Over 30 years ago when visual effects was in its infancy the Allora founders were there.  Amongst us Animation Festival Directors, pioneering VFX Supervisors and in the case of our Commercial Director Chris, Product Manager of Autodesk’s 3D Studio and Animator Pro – fledgling 3D and 2D animation programmes taking on the might of Silicon Graphics, Alias, Wavefront and the Quantel Paintbox to name but a (very) few.

Since then of course it’s all changed. What was and still is the amazement of T2 has been surpassed in some respects by the epic scenes in Game of Thrones and other less noticeable effects – still there, but doing their best to convince you that what’s on screen is real. 

We’ve grown with it too of course – and it has to be said, pleased not to be surrounded by the whirring animation controllers and £30,000 laser disc players of yore – same ones that kept the BBC idents ever ready, all those years ago. Thankfully tools and processors have grown smaller for the most part, although no less expensive, save the Adobe suite. Everything else still costs a small fortune if you want to participate in this space. Modellers, renderers, trackers, compositors, particles, paint and the rest all adding up and that’s before you add the processors and displays to render scenes, storage to keep it safe and the people to make it happen.

But we wouldn’t have it any other way because with this we can bring both the past and the future into the present. Which can at times be a little confusing. But to our clients it opens worlds of possibilities – not limited to size of set, or availability of a thousand extras, or a full size man o’ war. You see, with the right combination of tools and people, what we, and the rest of our peers in this space can do, may not be industrial, but we do hope, some of it looks like magic.