Rodolphe Pierre-Louis is the Founder & CEO of ActionVFX, the leading company that provides highest quality stock footage for VFX. We have taken his exclusive interview.
The excerpts are as follows.
What is ActionVFX’s mission?
We are a VFX Stock Asset company. Usually I’d say we’re a VFX Stock Footage company, but all that recently changed when we launched our new 3D Asset library last month. So we’re no longer just providing stock footage, but many other types of visual effects assets like 3D models, Animated VDBs, and more.
Our mission in the world of visual effects and filmmaking has been to build the best and largest library of stock footage for VFX assets in the world and we’re committed to see this mission through. We currently have over 10 thousand production-ready assets on our platform that are used by visual effects professionals worldwide, and that number keeps growing every month!
How the idea of ActionVFX got incepted?
Believe it or not, I’ve been wanting to create visual effects stock images and videos since I was in high school. I remember trying to create a Blood FX pack when I was 15 or so. It was a failure, of course, but the dream remained. As someone who’s both entrepreneurial and a lover of Film and VFX, the idea of creating stock assets that could help people create better and faster effects for their projects always sounded cool to me.
I first successfully started creating and selling VFX assets in 2011 on my, now defunct, website RodyPolis. After doing it for a few years, I wanted to take things “to the next level” by providing real large-scale fire and explosion assets to our users. It was clear at the time that there were very few resources for high-quality video elements; it felt like everyone was using the same assets in their projects, and it was very repetitive.
So in Summer 2015 work on what would become ActionVFX started. After the first pyro shoot, it quickly became clear that a lot more money was needed in order to create these assets at the quality they deserved.
All that led us to launching the ActionVFX Kickstarter campaign in the Fall to raise funds from artists who believed in the need of what we were doing. The community was extremely supportive and 443 backers helped us bring this company to life. In June 2016 we officially launched, and as they say, the rest is history!
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What sets you apart from other VFX stock footage companies?
Since the beginning, it’s been our goal to tackle not just quality, but also quantity. It’s not enough to just have the highest quality because without a large quantity, we’d be back to a world where all artists are using the same explosions and the same muzzle flashes in all their projects.
Our aim was to always compete against ourselves, which is why we have Volume 2’s and Volume 3’s of many of our products. There’s not one way to shoot fog or create blood splatters, so after we do it for the first time, we do it again, but differently, so our users can continue to have as much variety as possible.
Of course, the quality of ActionVFX stock footages also makes us stand out from other companies who create stock footage for VFX. We use state-of-the-art equipment and techniques to create assets that are truly production-ready. Whether you’re working on a student film or the latest “Avengers” movie, we aim to provide you with assets that you can trust.
Lastly, I’d say what makes us stand out is the mindset at which we approach the creation of our assets. We aim to trace every decision back to the end-user. The less our decisions can be based on our own opinions and instead be based on what will benefit the users more, the better the product we create.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you’re shooting with the best camera if the angle you choose doesn’t capture the asset in the best way for compositors. So we’re constantly having to refine our mindset to be focused on what’s best for our users.
How do you keep your library up-to-date?
We also make a sync with the evolving needs of the Visual Effects and filmmaking industries. We try to listen to our users a lot to know what they want us to do. There are many new advancements in technology weekly (or even daily) these days, especially regarding AI, so it’s easy to be overwhelmed or work yourself to death chasing every new thing.
The users are very good at letting us know what they need to improve how they work, so we just have to listen!
What challenges have you encountered?
While running our VFX stock footage company, we face various challenges, especially in terms of technology, content creation, and customer engagement.
Our biggest challenge has been scaling our in-house asset creation team without sacrificing quality. When it’s a small team you have a lot more control over the quality of everything, but the downside is that you’re limited by how many new products you can release. On the flip side, if you try to grow too fast without the right structure in place, then the cost of asset creation increases substantially but the quality decreases.
This challenge has brought one of the biggest opportunities that we’re currently pursuing, and that is to open the ActionVFX platform to 3rd-party contributors who are qualified to make amazing assets for VFX artists. Essentially, instead of only selling assets that our in-house team creates, we will become a marketplace where we’ll use our expertise in the asset creation to guide contributors in creating stock elements at the quality that we’ve done.
There are a lot of talented artists and filmmakers out there who can make great assets and we look forward to provide them a home to monetize their skills. We’re currently working hard behind the scenes to get the marketplace up and running, and you’ll start seeing contributor assets on ours site any day now!
What advice do you have for aspirants?
It for all the people who are looking to make the most of the resources available on ActionVFX.
I think the most important thing for any aspiring artist to do is practice their craft as much as possible. Sure you could watch 100 tutorials, but there’s no substitute for actually doing the work and working on a stock video footage. This is why we launched our free VFX Practice Footage library earlier this year.
In this library you’ll find over 500 plates that artists can download for free to practice and learn all kinds of techniques like chroma keying, tracking, compositing, 3D integration, and more. The Practice Footage library was one of those passion projects that was close to my heart since I struggled with the same need when I started out, so I was very proud of our team for bringing that vision to life.
I would also say to check out our free VFX assets as there’s a lot you can do with them. Our AVFX+ subscription also gives you instant access to thousands of assets, so if someone is looking for a lot of value, I’d recommend this for sure.
What has been the craziest / most dangerous shooting experience?
Even if we’re known as the guys who shoot massive explosions, we are pretty safe in these shoots since we work with licensed pyrotechnicians for these types of effects. So I wouldn’t say we’ve had any crazy dangerous shoots, but we’ve had hard shoots. Last year we attempted the most ambitious thing we’ve ever tried to do shooting-wise, and that was to build a 60 ft tall green screen so we could shoot some large scale gas and dust explosion assets.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a 60 ft tall green screen! It ended up being 10 times harder than we ever imagined. We got the effects and they look great, but I’m not looking forward to doing anything like that again!
What are your future goals?
As mentioned before, our biggest current goal is to open up to talented contributors who are looking for a great platform to sell their VFX assets on. We’ve learned a lot over the years about what to do and what not to do when it comes to creating stock footage and video assets, so we plan on leveraging that expertise to assist 3rd-party contributors in creating awesome assets.
We’re interested in working with FX artists, 3D artists, filmmakers, and anyone in between who have what it takes to create production-ready assets. We’re still in the early stages of this, but anyone who’s interested in joining our marketplace can simply fill out this application to apply as an early contributor.
Other than the Marketplace, we simply want to keep expanding our library to include different types of assets and tools that will benefit visual effects artists. At the start of the year we only had 2D VFX elements selling on the website, and now we have the Practice Footage library and the 3D Asset library. There are many more libraries out there that we can get into, so we plan to do just that.
Your memorable experiences that have been made possible through ActionVFX.
I was in High School when Iron Man came out in 2008 and had been a huge fan of the MCU ever since, so the fact that less than a decade later assets from a company I started were being featured in those films was a dream come true. From Spider-Man: Far From Home to Avengers: Endgame, seeing ActionVFX assets on the biggest screen possible was a memorable experience!
While we’re mostly known for Film/TV projects, many video game developers make use of our assets as well. The Call of Duty video games, for example, make use of our assets for many key sequences and that’s always very satisfying to see.
We thanks Rodolphe for such detailed discussion and wish best luck to him and entire team.
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