Before shooting began on Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, the film’s production crew had trouble finding one of the film’s crucial locations: the luxurious home of the wealthy Park family. The chances of finding the right house were slim, but the chances of finding a two-story house with an ideal setting was even slimmer. As a result, the film’s art team created a set — a one-story house that would become the Park’s mansion and the film’s main setting.
Later, artists at Dexter Studios, a Seoul-based visual effects studio, added a second floor to the house using computer graphics based on its blueprints, complete with a staircase and a garden that was digitally created. The streets nearby also were made in 3D and digitally merged with the film. During the four months of preproduction, more than 200 artists at Dexter worked on the project and roughly 500 VFX shots were used in the film.
“We call it ‘invisible VFX’ in the industry,” says Dexter Studios CEO Kang Jong-ik. “And it’s often more difficult to create digital images that blend into the existing landscape.”
Kang started his career in advertising in the late ’90s, when computer graphics were first applied in South Korea. He later set up his own studio and concentrated on films. One of his first — 1998’s The Soul Guardians, a psychological thriller surrounding a religious cult — was the first Korean feature film ever to actively employ computer graphics. “It was a revelation,” Kang says. “People called it ‘Hollywood style’ then.”
In 2011, Kang joined Dexter, which was founded by director Kim Yong-hwa, whose Mr. Go (2013), a comedy about a baseball-playing gorilla, was the first South Korean film to be fully shot in 3D.
Dexter is now a producer of several local blockbusters, including 2021’s Escape From Mogadishu and 2018’s Along With the Gods franchise. The studio specializes in securing original IP of…
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