How one indie filmmaker completed a VFX-heavy feature film in six years on $200,000

A 92-minute thriller, a two-person crew, and six years of post in a spare room.

Meleah Maynard’s feature for Studio Daily was the piece that put numbers on Retina. Carlos wrote, directed, produced, shot, edited, scored and finished the film, built its visual effects, and did it over six years for $200,000 raised from friends, family and investors. The article’s framing was that he had not set out to prove a point. He had set out to learn.

He told Maynard the gap he was trying to close was the one between directors and visual effects teams, where notes travel down a chain of people who never meet, and time and meaning get lost on the way.

What the piece documented, department by department. Principal photography was on a Sony CineAlta HDW-F900R, with a Phantom HD for high-speed work and a DSLR for tight spaces. Lindsay Goranson played the lead, April Watson, in a fifteen-person cast; Joshua Jenks and Jared Goldman worked as production assistants. Post ran out of a small studio in his father’s Manhattan apartment.

Everything not shot practically was modelled in Maxon Cinema 4D, which he taught himself for the film, and composited in Adobe After Effects. The dream sequences, rendered in blue, are a room that does not exist – built, in his words, because he wanted a place he had in his mind and could not find in the world.

The two set pieces the article broke down. The helicopter shot over a rooftop was assembled from reference footage he shot himself, with a purchased and modified model rendered in Chaos Group V-Ray specifically because it matched the live-action plate better than the native renderer. Viewers took it for a real aerial. The Manhattan Bridge collapse was harder: he shot the real bridge, painted out the centre, modelled it back in C4D, then fractured it and used rigid body dynamics to bring it down. The cables were the worst of it, solved with hair linked to splines inside sweep objects, constrained and run with spline dynamics so they whipped loose as the span failed.

The choice that says the most about the film is what he did with all of it afterwards. He cut it short on purpose.

Losing shots he had spent months on taught him something he counts as useful: what it actually feels like to kill your darlings, which is most of a visual effects artist’s working life.

At the time of writing the film had screened in New York and Los Angeles and was looking for a distributor. Screen Media Films picked it up, and it reached iTunes, Amazon, DVD and VOD in 2018. The following year Carlos presented the effects work at SIGGRAPH.

One line from the end of the interview has aged into the way this company works now.

That is the argument for a current pipeline, made a decade before the tools caught up with it. Where we stand on that now.