We want to introduce you to Marcus LeVere, a Vancouver-based VFX supervisor who used his time this year, after being laid off due to the strikes, to create OpenBID Client, a passion project fixing all the tedious issues with VFX bidding. This free, cloud-native collaborative bidding tool leverages AI and other automations so VFX Supervisors can better focus on the more creative aspects of their role.
Los Angeles Post Production Group: Thank you for taking time to answer some questions for us, Marcus. How about we begin with how you got started in the entertainment industry and what the path was that brought you to the world of VFX?
Marcus LeVere: My entrance into the world of VFX was fueled by some key mentors who went out of their way to help me. It started when I attended art school at Manchester Metropolitan University. That’s in the rainiest part of England, and it never stopped raining! Somehow the school got a grant to fill a tiny room full of SGI machines. As soon as I saw those SGI O2s, I was in love. I just loved how everything looked – the machines, the blue shelf buttons in Power Animator, the manuals. I’d take all the manuals home and read them front to back, one by one, as bedtime reading. I was in heaven in that little 3D animation room. It was as if I was in flow the whole time. They ended up just giving me a key to the room, and I never left , not even for school breaks. I only went home for Christmas because my mum would have killed me if I didn’t.
Anyway, Keith Brown and the rest of the faculty noticed my commitment. They awarded me not one but two travel bursaries. So, I borrowed another thousand quid from my brother and used the money to buy a ticket to Los Angeles and a few weeks stay on a bunk bed in a youth hostel on Washington Boulevard in Venice. I didn’t have any internships set up, so I bussed around LA with my backpack, knocking on the door of every post-production house I could find, just looking to see if they would let me work for free.
They all said no, except for the very last shop on my list, Pacific Ocean Post (POP) Film. They let me in the elevator and somehow, I got into a meeting room and sat down with Andrew Whitelaw. I don’t know what Andrew saw in me, but he said yes. And I was in.
I can still remember that feeling, skateboarding along the Venice boardwalk the next morning, coming from that youth hostel to work at a post-production company in LA. It was the opposite of Manchester. Makes me well-up just thinking about it. What a huge fork in the road! I found out years later that Andrew actually got in trouble – he was just a tape-operator at the time and had no authority to hire anyone. But their Producer, Todd Davidovich, did also meet me in that room and must have taken a shine to me. I owe these guys everything.
So there I was as an intern, more than happy to pick up Jamba Juice for Carl Seibert and his clients, eventually, they put me on a machine to create some Gerber daisies. I’d never heard of those flowers before that, but I have a soft spot for Gerber daisies now.
That was just my toe in the door, though. I was on a student exchange visa, so I went back to England and finished my final year of school. Amazingly, Todd Davidovich got me a job as I graduated, and I flew straight from my graduation in Manchester back to LA. He’s long retired now, so I can probably say this, but Jeff Ross, the managing director at the time, paid me cash every week in an envelope while I was transitioning from my student exchange visa to my H1-B visa. I look back on that and can’t believe how kind they were to me. They had no reason to help some random black kid from England. But they did. Can’t help but be grateful, right? I think about it a lot these days. 23 years ago… seems like yesterday.
LAPPG: You’ve worked on some really big projects at some highly respected studios like, Lucasfilm / ILM, Zoic Studios and FuseFX. From your experience as a VFX supervisor, what were some of the biggest challenges you face?
ML: The craft is quite easy, but the business of VFX can be challenging: strikes drying up work, having to follow subsidies to Australia, Singapore, Canada. Let’s be honest, most CG guys would do the work for free. It’s like playing video games. Less so now for me, now that I’m VFX supervising. So maybe that’s it, transitioning off the box. (Laughing) I don’t miss the tendonitis in my hands, though.
LAPPG: How did the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes affect you and how did you deal with that?
ML: The strikes flipped a switch in my head. I started working on OpenBID like a madman. ChatGPT4 was new and I hit it hard. All day long. I’d come out of my basement office with a stunned look on my face like I just got a Matrix upload. The first 4 months were a fire hydrant into my brain.
OpenBID Vendor had been out for a while, but some users really wanted to get the crew planning and profit projections into it, so I added those, and then I just kept going, and going, and going. Like a man possessed really. Everything the users voted for with the User Suggestion Form I added in the end. I put so much love into it. I spent months just writing custom functions with instructions, so the formulas wouldn’t scare users.
LAPPG: How were AI and machine learning leveraged in creating this platform?
