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It was already in 2010, as he likes to say, when Polish animator and visual artist Tomasz Bagiński urged his friend Andrzej Sapkowski to make a film. an Oscar for his short film “The Cathedral” – he dreamed of bringing the series to the big screen.
Among the first promoters of the project was Platige Image, the Polish animation, visual effects and post-production studio that Bagiński joined in 2004. When Netflix stepped in to obtain the rights to “The Witcher” in 2017, the company was asked to executive produce along with L. A. —founded at Hivemind. The Polish studio has also become one of many houses handling the series’ special effects, earning an Emmy Award nomination for its VFX paintings in what has become one of Netflix’s biggest foreign hits.
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“The Witcher” turned out to be just a feather in the hat for Platige Image, but also for a burgeoning Polish visual effects and post-production industry. Production and visual effects paintings were unleashed during the pandemic, amid an accumulation in production around the world as corporations rush to make up for lost time due to COVID-19.
“There’s more volume, that’s for sure. It’s visible,” says Karol Żbikowski, CEO of Platige Image. “The market is all the rage right now. “
The biggest replacement of games for the Polish industry has been the boom in domestic production driven through Netflix and streaming services. Central and Eastern Europe in Warsaw later this year.
“When Netflix came to Poland, they forced other people to acquire new knowledge,” says Kamil Rutkowski, executive director of warsaw-based post-production space Black Photon. meeting those demands, he provided loose tutorials to local studios while helping them adapt their workflows. “I think Netflix has done everything it can to teach the industry,” Rutkowski says. “In the last five years, the industry has grown a lot in terms of skills. . “
This expansion is one of the reasons why the Polish Film Institute will introduce a $50,000 cash prize in the US. Titles in the last stages of production. This year’s edition will take place in Wrocław, Poland, from 9 to 11 November.
In addition to the $10,000 in-kind prizes from Poland’s leading post-production companies, the PFI Award will be awarded to a winning filmmaker who will be spent on post-production, image, sound and/or visual effects in Poland. step forward to “encourage small and medium-sized [foreign] independent manufacturers to know us and see for themselves what we can offer,” according to PFI director Radosław Śmigulski, who pointed out 30% of money that can be implemented in post-production. paintings in the country.
Poland has a rich film culture and local filmmakers, subsidized through an influential guild, have long pushed the industry to maintain rigorous standards. head of your virtual catering department.
The company has restored works by Orson Welles, Andrzej Wajda and Dario Argento and has collaborated with establishments such as the British Academy of Film and Television and New York’s Film at Lincoln Center. Ceranka says Fixamovie was also the first post-production space in Poland. — and one of the first in the world — to adopt the Academy Color Coding System (ACES), which has since become the popular industry for color-controlled film and television production.
American filmmaker Joe Sackett, whose first film, “Homebody,” won the Best First Feature Award this year at Toronto’s Inside Out 2SLGBTQ Film Festival, went to Fixafilm for post-production after winning an in-kind award at the U. S. in Progress Event in 2020.
“Essentially, they left the door open for us to know what we needed, and without fail they provided us with all those things,” he says, adding the film’s titles, credits, and the festival’s DCP. “When we finished publishing-production, I knew we could just pass them for anything, and they would accept us. “
While the pandemic has been a boon for post-production houses around the world, as studios show a greater willingness to do later work remotely, this has spurred a fierce festival for most sensitive VFX artists. This festival, in turn, has increased costs in Poland, whose low wages and production costs have long been a vital point of promotion, according to Żbikowski.
Although new post-production houses continue to enter the market, capacity is a challenge that threatens to slow the expansion of the industry. “We couldn’t do ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Avengers’ in Poland,” Rutkowski admits. others in character animation. ” Many of the country’s most sensible VFX artists, he adds, are drawn to the burgeoning video game industry.
This is a challenge that requires a radical rethinking of the way Polish artists are taught and trained. “There is no proper education for the skill that you just need to paint in the film post-production industry,” says Warsaw-based Alicja Gancarz of Orka. Studio. Rutkowski recently created the Polish branch of the Society of Film Engineers, the professional guild that sets the criteria for business education around the world, because he was “looking for knowledge” that he could not find in Poland.
Scaling is the only logical solution, but it’s less difficult said than done. “Training VFX artists is a long process. You can’t fill the void so quickly,” says Żbikowski. In addition to strengthening its Polish team, Platige Image has opened a studio in Los Angeles and is actively recruiting at industry meetings and occasions around the world, with foreign staff representing approximately 10% of its staff, and continues to grow.
“The biggest challenge is locating the right people, locating the right projects,” says Żbikowski. He laughs. ” It’s a smart challenge. “
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