30 Years of The Mill | 2D Lead, Andrew Pellicer

What piece of work inspired you to get into a career at The Mill & why?

I was quite familiar with The Mill’s reputation for being an outstanding Visual Effects company since the beginning of my career, but when I saw the SSE ‘Maya‘ spot and then its follow up SSE ‘Pier’ spot, I knew it was the company I had to be at. Coming from a lighting and compositing background, I am always enthralled by photoreal integration of CG elements in a live-action world, especially when they are in dynamic lighting situations. I feel like SSE ‘Maya’ was a stunning introduction of a beautifully animated, rendered, and integrated character and was only enhanced by SSE ‘Pier’ with its beautiful lighting and location. The level of details that were put into that spot were so inspiring and I loved how the character just felt like it was just another actor in the scene, as opposed to really overplaying the visual effects aspect of it.

What do you believe will be the most defining change in the creative industry over the next decade?

In my opinion, the most defining change in the creative industry will be the further development of machine learning and capitalizing on the best way to use it to enhance our work.  It’s incredible (and a little scary) how machine learning has already been used for things like deepfakes and dialogue changes but has also been used to help create massive shortcuts in previously tedious processes (i.e. creating depth maps in post and rotoscoping). I am excited about its development which will allow us to broaden the possibilities within our projects and give us time to focus even more on the creative aspects of jobs.

Discover more about 30 Years of The Mill here. We would like to thank everyone who has been part of our history – our clients, our partners, our collaborators and our staff past and present. All of you have been central to making our first 30 years so extraordinary.

You can also follow Andrew on Instagram @andrewpellicer and add him on LinkedIn.