Through the Looking Glass: Inside the Visual Effects for 'Naples - New York'

We spoke with award-winning VFX Supervisor Victor Perez about working on Naples - New York, collaborating with director Gabriele Salvatores, and livestreaming his VFX reviews with Louper.

Victor, can you tell me about your background, were you always passionate about cinema?

I loved stories as a child, and I wanted to be an actor when I was very young. My brother was a photographer, he was 15 years older than me and he would take me to the cinema. He was fascinated by visual effects and he'd always point out what was fake, what was a blue screen. At the time I just wanted to enjoy the movie, but I am very grateful because I became so conscious of the trickery of the images. When I was six or so, I was playing with my brother's cameras, making stop-motion animation, using my toys to make movies. And the feeling that I have today is exactly the same thing - I’m still playing, but now they are paying my bills! That is the only difference.

I never chose to be a visual effects artist. It just happened very naturally. When I was studying cinematography all my colleagues were asking, “Can you do this effect for me?” So in the end, I was just doing effects and nobody was asking me to do cinematography. You don't choose to be an artist. You either accept it and embrace it or resist. So I just decided not to resist anymore.

A full CGI scene from 'Naples - New York'.

Let’s look at your recent work on Naples - New York. The story follows a young girl, Celestina, and her friend Carmine, as they journey across the Atlantic in search of a better life. Can you tell me about the background of the film?

Naples - New York was written by Federico Fellini, the legend of cinema. And I had the good luck to have access to the manuscript, with his handwritten notes on the sides. So I got direct instructions from the mind of Federico Fellini when he was 27 years old. In one of the notes, he wrote: "I’ve never been to America. So all my references to New York are just based on the films I love.”

I’d never been to New York before doing this film, and my first instinct was, ‘I need to go to New York!’ But when I read the note, I thought, no, I don't want to contaminate the vision with the reality. I want to recreate the New York of the films, the America of possibilities, the American dream. And the result was, okay, let's just play. How do kids imagine another place? And that was so nice because it’s based on how we envision things. That’s why we call it ‘Fellini’s New York’.

Carmine and Celestina contemplate the American Dream.

Gabriele Salvatores, the director, told me that when the children arrive in New York from Naples, it’s like Alice when she arrives in Wonderland. It's like a world that is not a real place, it’s more than reality. We were coming from a neo-realistic background in Naples and I needed to transfer the idea that we are going beyond the reality. I proposed this very simple idea of ‘going through the looking glass’ - and that is how I designed that part of the film. When you see New York from the camera, it looks very stylized, but all the reflections in the windows, every reflection you see, is a real picture of New York. So the reflections are actually like the other side, the reality.

A magical reveal as we step 'through the looking glass'.

The story is told from the perspective of children. How did that affect the way that you approached the film?

From the very beginning Gabriele wanted to shoot from the point of view of the children. So every shot was going to be captured from below. And for me, it was perfect because New York is a very tall city. So I was adding buildings here and there, everywhere. We were shooting in Trieste, in the north of Italy. Sometimes we were using a tiny fraction of a building and then everything else outside that was visual effects.

New York skylines from a child's perspective.

I had a team of 167 artists, and I wanted to see the whole perspective of the city. The team was like, “man, we have to put a lot of people in there, vehicles…” and I was like, “yeah, but we need to separate ourselves from Trieste, we need to show that this is New York and New York is massive.” Gabriele was just choosing the key elements from the locations to have in front of the camera and then everything else he knew he could add after. Louper made it super easy - I could just call him and say, “hey, how do you want this? This way or this way?”

Building the scale of New York City in 1949, from scenes shot on location in Trieste.

Why was Louper necessary for the project?

Louper was the key, because I'm living in London, and he lives in Milan. If you are remote, of course you can send videos and pictures, but how do they interpret things when they see the pictures alone? When you are telling a director about an idea you are still assembling, you need to fill in the gaps. It is very delicate because if you fail to sell the idea, the idea is going to fail. That is part of the collaborative process of moviemaking - you both need to be looking at the same image and listening to one another. That is, for me, the difference between Louper and other software. It's like, “let's do this together!”

As a supervisor, you need to take care of so many things, and you just want to get them done fast and well. You don't want your feedback to be lost in translation or passed from one hand to another. Part of my job is to be able to articulate feedback in a way that is easily interpreted by the artist. Not just the technicality but also the soul, the aesthetics. How can you transmit that if you have so many filters? Sometimes I just prefer to talk to the artists and get my hands dirty, to use my hands to solve problems. I don't want to be intrusive, but I know I can help them. So I might just say “hey, let's jump into Louper. I'm just going to show you”. So I’ll share my screen, change this and that, have a look at the result. We are visual artists, we don't want to talk or to write. We want to sit together and play with the pencil.

The ocean-crossing was shot on a ship at the port of Rijeka, Croatia.

