Dexter Studios has been nominated for an award in the Best Visual Effects category at the Grand Bell Awards. Attention across the industry is now on whether it can beat the competition and win the award again this year.
On December 8, Visual effects (VFX) and content company Dexter Studios announced that three films featuring its VFX technology were simultaneously nominated for the Best Visual Effects Award at the 58th Grand Bell Awards. Given its success previously at the Grand Bell Awards (Dexter Studios won the Visual Effects Award for Along with the Gods in 2018 and Ashfall in 2020), Dexter Studios could become a three-time winner at the Grand Bell Awards this year.
This year’s Best Visual Effects category has five nominees: Emergency Declaration (Hong Jeong-ho), Hansan: Rising Dragon (Jung Seong-jin, Jeong Cheol-min), The Witch: Part 2. The Other One (Jang Min-jae), The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure (Kang Jong-ik, Seo Byeong-cheol), Alienoid Part 1 (Jegal Seung). Among the five, Emergency Declaration The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure, and Alienoid Part 1 features Dexter Studios’ VFX technology. Industry insiders have keenly pointed out that Dexter Studios’ VFX technology appears to be making its way into a variety of different genres and stories.
Emergency Declaration depicts the struggles of people, including passengers on a plane, a flight crew, and detectives on the ground, facing an unprecedented aviation disaster. Visual effects supervisor Hong Jeong-ho, who oversaw the VFX work used in Emergency Declaration, said, “Emergency Declaration was a project that required a lot of thinking from pre-visuals to realistic camera design and animation work to deliver in-flight shots that looked and felt real.” He added, “To make the VFX closer to the real thing, we added more optical reality using rendering pipelines that produce clouds and realistic reflections bouncing off the airplane’s surface.”
The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure is about a bandit leader and a pirate ship captain sailing together to find an old treasure. Supervisors Kang Jong-ik and Seo Byeong-cheol, who took care of the VFX elements in the movie, said, “The Pirates needed various types of special effects rendering water that went far beyond the know-how on simulating water we had accrued so far. In particular, we put in a lot of work to make fantasy elements of the story, such as water whirlpools and lava eruptions, as realistic as possible.” Kang and Seo explained, “We were able to prepare for various simulations thanks to our past experiences in the VFX industry. The Pirates was a project that needed Dexter Studios’ own simulation and render farm systems capable of processing big data, including an in-house software called the Zephylos system to quickly process large-capacity water simulations.”
Meanwhile, Alienoid Part 1 had an extraordinary story in which an alien prisoner trapped in a human body escaped and opened a door to time travel. Supervisor Jegal Seung, who oversaw the VFX used in Alienoid Part 1, said, “We were able to process large-scale VFX shots without much difficulty using Dexter Studios’ efficient pipeline system.” He added, “Since we had different concepts to work with in the same film, we played an active role in designing the film from the very beginning, and did our own R&D as well. Thanks to this, we were able to create various visual elements such as the structure and muscles of the alien organism, and detailed movements of the cube that appears in the film.”
An official from Dexter Studios said, “The films nominated for this year’s Grand Bell Awards each had their own unique traits, which is why we had to use different VFX concepts for each film. We’re just happy that multiple films featuring our company’s VFX technology were nominated for the Best Visual Effects Award, and we feel that being recognized as one of the best in the business in terms of VFX technology is a massive achievement in and of itself.” He continued, “We will take this as encouragement and support for Dexter Studios’ relentless work since 2012 to become Korea’s best VFX company, and we will continue to engage our audience through various projects. And of course, we would like an opportunity to add another feather to our cap with a win at this year’s Grand Bell Awards as well.”
Meanwhile, the Grand Bell Awards will go on air at 5:00 pm, December 9, on the ENA channel, and a live broadcast will also be available on ENA’s official YouTube channel.
