Meet the renowned SFX artists, Effectiv Team, and its esteemed founders, Philipp Girardet and Thomas Degner. Together, we embark on a captivating journey, tracing their beginnings as set builders and witnessing their evolution into pioneers of the special effects world. Join us as we delve into their unique perspective on the delicate balance between technology and imagination, the essence of crafting spectacular effects, and the ever-evolving landscape of new media in the industry.
Jakub Laskus: How did you become who you are now? How did it all begin?
Philipp Girardet: We started out as set builders, in the end of the 80’. Somehow, we found our way into the business. We were building sets, and I remember realizing more and more that there are no SFX guys – they always came from England. So we thought maybe it’s a good idea to take a closer look at what they’re doing and we found out quickly that they’re just cooking with water, so… (Philipp laughs).
Pretty soon we stopped set building and focused on the special effects. It got more and more precise. We tried to find a high-speed camera which we could use to control our rigs. There wasn’t a real high-speed camera back then, so we approached the German Institute and, together with them, we developed a high-speed camera. Going from there, getting control over the rigs, we tried different cameras, tried to develop them with the inventors. And then the US came up with the first Phantom camera.
Thomas Degner: We actually bought the first Phantom camera in Europe!
P: It was far better than the cameras we had before. We were in contact with the developers and we gave them very precise descriptions of what we need, what could be improved, and so on. So they reacted and sent us cameras back and forth. The first year or so we spent more on UPS than anything else (laugh). But the cameras kept getting better and better.
T: I printed our first business card in 1995.
J: Oh, so in 2 years you’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of your company!
T: We were there before, so 35th! It was just hard times, you know? You couldn’t buy anything sfx related – there were no compressed air-rigs, no trigger boxes, no motion controlled rigs, nothing but our old wood workshop and tons of ideas.
You had to do everything by hand. So it was like a circus of people: you had the director, a DoP maybe, most of them from London or France, and they were shooting high-speed. We did tests before shooting. We’d travel all around the world with these guys – Kazakhstan, China, everywhere! Always the same crew. And that’s how it started. The olden days.
J: Yeah, the olden days, true. Now the tabletop is completely different – there are many more techniques, cameras, gear. This leads me to another question, which I ask myself and my team a lot: what is the essence of what we’re doing? Is it about technology, imagination, precision? Probably a little bit of all of these.. What do you think is the most crucial element to create a spectacular SFX in tabletop?
P: It always starts with an image. We’ve developed a lot of technologies, we even developed the first robot, because there were no camera robots available. So we just bought robots from eBay and started to develop them further and further, because we had something in mind that we wanted to achieve. Technology was more of a tool for us.
Nowadays, some companies, I think, are going the other way around. They have technology and they wonder what they can do with it. They have 1, 2 or 3 robots on set and they’re doing things which, we think, are sometimes a bit too technology-driven. They use it too much and forget about the final image, the basic idea, which is a nice image.
So we, as artists, look more at the nice image, and this is, I think, one of the goals of our company – to come from the point of creativity, not technology.
We have technology, we use it, we build what we need to achieve the images. So, for us, the essence is creativity. Of course, we have guys here at the company who are a bit of tech-nerds – I say to them ‘we need this and this‘. They disappear and a few hours later they come with the solution.
T: I think the most important thing is the balance between creativity and technology. So the tool is there to see how the image will look – we test it, by hand at first, to see if the idea of the director will look nice with this tool. Some other people will start to build a huge grip for this, and then it turns out the image is no good. Or sometimes the idea is no good.
Very often I’ll be on a shoot and I’ll have discussions with the director about the image and I’ll go ‘Listen I don’t like it’. Recently I shot a bolt in London, it was for a company from Belgrade, and everything was done, the SFX team was happy, because the job was done, but I said to the director ‘I don’t like it. I think we have to do it upside-down, change everything, because it’s not looking nice’. And the SFX crew came to me and said ‘What are you doing?! We finished, it’s done!’. I said ‘Yeah, but it looks awful’.
We can’t always do it, sometimes there’s a director that goes ‘I’m the director, I do the job‘, but most of the time you can talk to the guys, they come to you. And the earlier the better. That’s why we like to do tests for directors, and then we can do something we all like.
