Films by Wes Anderson are regarded as classics—and thanks to Anderson’s special narrative style and aesthetic, it’s not just dyed-in-the-wool fans but also more general film enthusiasts who await each new work with baited breath. These films are captivating for their unique stories, unmistakable love of detail, fast-paced dialogue, and their perfectly custom-calibrated colour palettes. The excitement was hence great when it became known in 2022 that Wes Anderson was to adapt Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RdncisZ_QA) as well as further works by Dahl in collaboration with Netflix.
This short-story-turned-film stands out convincingly for its elaborate special effects. One is struck by this special quality particularly in the initial scenes, which feature flowing changes to the backdrops and scenery almost every second—not unlike what one might see in stage drama. For viewers, it’s impossible to detect even a single cut. This comes thanks to the elaborate and detail-obsessed work of Valentin Struklec and Franz Brandstätter, both of whom teach in Film Academy Vienna’s Digital Art – Compositing programme and were responsible for the special effects in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) together with their team from VAST (Visual Effects for Film, Commercials and Television). This team also includes Film Academy Vienna students Andrea Singh, Manuel Plach, Matthias Boca, and Robin Leeb. All of them spent months together doing detailed work on this short film.
Their collaboration with the Hollywood director arose almost coincidentally during a visit to London. “At an appointment we had, we ended up talking with a creative head who said they were in urgent need of help on Asteroid City since other studios couldn’t handle the exactitude that it required,” explains Valentin Struklec, who does double-duty at VAST as a VFX producer and its CEO. His team then put together a small package for ten scenes, whereupon they were immediately asked whether they were open to taking charge of additional sequences. “Others were apparently incapable of delivering the desired quality. But we’d luckily been able to gather the kind of experience over our career where we even had some old tricks we could deploy,” Struklec sums up. Thanks to the good collaborative experience with them on Asteroid City (2023), the VAST team was engaged from the get-go for the production of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
A challenge in working on this short film was retaining the special Wes Anderson aesthetic in its material, which had been filmed on 16mm stock, while simultaneously altering the images’ content. “Someone like Wes Anderson works in a way that’s unbelievably meticulous. Every detail is precisely planned, for which reason the VFX work was subject to highly exact requirements. Adherence to these requirements was checked all the way down to the pixel level, which made our work significantly more difficult. Our only creative freedom was in terms of how to achieve the desired effects in the perfection that did justice to Anderson’s requirements,” is how Franz Brandstätter describes the working process. “Processing these shots, some of them between three and four minutes long, in consistent perfection was probably the most difficult thing about this project.”
While Valentin Struklec assumed the role of executive producer and made the collaboration with Wes Anderson possible in the first place, Franz Brandstätter assumed creative responsibility as VFX supervisor and saw to the further ongoing communication with those responsible for the project. The two also actively involved their students (all of whom had already been employed by VAST) in this project as members of the compositing team, in which capacity they worked independently on shots according to the instructions they’d been given. Nearly all of them had already worked on the production of Asteroid City. “Since the jobs were very similar, we wanted to stay with these people for our Anderson projects,” says Brandstätter. “Franz made sure they were closely guided as they gathered their own experience. He ultimately served as a safety net of sorts for our young artists,” emphasises Struklec, who adds: “It’s so great to sense these young artists’ pride following such a project and to feel like you’ve been able to offer them opportunities that don’t otherwise exist in Austria.” Both are happy that their students were able to gather such experience and also show that they’d already learned the skills necessary to do justice to such large projects, as well.
They’re also very happy about the Oscar that this short film won, seeing as every single shot of its initial 25 minutes had been worked on by the VAST team. This success has also netted them further new project inquiries. But even so, it’s a success that Franz Brandstätter sums up with modesty: “Particularly in Wes Anderson projects, the VFX work as such always has to be a very invisible thing—and it’s a distinction all by itself when that’s the case, because it means we’ve done our work well.”