My sense of the work you do is that it's always in service to the story. I think what's so special about the visual effects on this film is that they are not there to call attention to themselves.

For me, beauty is in the story, I don’t want people to notice what I'm doing. I want it to flow in a very natural way - the golden rule is once you enter the world, everything must make sense, it must support the suspension of disbelief.

This film is in three parts: the first part is in Naples, the second part is on the ship at sea and the third part is in New York. Each part has more or less the same amount of visual effects, but people only notice the visual effects in New York because they are so spectacular, so dreamy. But in Naples the number of shots is like 10 shots more than the rest, but nobody noticed! We created the port of Naples. It’s entirely done in CGI.

Rijeka's contemporary harbor becomes the port of Naples in 1949

There is one shot I will never forget, because we created 17 iterations of it! It's one of the most dramatic shots in the whole movie: Celestina is underwater and you can just see her hand. I produced all the necessary footage in VFX, many months after principal photography wrapped. It's very raw as an image, and I wanted to make sure we got it right. After 17 iterations, a colleague suggested Louper so I installed it, Gabriele joined me in the Room, and it went so fast! He’d say: “Make the hand bigger, the bubbles less intense and move them slightly over there. Can you move the camera down? And the waves on top?” And I was operating while he was telling me and seriously, I'm not kidding, after five minutes, the shot was finished. And it's the version you see in the movie. That for me is gold because it saved me not only time, but also the vision of the shot.

Celestina reaching for the surface - created entirely in CGI

In the opening scene we experience Celestina's sense of loss after her home is destroyed. Can you talk about your inspiration for this, and how you envisioned this pivotal moment in her life?

In 2009, I survived a massive earthquake in Italy. Many people lost their lives, it was a horrible thing. We were very lucky because right after my wife and I got out, the house imploded. It was a tremendous sound. And I remember seeing right through the place where my house had been that morning, I could see right through to the mountains. I remember the cloud of dust, the screaming.

When you lose your house, you are losing your security, your place to go back to, a whole system of values in your life. I have this experience inside me. And I said to Gabriele, I would like to design this shot myself.

Scrambling to find earthquake survivors at the start of the film

There is a picture from the attacks of September 11 that is both beautiful and terrible, The Dust Lady. It is a picture of a woman getting out of one of the towers right before it collapses. And the image is yellow because of the way the dust is filtering the light. I wanted to transfer that idea. This scene is the very beginning of the movie, so I wanted to throw a stroke of yellow over something that is so terrible. I didn't want to see red in there, to see real blood, for it to feel like a horror movie. I wanted it to depart as a mystery, as an adventure, as a theme of another time, with the iconography of contemporary events.

Celestina survives the earthquake, but has lost everything.

I wanted to assemble all these levels of this story in just one single shot. And it went from the widest angle to the close-up. Charlie Chaplin once said that life is a comedy in a wide shot and a tragedy in a close-up. And I wanted to go from the strangeness of these elements, of many people doing things in the cloud of dust and then going to the eyes of this girl - everything that happens in the movie is through her eyes. This is a terrible event, but at the same time this is why she is going to have a possibility of a decent life. And that is why I love that scene because many people have suffered through that loss, and it breaks my heart. But I'm an artist - if I cannot make the world a better place, maybe I can try to inspire a world I would like to live in.

Victor Perez with director Gabriele Salvatores on set at Cinecittà Studios.

What is your relationship with Gabriele like?

Gabriele has made something like 25 movies; he's one of the most important Italian directors. He's amazing, he’s so open. He's now 75 but he feels like someone that is just starting out because he's so curious to explore everything. The best compliment that he ever gave me is, “You don't talk about visual effects, you talk about storytelling”. I like to use visual effects when we really need visual effects, to use it wisely instead of just trying to fix problems, to use it to tell the story. Working with Gabriele is like a dream. I love him as a brother; whatever he's going to ask me, I know it's going to be beautiful.

Director Gabriele Salvatores and VFX supervisor Victor Perez on set.

When you are doing visual effects, you are creating something that, in a way, is impossible to shoot. The most beautiful contribution that I can bring is to help a director to envision things that wouldn't otherwise be available to him. My job is to dream.

A peak behind the composites in 'Naples - New York'.

Victor Perez is originally from Spain, and is currently based in London. He has had a diverse career as a professional actor, film director, VFX artist as well as supervisor. Visit his site to view his selection of online courses, or watch the documentary Before and Ever After for more insight into the Visual Effects for Naples - New York.

Victor used Louper to stream his VFX workflow from Foundry Nuke. Visit our setup guides to see how to livestream an NDI feed out of Nuke.

Naples - New York

Director: Gabriele Salvatores

VFX Supervisor: Victor Perez

Celestina: Dea Lanzaro

Carmine: Antonio Guerra