) and Working Without Prejudice
Throughout 2024, particularly, debates and discussions have rapidly developed regarding the role of AI in relation to artistic and creative work and Victor uses his work on Naples – New York as a lens through which to consider the dynamic.
Victor begins by observing that “This is the first time Machine Learning has been approached this way for such a technically challenging and yet subtle task; generating several thousands of procedural iterations of the input data extrapolated from such a small amount of source frames. I think the idea is quite simple: if I leave the machine to do machine things, processes, I will have more time to do human things, art. ML is a branch of AI, but Machine Learning has nothing to do with the controversial generative AI, such as Midjourney or Runaway. We used CopyCat, a Machine Learning toolset native to Nuke, a system made to help artists with repetitive tasks and large volumes of complex edits. I was collaborating with Foundry and we used this film in order to experiment with the advanced capabilities of CopyCat. What we did is quite remarkable: we did a lot of research, and I was training the machine in order to learn how I was removing, from one shot, drains from the floor. If a human being has to remove those drains, that’s a long and tedious job because you have to reconstruct the floor, do rotoscope work of a crowd moving on top of the interest areas, and then we are going to add that the camera is moving and shadows passing by… a complete nightmare. The inception of the shot was that the director initially wanted to have the shot happening in another location. When we saw the edit, I realised that we wouldn’t have the budget to do those clean ups (of the floor to remove the drains just to match the period of 1949 in New York). In order to do that work, we’d need at least three artists for a month for very little outcome in terms of storytelling. The shot was not a priority but the shot in storytelling terms is a very intense, emotive shot. The director was sad to let the shot go and then I thought this might be an opportunity to test ML to the limits of what is possible today… and a few weeks later we exceeded the preconception of those limits.”
Victor elaborates further on his realisation that AI would have a legitimate function in the production, and he applies that understanding to the bigger picture, explaining that “I’m not against AI at all. I believe AI is here to stay and so we need to learn how to work with AI, not just from the technological point of view, but also to understand the ethical implications of it. Technology evolves way faster than human though, but the human component of art is the very essence of our craft. Keep it in mind that I want AI to be embraced by artists, and so the first thing I decided is ‘I’m going to use AI (on the film) only if the data that is generated by it is trained from the work of the artists in-house. We’re not going to use third party data where I don’t know what it’s sourcing. Everything is going to be according to the respect for my craft that I love, and everything that is related to visual effects and technology. So, I trained the machine in order to learn how I clean up those shots. After some exploration, I arrived at a point where I could do only three frames of the whole sequence, which was made up of three individual shots, and I was working on just one shot (for the research). I was able to clean up three frames of that one shot. Foundry fully supported this research, so I was able to collaborate with Luca Prestini, Senior Machine Learning Specialist at Foundry and a key member of the CopyCat team, we found a procedural way of recreating variations of the occlusions and shadow and lighting variations and texture: everything that could train the machine in order to understand what do every time someone is passing in front of that area that we are cleaning up. What happened was that from those initial three frames we generated 17,000 frames representing different aspects of occlusions and lighting variations. That procedural way paved the way to allow the machine to not only finish the shot but to transfer the inference (the training) in order to allow the machine to autonomously to complete the other two shots. This is really remarkable: the shots in themselves are extremely complex but the machine as able to complete the job without the supervision of an adult! [laughs] Just to be clear: the whole training set was generated from scratch in CopyCat using exclusively footage from the film. This is an achievement: making the research of machine learning wide open in order to be embraced by artists. In our case, we took a while to understand how to train the machine but all of these now can become a methodology.”
Considering the bigger picture of applications of AI to visual effects, Victor offers a caveat when he says that “There is lack of AI methodology right now. You need to understand what the machine needs in order to feed it with data. I was actually developing a procedure for compositors work with Machine Learning, a way to embrace it without prejudice. I hope that this could support many artists. AI will never replace an artist if an artist behaves as an artist. But if an artist behaves as a machine, of course, the machine is much better than a human at being a machine. I would encourage artists not to behave as mere operators. Every time I think of AI, I remember the speech written by Charlie Chaplin in his first film with dialogue The Great Dictator in 1940: ‘We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity’. I think now, more than ever, the world needs humanity, and film is a celebration of what means to be human, art expresses beauty through the harmony of imperfections; the very essence of humankind.”
Documenting the Artistry of Visual Effects in The Visual Effects of Naples – New York
It may not have gone unnoticed in recent years how film directors have seemingly downplayed and negated the central storytelling value of visual effects in their movies.
A longheld suspicion of the integrity of visual effects seems to have morphed into an unexpected denial of their place in so many films as a legitimate and expressive storytelling device. Earlier in this article, reference was made to director Robert Zemeckis, and famously Zemeckis has noted that the best visual effect in cinema is the close-up. All of cinema, therefore, is an effect.
With the larger debate about aesthetics and how the value of visual effects is perceived, Victor has been inspired to produce a feature length documentary (entitled The Visual Effects of Naples – New York) that offers an insight into the creation of the visual effects for Naples – New York. The impulse of the documentary is to restore faith in the integrity of visual effects as a necessary and artful aspect of filmmaking; whatever the genre, whatever the territory in which the film is being produced.
Victor explains that with the documentary, “What I feel is that there is a tendency now for some reason to say that visual effects are ruining movies. I want to share process and inspire others to recognise what is possible in the current digital visual effects moment. Referring to how the documentary is intended to encourage audiences’ to recognise the varied and significant role of visual effects in storytelling, Victor makes the point that “The visual effects on Naples – New York made the difference, and so the joy in being able to collaborate in order to make this film makes me very happy that we managed to document the whole process and interview the significant contributors of the film. In order to produce just one shot, that nobody will notice, in which there is so much going on is beautiful. I wanted to use my raised public profile to give voice to the visual effects.”
The documentary will be released during the week of the release of the movie in cinemas in Italy on November 21st, 2024. The feature length documentary will be available on YouTube to watch as a coproduction between Black Orange and Victor’s company Masked Frame Pictures.
Victor brings the conversation to a close, reflecting on the spirit of creativity in relation to what visual effects offer as an expressive and vital form of cinematic storytelling.
Victor observes that “Gabriele Salvatores loves visual effects and he was one of the very first directors to start using CGI on film in the late 1990s. In 1993, Jurassic Park was released and in 1997 Gabriele made his science fiction film, Nirvana in Italy. Gabriele embraces what he can get from what you have to offer. It’s a joy to share something that we did with the rest of the world, and we made it thanks to the perfect alchemy between science, technology and art.”
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