World VFX Day has announced its first round of speakers for the 2025 edition, broadcasting live on 8 December. Founded in 2023 by Hayley Miller, the annual event has quickly become a fixture for VFX and animation professionals worldwide, part celebration, part industry summit, and completely free to attend.

This year’s 12-hour livestream will once again originate from London – the hybrid format allows both in-person and online participation, connecting artists and studios across time zones in one continuous global broadcast.

A Strong Start to the Speaker Line-Up

The 2025 roster reads like a who’s who of modern visual effects. Denis Baudin, Genevieve Camilleri, and Aidan Martin from WētāFX open the programme with the VFX & Animation Supervisor Roundtable, an insider discussion on creative direction and team leadership at the highest level.

ILM’s compositing veteran Todd Vaziri joins Valentina Sgro for “VFX: Hollywood’s Underdog”, tackling the question of how visual effects are perceived and valued within major studio production pipelines.

Leadership takes the spotlight in a fireside chat with David Li (Dream Machine FX, ILP, FIN Design, Arc Creative, Zero VFX, Mavericks VFX) and William Sargent (Framestore). The conversation will focus on running studios across continents while keeping both creative integrity and artist wellbeing intact.

The panel “VFX Innovation” brings together Michael Ralla (Warner Bros.), Johnny Han (HBO), Christina Caspers (Trixter & Cinesite), Kevin Baillie (Eyeline Studios), and Christine Resch (Adobe), in association with the Visual Effects Society (VES) and the View Conference, to examine current technology shifts and production trends.

In “An Inside Look at the Future of VFX,” Alana Newell, Clare Cheetham, Jonathan Cheetham and Jasper Kidd of Crafty Apes London share their perspective on studio growth, creative collaboration, and adapting to the evolving demands of modern production.

ILM’s Delcio Gomes presents “When 85 Artists Unite,” a case study developed with Chaos Group that highlights collective creativity and technical problem-solving under production pressure.

Marcus Ryder MBE will mark “100 Years of Supporting the Film & TV Industry,” and the Leadership Roundtable will feature Laurens Ehrmann (The Yard VFX), Brian Carbin (Stone Dogs), Lucy Cooper (Union VFX), and Vikas Gandhi (Gelaro Grace), exploring what it takes to guide independent studios in today’s competitive landscape.

Additional speakers and sessions are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

A Platform for Collaboration and Change

According to founder Hayley Miller, the mission of World VFX Day is to “elevate our industry in the eyes of the wider world” while sparking collaboration, new ideas, and shared growth. The emphasis this year continues to be on diversity, inclusivity, and the long-term sustainability of VFX as both a craft and a business.

Since its first edition, World VFX Day has reached more than forty thousand viewers, with the support of over four hundred sixty studios and one hundred fifty speakers. The initiative extends beyond the annual livestream through its “Connects” meet-up series and participation in major industry conferences.

Honouring the Origins of VFX

World VFX Day takes place every 8 December in honour of Georges Méliès, regarded as the grandfather of visual effects. The date serves as both a tribute and a forward-looking platform for discussing the art, craft, and evolving role of VFX within film, television, and games.

The post World VFX Day 2025: Global Line-Up Revealed first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Can a Visual Effects studio survive only on film work? “Absolutely not!”

Scott Ross is an important part of the history of Visual Effects. He was manager at ILM, Senior VP at Lucasfilm, Chairman & CEO of Digital Domain and one of the Founding Members of Visual Effects Society. He summarized his experiences and a part of the industry’s history in his book “Upstart”. In our episode we trace a line from the cloistered halls of ILM and Lucasfilm through the founding of Digital Domain, across the rise of digital pipelines and into today’s inflection point of Agentic AI.

Scott’s path into film wasn’t linear: Music studies, audio engineer, then Bay Area post with One Pass before Lucasfilm recruited him. When he arrived at ILM in the mid-1980s, the reality contradicted the Oscars on the shelf: ILM was losing money and morale was low. The corporate layer above him prized brakes and cost cutting over progress and acceleration.

Scott sketched ILM at a crossroads. The facility’s reputation masked cashflow issues and a flattening culture. His first months were spent earning the trust in a “Hell’s Angels”-tight shop that viewed him as a young “video” guy; an outsider. Once in, he ignored the brake pedal people and ran ILM as if it were his own: Buying new gear, fixing the org chart, restoring transparency and diversifying revenue to smooth the feature-film boom-bust cycle, opening up opportunities for commercial and location-based attractions.

