As part of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking team presents “Behind Their Lenses,” a series of panel discussions with some of the most exciting filmmakers, directors, and producers of 2026.
At the directors’ panel, “Blue Heron” writer/director Sophie Romavari, “Josephine” writer/director Beth de Araujo, “Custom of the Country” director Josie Rourke, “The Good Daughter” director Steph Green and “Toy Story 5” co-director Kenna Harris talked about their different paths into directing — a fair amount of team sport — and the places they How you do everything from thinking through to clearly communicating your vision with different members. His team.
But the panel also talked about the ways in which film as a medium is constantly changing and the skills they want to be able to bring to future projects, and that All The director will probably want to be aware of this.
Rourke, whose first feature film was challenged to create a broad historical scope for “Mary Queen of Scots”, was thinking about how the director and visual effects artist could work better together as she had to demolish some (digital) castles in some Scottish hills.
“I just knew it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t figure it out. And finally, I called a friend of mine who’s a really good architect and said, ‘Listen, just come to editing,’ [to look at the castle assets]And he looked and said, ‘Yeah, it won’t stand up,'” Rourke said. ‘It was really interesting because there was an internal fear of wanting to use that structure in my body. But it’s just an imaginary castle [I knew] It was dangerous.”
Rourke’s intuitive awareness is something he’s since tried to better communicate with VFX teams about, but there’s more nuance to those discussions. “Some smoke and mirrors around [VFX choices] It’s about cost. So I don’t even know how to look at it and say, ‘Here’s how I would achieve this more economically,'” Rourke said. “I know how to cut costumes or cut sets or cut scripts or cut schedules, but I don’t know how to be in dialogue that is intelligently and creatively managing the budget for visual effects.”
Harris, who has been involved in the world of digital animation for years as a story artist before joining Hivemind with his fellow co-director Andrew Stanton to tackle “Toy Story 5,” still has a few things about the process he wants to learn.
“I wish I understood simulation a little better because I want to learn how to talk about it in a way that feels more collaborative. And I say that because even at a really fancy studio like Pixar today there are some things that are still difficult to understand clearly,” Harris said.
One of those things is the folds in clothing – the ability to create the feeling of clothing moving naturally with a character’s body or having clothing bunch up around the elbows in a believable way, creating the illusion of a hood lying in front of someone’s shoulders is simple but actually quite complex.
“If I said, ‘Hey, I actually care about sleeve layers,’ I’m sure my producer, Lindsey Collins, would be like, ‘What? Why? Why, why would you care about that?'” Harris joked. “But artistically, I’m fascinated by it. We’re still relying on these physics-based engines for things like this, and when I look at a lot of 2D art, there are people who can do awesome designs, from just making clothes.” [work]It’s a beautiful way that fabric works on our bodies, and it’s very hard to do at feature scale. And so, I think it would be awesome if I could understand the simulation more technically because then maybe I would get closer to having a conversation about seeing those sexy clothing folds that I’ve wanted my entire life.
Clothing is one thing that is both important and underrated in live-action. “Blue Heron” is an indie film and it was a point of pride that it was the first time that Romavari had worked with a costume designer and seen what a creative collaborator could do in that department.
“It’s often seen as very trivial and just clothes and, you know, it’s often treated like a women’s department and that’s really, you know, just putting something on them. But I’ve learned a lot working with my costume designer, Maria [Katarina]This is how integral it is to continuity, aesthetically, but also for the safety and comfort of the actors,” said Romavari.
The costumes in “Blue Heron” do a pretty dumb job because it’s a period piece based in the late ’90s (terrible idea), parts of which also take place in a more contemporary timeline. The changes in clothing, and how the characters feel about themselves in terms of how comfortable they are in their clothes, makes clear things they cannot say themselves.
“Often costume designers are asked, ‘Can you throw something on them?’ And now I understand the internal turmoil they go through when they say, ‘Do you know how much time I spent dyeing that shirt and then using this artificial scrub to make it look like this other period?’ There’s so much work that goes into it that it’s not respected, and it’s so integral to what you see on the screen,” Romavari said. “So I guess I’m just speaking for the costume designers. It’s a really important element and I think it’s underappreciated because of its value.”