ML: Well, I was working on OpenBID all alone, so I collaborated with AI on most of it, really. It increased my productivity tenfold by helping me with new ideas for faster functions, guiding me on the best security architecture, and commenting all my code. I didn’t study computer science at University; I just learned it on the job, building MEL Scripts, and a little Google Apps Script on the weekends for side projects. ChatGPT is great if you have a task that you need help with. It helps you break the task down into steps and push through to get it done. It’s not easy, though. You have to learn how to work with it. You’ll end up getting a sixth sense for when it is hallucinating, and when to ask it again if that’s really the best way. It often surprises you with radically different ideas though, which is definitely one of the benefits of working closely with large language models like ChatGPT. The key thing when collaborating with it on something you know nothing about is to make sure it explains all the parts for you, all the time.
AI is going to be a game-changer in developing countries. Kids will be going straight to NukeGPT or something like it while they’re still at school. That’s why I added the OpenAI tab inside all of the OpenBID templates. I wanted to make sure that people got a chance to see what they could do with it. Just last year, I was jumping through hoops trying to join together columns of data from clients’ breakdowns, and now I can ask ChatGPT to do it all for me in one go.
LAPPG: What are the benefits for a VFX supervisor to use this technology?
ML: Well, for production-side visual effects supervisors, the OpenBID Client templates will speed their workflow by streamlining the emailing out of breakdowns and automatically bringing all of that data back into a main table. Normally, that would take many long email chains and then trying to compare all the PDFs against each other. An utter nightmare.
For vendor-side supervisors, OpenBID Vendor has lots of little checks and automations built right into the spreadsheet. And you can connect all your bids together to really do proper crew planning and cost projections across all your projects. It tracks compounding crew needed and dynamically adjusts the people days for the time available, as you are bidding. It also shows you how that will affect all of your other shows. It’s amazing.
And if you were forced to start a small company because you were laid off, you now have a chance to get in front of new clients using the vetted vendor list. A client doesn’t have to only rely on their usual list. As the floodgates begin to open again, just like after COVID, clients will have trouble finding a vendor with availability. Now with the click of a button, they can get a list of vendors plus their availability and showreels, before even sending out one NDA. This VFX clearing house has the potential to not only help the tiny boutique houses, but speeds up the whole process of getting that initial list of available vendors to work on your show.
Oh, and the AI part of OpenBID is just a sample implementation of what you can do with it so far. By default, it creates example thumbnail images, shot titles, and status update emails for you when you are on set. But it can do much more. I’m sure we’ll see some very interesting and unexpected uses of it.
LAPPG: How do you see this platform being utilized and evolving in the VFX industry?
ML: It’s important to note that OpenBID is more than just a free set of open-source spreadsheet templates. No one is winning awards for bidding templates, there’s no competitive advantage. So why don’t we all just use the same one? It makes all of our lives easier. The fundamental concept that made me build the system is the idea of speeding up the communications loop. Instead of long email chains, you just leave a comment directly in the bid, on the cell you have questions about. This new faster way of communicating can really help us all be more productive. Don’t get me wrong, there is still an ‘Export Bid as PDF’ button if you need it. But just imagine, you’re in a production meeting discussing a script change, you can leave a comment in the bid in the meeting, and get live updates from your vendors there on the spot. That’s a game changer.
LAPPG: What has the feedback been so far on OpenBid Client and how do people get access to it? Has it been used on released projects?
ML: I know it is definitely being used in production, but I have no clue on how many shows. I guess that’s one of the downsides of it being an open-source spreadsheet. You are allowed to copy it, modify it, and share it as you wish. No one can take it away from you, and no one can track what you’re doing with it. It’s not a subscription service that if you stop paying, you lose access to your data. It’s out there, free. I do know that there’s over 220 members in the OpenBID user group though.
LAPPG: What is on the horizon for you?
ML: Now that OpenBID is finally out I wish I could take a breather, but amazingly the AI start-up I launched through Nvidia’s Inception Program just got funded! Do you remember the R&B singer Aaliyah? Back in 2001, she died tragically in a private plane crash in the Bahamas. Well, her film, Queen of the Damned, was in post at the time. To get the thing finished they had to bring in Aaliyah’s brother to re-dub some of her lines. That was the first film I worked on, and it always stuck with me. So when the SAG strike hit, it seemed like good timing to help actors take control of their own AI-powered likenesses. If Aaliyah (and subsequently, her estate) had owned her own digital replica, Queen of the Damned would have been a much more successful film for her family. Imagine, actors could take on extra projects anywhere around the world, or even prolong their careers indefinitely. So that’s what I’m up to now. I sell cinematic-quality AI cloning technology clones directly to A-list actors and sports stars, so they can own, license, and control their digital replicas. I came out of stealth mode just recently at the Launch Builders demo in Vancouver, Canada.
Learn more about OpenBID here.