Soon after he found himself on a crossroad to either stand behind his team and support their efforts for a fair compensations and bonuses that they were promised or accepting the games at play. Waging his job for what he believed was right he found himself looking for another job. The problem was that he was the general manager of one of the biggest visual effects studios on the planet, no one else wanted to replace their GM while Scott’s reputation wasn’t of someone who played the cooperate games.

“A fixed contract to do something that’s never been done before, giving the facility all of the responsibility and none of the authority, is a model of madness.”

Scott Ross

Three-legged stool

Over the years Scott defined the concept of the “three-legged stool” as the key ingredients of a successful business. Remove even one leg and the shop tips and the business fails. The three legs consists of:

• Technology: Technology is the key to staying relevant in quality and production speed. ILM’s analog-to-digital pivot foreshadowed today’s shift toward AI-assisted craft.
• Finance: A diversified revenue is key for any business but especially for visual effects as there are only a handful of production houses. From commercials, attractions, episodic productions to visualisations those had different field while often have better margins.
• Creativity: Keep the core creative decision-makers close to the tools, but align authority with responsibility. Scott’s ILM anecdotes reveal how often errors are organisational rather than technical.

“Follow your bliss, but be brutally honest about your lane, and plan your rent. You can’t survive without profit. If it doesn’t make money, it’s not a business.”

Takeaways

Scott’s stool test is still the fastest sanity check for any show or facility. If technology dazzles but cash burns, the shop tips. When finance is tight but creative authority is outsourced, the frames suffer. If creativity is strong but tech lags deliverable specs, you ship compromise. The “fixed bid for the impossible” contract structure is as dangerous now as it was then. As AI moves from assistive to agentic, we need to write scopes, schedules, and authority trees that assume fewer hands on more decisions and still protect image integrity and human sanity.

Finally Scott warned against believing one’s own hype: if you want to be a core storyteller, develop those muscles; if not, your skills will be valuable across medicine, manuals, advertising, and beyond, especially as visual communication saturates every industry.

Do you want to read this for yourself? The Book “Upstart: The Digital Film Revolution. Managing the Unmanageable” by Scott Ross and Joanne O`Brien-Levin.

The post “A Model of Madness” Scott Ross Why VFX Fails as a Business first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Alexander Richter.

Phantom Digital Effects Limited, headquartered in Chennai, has formally launched Phantom Media Group (PMG), a new umbrella organisation uniting several established visual-effects and post-production studios. The group brings together Milk VFX, Lola Post, Tippett Studio, PhantomFX and Spectre Post into one global structure.

Confirmed Structure and Intent

Official filings and press materials confirm that PMG sits above the existing Phantom FX corporate entity. Each studio remains operationally independent but aligned for global productions. The press release describes PMG as “a unified global identity combining creativity, scale and technology.” The announcement confirms earlier acquisitions by Phantom Digital Effects: Milk VFX and Lola Post were added in 2025, and Tippett Studio joined the group in 2024. Spectre Post, based in Bengaluru, was launched internally by Phantom FX earlier this year.

The five studios share a long list of high-profile credits. Milk VFX has contributed to Good Omens, Doctor Who and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Lola Post is known for Walking With Dinosaurs and Bad Sisters. Tippett Studio, founded by Oscar-winning supervisor Phil Tippett, has a legacy spanning Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers and The Walking Dead. Phantom FX’s credits include large-scale Indian features and streaming series.

Strategy and Scale

PMG’s stated aim is to provide end-to-end creative services across multiple territories. The organisation cites a focus on global collaboration, shared technology, and integration of real-time rendering and machine-learning tools. Each studio’s distinct creative style is expected to remain intact. According to Phantom Digital Effects, the consolidation expands its presence across the United Kingdom, United States and Asia-Pacific.

Industry Context

The creation of Phantom Media Group reflects an ongoing trend toward consolidation among mid-sized and boutique VFX studios. By forming multi-territory alliances, companies seek economic stability, shared infrastructure, and broader client access in an increasingly volatile post-production market. It also provides access to different production incentive zones.

The post Phantom Media Group: Milk, Lola, Tippett, PhantomFX and Spectre Unite first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.