SUE ROWE: VFX SUPERVISOR IS THE PERSONIFICATION OF DETERMINATION By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Sue Rowe, except where noted. TOP: Sue Rowe, Visual Effects Supervisor, Scanline VFX OPPOSITE TOP: Rowe found Roland Emmerich and Volker Engel a joy to work with during the making of Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). OPPOSITE MIDDLE: Rowe holds an Oscar with the Cinesite team. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: For over 20 years Rowe was part of the U.K. visual effects industry working on productions such as Troy (2004). (Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Animation has become a family tradition for Scanline VFX Visual Effects Supervisor Sue Rowe. Not only was her husband also involved in the industry, but one of their two daughters studies the craft at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Rowe’s love for the arts was furthered by the creative expertise and chauvinistic attitude of a particular educator. “I grew up in Bridgend, Wales which is on the coast, beautiful and rugged. I had a brilliant art teacher who used to say things to me like, ‘You are OK, but you’ll go off, get married and not have a career in this.’ I thought even then, ‘I’m going to show you that I’m good at this.’ One of his words of advice was, ‘Draw what you can see. Not what you think you can see.’ I use that with my compositors. ‘Study real life. Go outside and look at the horizon. That tone at the bottom is not going to be the same as the one at the top.’” Despite growing up surrounded by engineers, Rowe was still exposed to the arts. “My mum would take me to the theatre once a year to Cardiff or London. I remember seeing Madame Butterfly and literally crying because of the music and visuals,” Rowe reveals. An iconic talking bear was a career inspiration for the teenager. “I wrote a letter to FilmFair saying that when I grow up that I want to be an animator on Paddington Bear. They never wrote back but I persisted!” Other influences were the Dune books and cinematic adaptation by David Lynch, as well as Pixar shorts Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy. “Just the excitement of seeing something so visually unique and wondering, ‘How did they do that?’” The aspiring Disney animator got a Bachelor of Arts in Traditional Animation at University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. “I used to build the sets and model armatures. That was my first step into the world of filmmaking. At the time, hand-drawn and stop-frame animation was not a good market, so I decided to take a Master’s in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University. My whole life changed after that. The visual effects industry was beginning to blossom in Soho. I went from hawking my way around companies trying to get work to getting offered a job on the spot. I chose Cinesite because they had a bar!” Despite being employed by Cinesite as an animator, Rowe had to learn how to be a generalist. “I had to model, rig, shade, light and then animate; that was definitely a calling for me to end up being a visual effects supervisor because I loved all of the sides of filmmaking. The thing I didn’t know that I would love was reading script, walking onto a set and having a director ask, ‘How do we do that?’ I’m a big planner! As a visual effects supervisor, you have to have at least three plans cooking in your head every time you’re setting up for a shot because someone will throw you a curveball and you can’t stand there in the middle of the stage and say, ‘I don’t know the answer to that. I’ll come back to you.’” Visual effects have become more prevalent. “We did visual effects on 20 to 30 shots [in 1994] and by 2012, John Carter had 800.” The industry has become more globalized. “So many of the companies now are in different time zones. It’s a blessing and a curse that I can start my day talking to London and finish speaking to India.” Rowe has experience both as a studio and facility visual effects supervisor. “When Eric Brevig and I did The Maze Runner, the budget was not huge, but every pixel counted and looked
56 • VFXVOICE.COM SPRING 2022
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2/28/22 1:31 PM
