Everything Everywhere All at Once is everywhere you look right now. The film, from writing-directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, has quickly developed into a mainstream hit with its blend.
Everything Everywhere stands out for its unique, small-scale approach to filmmaking, with the two filmmakers opting. Seven people are credited for the film's visual effects, led by Zak Stoltz, the visual effects supervisor. The two Daniels and Stoltz worked with the lead visual effects artist, who was named Ghost Ghirls, on earlier projects.
Digital Trends spoke to Stoltz and Feldbau about how they made the small-scale approach work for the Daniels, and what it was like to see the independent film achieve such unexpected results.
Digital Trends: Everything Everywhere has one of the shortest lists of visual effects credits of any film. Was it to keep the team small?
Towards the end of post-production, we were wondering if we needed to bring on more people. It was a conscious decision to keep it small, and it was also a functional thing. Dan and Daniel came to me to head up the visual effects for the movie because they didn't like working with a larger house. They wanted to make sure they had an intimate relationship with the artists and were able to help with some of the things themselves. They worked with a bigger post house and didn't like it. They did a lot of their own effects. They decided that it would be a good idea to just do it all on the film as a small, homemade thing.
Zak was the first to hire, and then he hired me. I worked for the Daniels as a production designer in the past. We both went to college. I had just finished working with Zak on a show called Breakarate, and he was the visual effects artist. Zak was the supervisor of the visual effects, figuring out how to organize, manage, bid, schedule, process, hire, and think through the logistics of it. I have an art director. I was able to do a lot of concept-ing with this small team to figure out how to make the words look better.
They were finishing shooting when production went dark. The extra time gave us time to be a small crew while everyone figured out how to move forward with the movie.
You don't have a lot of people to delegate work to in visual effects production. How did that affect your approach to the work?
The way it was was because we had no money. I had to figure that out. I became intolerable before I learned to let go and let things be what they were going to be. Can we afford to have a third person on for a week? There was a separate amount of funding that had been set aside in case this process didn't work out so they could go to a bigger company. There was a risk involved in the way we did it, but we proved it could work. It was a success.
10 years ago, I was working at a post-production house in Boston on The Proposal, which starred Ryan Reynolds andSandra Bullock. The film had a five-person visual effects team, the same size as our movie, but for a movie that wasn't visual-effects intensive at all. Zak found himself with a very visual-effects intensive movie that wanted to be done in-house, like the Daniels music videos were, with a bunch of friends working together. How do you scale up that intimate process without a multi-tiered and structured visual effects department and all the go-between that usually happens on a movie? It was difficult.
The sort of computing resources needed to process and render the massive video files for a film like this is typically brought to the table by a big VFX studio. How did you deal with that part of the process?
You couldn't have sat at home with an inexpensive computer and made 4K images quickly. It could not have happened. Technology has changed. Zak put together the appropriate workstations for us on a modest budget. That was important. We were able to work faster because we knew what the Daniels were going for and we had a shorthand that we could use.
It wasn't hard to get on the same page because it was a small group. We had a lot of show-and-tell in the mornings. Our paths in post-production have been very different. I have never worked with a bigger post house. I used to do visual effects myself, but I needed them for my own projects. It has been a long relationship. It was easier for me to join a small team.
It was useful to know what the process would be like with a larger team. We have a small team, so we will just do what we usually do, but for a movie. We set up a process based on what we had available to us. We would just figure it out in the morning when we set up stuff to render overnight. What was the longest rendering you had?
It was like 30 hours.
It was all about knowing the limitations and working within them. You hear it all the time, that you can make the best stuff if you work within your limitations. A lot of the effects in this movie seem a lot bigger, but they were actually made in simpler ways.
There was very little animation. The pre-rendered element was used to create a bunch of 2D effects over the top of the shot. The main bagel we used throughout the film was just one of many elements we used over and over again. We made it feel different by messing with it.
Did some shots challenge your small team more than others?
The effects are rather invisible, so some of them might not be the shots you were expecting. The film allowed us to be imperfect with our physics and how it was made. Robert Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a live-action cartoon that was done by hand, without computers, and that was what made it so good.
I painted the IRS building in 2D in a relatively straightforward way. Normally you would make this shot in 3D, but at the time we needed it, we were very concerned with budget and were trying to be very minimal with our crew. I tried it in 2D, almost like a painting.
The camera tilts up and you see the IRS building and the sky. It was a one-story building and everything above it was a painting.
Exactly. We had thought it could be done outside. It could be done in 3D. We are all just hanging out at home anyways, so it was cost-effective for me to spend three days hanging out in the studio. That was the correct mindset for that element. The live-action cartoon quality of the film allows it to work even though the painting isn't as perfect as a computer could do.
The visual effects credits for the film show that most of the people listed have directed their own short films or music videos. That is not common in my experience.
Everyone who did visual effects on the film is a director. We have all directed stuff, not just in high school. All of us have directed professionally. We have a sense of trust in each other because we know that if we hand something to someone, it's not a done deal. We are all people who have had to come up with solutions to difficult problems while working on our own projects. Realizing that set the tone for the rest of the movie for me, and I was able to chill out a bit more about time and budget.
It is difficult to figure out where the visual effects are in this film. Did that affect your strengths as both an artist and part of a small team?
The only reason we were able to do it with a small team was because of the way it works with the Daniels. No one goes into a project thinking, "Oh, just make that visual effects, or we can just do all of that in visual effects." There were no effects on Racacoonie.
Is there a shot you're proudest of in the film? Do you have a favorite scene you worked on?
I do. I had to shoot the security guard coming over the cubicles and landing. You are aware of the shot. The eagle landed with it. The crowd likes that shot. It is the moment you go to the theater that you hear the reaction. It will be in my effects reel forever because nobody else was as excited to take it.
Stoltz: I knew you would love to do that one, so I gave it to you.
Thank you, Zak! It was a gift.
The moment when the bagel entered the IRS building was for me. I don't know, I was staring at that shot. It took a long time for that shot to be taken. There were many things. The camera goes through her eyes, and then there are all the people who weren't actually there but were shot on green screen later, and then we had to figure out what the bagel was doing. I started the shot six months before it was done.
We were creating a lot of effects while they were editing the film, so it was a very long, creative, frustrating, but also satisfying process of iterating things and having 30 versions of a shot before we were like, "Okay, this is good." Art is only abandoned, right?
What has it been like for you to see the positive response to the film after a long time working on it?
It has been amazing. I told Zak that Rebecca Black felt the same way when Friday became a big thing.
Wow. I didn't expect Rebecca Black to be mentioned.
Right? We were in this film. I was in isolation for a long time after we started on this. It was an important part of my life and kept me out of the public eye during the Pandemic. You aren't making it for attention. You're just focusing on how to make it work. This is the first time I have worked on going out and having everyone talk about the specifics of our involvement. It has been nice, and I have gotten a lot of praise.
It's weird, because I've been off social media for a while, and now I'm feeling this intense pressure to get back in there. It is a weird thing, but it is also very cool. It's so crazy that they did this with five people, but we had a few more people that helped out. It's gratifying because we always wanted that to be part of the story.
When the movie first came out, there weren't a lot of people talking about it, but now it's like, "Oh great, we're seen!" I'm happy that other people are recognizing it, because it's something that was really hard to create, and it makes it all feel worth it.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie.
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