The word VFX is an abbreviation for visual effects. 

So basically the VFX industry is constitued of all the companies that are making the visual effects on all the movies, TV series or music videos you watch. But what do they exactly do and how many people are working on these movies?

To be honest it is difficult to estimate the total number of person working in the whole industry. It is easier to take movie as an example and see who is behind the images you watch. 

Let's take a big blockbuster as an example: Avengers Infinity War 

For a movie like this you have visual effects behind almost each shot and the quantity of work is just enormous so a single company is not enough, this is why more than 10 companies worked on this Avengers movie.

This represents more than 2000 people working only on the post production of the movie, not including on set technicians, actors or special effects artists.

Property of ILM                       

All these people are working in a department that is part of the big process of making a movie. You have concept artists who imagine the look of environments, spaceships, dinosaurs. You have CG artists who are building the millenium falcon or a dragon in computer graphics. You also have compositing artists who are merging live shooted footages with computer generated images.

I know that it is difficult to imagine how a 2 hours long movie needs 2000 people working more than a year on its visual effects. 

Property of ILM                    

I will try to breakdown an image or an CGI asset in another post to show you all the steps and all the work in it. Consider this short article as a teaser for big journey in my world made of explosions, dragons and lightsabers. 

Thank you for reading me,

Witchone