Anya Vinnik is a visual effects executive producer at PFX, a European VFX, animation, post production and commercial studio with a team of more than 350 artists working across six countries. PFX provides services for online streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and HBO while also collaborating with big productions around the world.

The studio’s recent projects include Locked, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Apple TV+’s Foundation Season 3 and The Naked Gun, the latter of which Vinnik executiveproduced.

Vinnik began her career in her native Russia as a post production manager on local blockbusters. Now living in Prague, she focuses exclusively on VFX production, communicating directors’ creative ideas to post artists and leading VFX teams.

Let’s find out more.

What does the job of   VFX executive producer entail?
I mostly focus on client relationships and overseeing projects from bidding to delivery. I am involved in the most important and essential topics related to each project, and I make sure that everything runs smoothly and is delivered on time in the best possible quality. Day-to-day communication is handled by my production managers. If there are changes, such as additional scope, I jump back in to help navigate that, ensuring it fits with our project budgets and schedules. Based on my experiences, I also try to prevent possible difficulties.

The most important aspect of my job is to always be open and honest with clients. I think it’s the best way to do business — to be honest and to be knowledgeable — rather than just sugarcoating and overpromising things. Being transparent and reasonably proactive about what I think and where I see potential bumps in the road has helped me enormously throughout my career.

What would surprise people the most about what falls under that title?
I think most people think executive producers do three main things: take care of the business, take care of the money and take care of the clients. But what some people might not know is that I take a lot of pride in making the internal team happy, as well as the client. My job isn’t just about protecting the client’s interest; it’s about creating a balance between them and the artists.

How long have you been working in PFX and in what kind of roles?
I joined PFX seven years ago as an executive producer. Back then, the VFX department was smaller and located only in Prague, where the company was established in 2012. These days PFX also has branches in Slovakia, Germany, Poland, Italy and Austria. I handle projects that are produced across our branches along with our production team.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?
I feel like relationship-building is probably the most challenging thing to get right. I always try to listen to the client and get as much information as possible about the project, even before the bidding. We want to know about the background of the project, the director and the creative ambition. We use that to build as clear a picture as possible. This is very helpful considering the different clients and directors we work with. Some directors, for instance, are doing visual effects for the first time, so the conversation is very different from other clients who are studio producers working on their 6,000th production. 

What’s your favorite part of the job?
I really enjoy talking to clients, and I love it when we do such a good job that clients come back or increase their scope. My latest job as the executive producer on The Naked Gun was a great example: We initially had a small scope, and as our relationship with the client got stronger, we were given more and more shots and more diverse work, like 3D and complex compositing and set extensions. The moment you see that return business is always super encouraging.

What is your most productive time of the day?
The morning. A lot of our clients are in the States, so I have a lot of emails that come through overnight. We have production meetings every morning, where we brief the team on the best course of action following those emails.

What do you see as a big trend that is currently happening or maybe on the verge of happening? Is it AI?
AI is definitely what everyone is talking about, and I do think it’s really interesting. Personally, I believe we’re at the beginning of the journey with AI. We have an internal AI unit — a team that constantly investigates what is new on the market. We do a lot of testing and try to adopt useful solutions into our pipeline.

Right now, we primarily use AI to help do manual tasks like roto, if the client allows. It saves artist time and therefore helps the client save on budget. We’re also using AI on other tasks, like face replacement, initial concept work, 3D prop generation for visualizations and many more. However, it’s fully up to the client whether they want us to use AI on their project or not. Many ask us whether we use it, and some ask us to strictly use no AI on their project. Overall, I think most of the industry is very cautious about it as a technology.

Did you go to film school? Art school?
My parents are actually film critics, and my mom used to be editor-in-chief of a film magazine. That meant that as a child, I could go to the movies for free, so I’d go every day after school. I watched everything that came out at the beginning of the 2000s. Name any movie, and I watched it because I was going to the movies for free after school for 10 years! That ignited my passion for film, and I decided to go to film school and work in post from there.

If you didn’t have this job, what would you be doing instead?
I think I would still do something in between art and business, even if it wasn’t in the film industry, but in another creative industry, like fashion. I love creative industries, and I love working on the numbers, so something across both would be ideal.

Can you name some recent work?
As mentioned earlier, one of my most recent projects was The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. We were super lucky with the client on this film, Paramount. It was the first project we worked on together, and they were an amazing team. They were both creative and encouraging of our artists’ ideas.

We ended up working together for a year, and it was a very fun project for us, as we could push how comedic our VFX could be. We had to strike a balance between realism and comedy, and sometimes a simpler look would really enhance how funny the final scene would be. That was a really interesting way to work, as normally in VFX you always strive for this super photoreal, detailed look. But that wasn’t in the spirit of The Naked Gun. Even if you watch the original film series, it had more exaggerated, theatrical effects. And that’s part of why it was funny.

I also recently worked on Foundation Series 3 and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

What do you do to de-stress from it all?
I do meditation and also just joke around with colleagues. Our team has a really good relationship, and we always talk through things and laugh a lot.