People looking at the creative process from afar see it as an individual’s singular vision—for instance, a director conjuring a fantastical scene in his or her head. The reality, of course, is that it’s a much more collaborative process. When that same director wants to transform imagination into movie magic—or any form of screen sorcery (television, commercials, gaming, VR and AR…)—he or she turns to a visual-effects wizard. And Michael Ralla, VFX supervisor at the Bafta- and Academy Award–winning creative studio Framestore, is one of the best in the business.
To bring this visual data to life, Ralla’s teams lean heavily on VR-ready Lenovo ThinkPad P53 mobile workstations, powered by Intel® with i9 processors and featuring NVIDIA® Quadro RTX™ 4000 8GB graphics cards, a whopping 128 GB of RAM, and 2 TB hard drive disks—all readily available professional gear anyone can buy, mostly loaded with off-the-shelf software. As Ralla puts it, it’s the knowledge, skills, ideas, and creativity of the humans behind the machine that create the mind-blowing output.