#030 - How to Win Work You Shouldn't Get
If you let me direct one of your TV episodes I will do all of your visual effects for free...
— Gareth Edwards, VFX Artist
Here is a lesson from director Gareth Edwards' career on how to win work that you otherwise shouldn't really get.
Gareth Edwards directed Star Wars: Rogue One.
Before that he directed Godzilla.
Before that he directed indie movie Monsters.
Before that he directed a one hour TV documentary drama called Attila the Hun for the BBC.
The reason that he got to direct that episode is because he created all of the visual effects himself for free.
In the end, that turned out to be 260 shots that he cranked out by himself in five months using After Effects.
I made this hour of TV and it maybe cost £90,000 but it looked like maybe it had cost £250,000, because of all the visual effects.
And then I got offered a directing gig that had a budget of about quarter of a million because it looked liked I'd already done that.
And then through visual effects I could make that look like it was half a million budget. And it just kept growing and growing over several projects.— Gareth Edwards, Director
Gareth's 'overnight success' of a directing career, which was always his original goal, took him 10 years of a self-taught visual effects career to achieve.