When VFX industry veterans Jon Campfens and Peter Denomme founded Switch VFX in early 2004, the idea was to escape the big-facility environment and start a boutique that they could believe in. (Campfens had worked at Canadian giant GVFX, and Denomme was running Calibre Digital Pictures, which was part of Alliance Atlantis.) They didn’t count on being the go-to guys for high-impact horror movies, but as it happens some of their best gigs have come from the genre — George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead last year, James Gunn’s tongue-in-cheek monster movie Slither earlier this year, and now the box-office behemoth Saw III.
Switch has kept busy with some high-profile TV work, including Tilt for ESPN, last year’s Kojak revamp for USA Network, and an upcoming BBC/Discovery Channel children’s series called Dinosapiens, about dinosaurs that have continued to evolve over millions of years. Switch has also teamed up with Yowza Animation, which gives some of its artists the chance to move back and forth from Switch’s photorealistic environment to a more traditional animation studio. (Switch contributed a 3D CG element to Yowza’s work on the 2D-animated Disney sequel Kronk’s New Groove.) But the studio’s work on Saw III is no doubt its most notorious to date, and it runs the gamut from putting a simple chill in the air to making splatter even splattery-er. We asked co-founder and VFX Supervisor Jon Campfens to fill us in on what they did. Read the Q&A, below, then load up our interactive flash presentation to see some before-and-afters with more detail on technique.
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