How did you start working with computer graphics, and what was it like being part of the demogroup Future Crew? During the late ’80s, I was big into graffiti as a kid in Finland and spent most of my time drawing or sneaking out on artistic missions at night. I was also into computers like the early Commodore 64 and the Amiga, but I used them primarily for gaming. During the early ’90s, a friend introduced me to Deluxe Paint, a rudimentary graphics editor on his PC—like the early Photoshop. I drew graffiti with it and was immediately hooked.

I put together my own PC, got a copy of Deluxe Paint and started hanging out with my friend in his basement, nerding out on computers and movies with other like-minded friends. That’s how I ended up as a graphic artist named “Pixel” in Future Crew, a group of computer-oriented teens creating demos to showcase what we could do with computers. Some drew graphics, others composed music and coders added cool effects while putting everything together into one coherent audiovisual demonstration. We then showed our demos at demoparties like Assembly in Finland, competitions where hundreds (and later thousands) of kids came together for a weekend to show off their computer skills. It was exciting to be at the vanguard of a new art form. We ended up winning some of these competitions and garnering quite a bit of fame, especially with a demo called Second Reality, which was very encouraging and motivated me to push forward on my artistic path.

There was a lot of camaraderie, and I now realize that what we did back then was quite similar to filmmaking. We worked together as a team to create an audiovisual piece of art we would then show to the world—a great initiation into the collaborative nature of filmmaking.

What caused you to pivot into creating visual effects and eventually led you to work as a director in advertising? After succeeding with Future Crew, I was seventeen but failing in school and working odd jobs. So, I reached out to computer game companies in the United States looking for more inspiring work. At the time, the internet and email were nascent, so I saved my graphics onto a diskette and—accompanied by a handwritten letter—mailed them to these companies explaining my talents.

Fortunately, the game developers in the United States followed the demoscene because there was a lot of talent there. I got recruited by Tim Sweeney, the chief executive officer and founder of videogame production company Epic Games. He had seen our demos and offered me a job I enthusiastically accepted. I ended up sharing an office with Sweeney for a couple of months while designing graphics for Epic Pinball, which was a success and a great experience. Tim, if you’re reading this, thanks!

Eventually, I returned to Finland, and my uncle, a partner at post-production company Factory Post, offered me an apprenticeship with one of the company’s top visual effects (VFX) artists. Using digital effects in filmmaking was an emerging field at the time, and Factory had just bought Quantel’s Henry, the first digital multilayer compositing system. I was a fan of movies like The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park, which all utilized this new technology, so I was intrigued and accepted my uncle’s offer.

Stoked about what I could do with Henry, I ended up working as a VFX artist on hundreds of TV commercials, music videos and feature films over the following six years, cutting my teeth on the film industry. After the turn of the millennium, I joined a commercial film production company as a VFX artist and supervisor, which quickly led to directing my first commercial. After first directing dozens of commercials and music videos and then my first short film, I started advertising my work abroad. I scored my first international directing gigs from Eastern Europe, leading to Germany, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Sweden and the United States, where I finally moved in 2015.

Your advertising work is lauded for your imaginative storytelling and emotional impact. What inspires you to incorporate these in your ads? Cinema is a highly visual art form, and I greatly appreciate film’s aesthetics. I enjoy watching and making visually beautiful films. However, even with my background in VFX, I’m most interested in telling stories that evoke emotion. The best films combine these aspects, and I think if intriguing stories and compelling characters are the heart and soul of movies, the aesthetic represents the rest of the body.

Especially when working on films with fantastic events, I find it essential to incorporate humanity and emotion into these stories to make them easier to connect with since, ultimately, that’s what’s going to make a film memorable. Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a great example: even if it’s a science-fiction story dealing with an extraterrestrial, it’s Elliott, the boy who finds E.T., that touches our hearts and makes the film memorable.

There’s a quote by the American poet Maya Angelou that also fits filmmaking: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” If we want to reach the audience, we need to create a change in their emotions. If I can make them feel something, anything—whether it’s making them laugh, cry, be afraid or even angry—I think I’ve reached my goal.

You also have a penchant for creating CGI characters in your ads, like the allergen monsters for Flonase or the robot in your spot for door brand Daloc. How do you come up with these? I’ve always loved extraordinary stories that snap us up from the mundane, particularly science fiction, and I like working on scripts of that nature. In the commercial world, ad agencies develop ideas and send their scripts to directors with which they’d like to work. Because of my background in VFX, I’ve been offered scripts with CGI characters early on and have quite a few in my reel. Since I gravitate towards stories that deal with the extraordinary, like robots and monsters, I tend to see a lot of scripts like that.

When working on CGI characters, especially with inorganic characters like robots, I spend a lot of time with the animators to make the digital characters look alive and conscious. They need to have personalities like actors do. Unless I can use motion and performance capture and work with actors, I’m essentially directing the animators who will bring the characters to life. When replicating real-life characters like animals, we can usually study good references to understand how animals behave. But when creating fictional characters—which I love, since it gives me more room for imagination—we must develop their movement patterns and behavior, which can be challenging. So, we might use real-life creatures as a reference.

I also find it helpful to place CGI characters into real-world settings to make them interact with the world around them. This practice helps ground these fantastic characters into reality. To help with that, I always strive to shoot as much live-action footage as possible and create interactions between the human and CGI characters to make them feel real. Incidentally, I would love to make a live-action version of animator and director Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, one of my favorite robot films and an excellent example of a robot character with consciousness.

What have been some of your favorite commercials you’ve directed? “The Cell” for grocery store chain Lidl. Film director Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are among my favorite movies, and I always wanted to tell a prison story, so I only needed to read the script once to get excited. I loved the heartwarming and clever idea: two men stuck in a godforsaken prison—just on different sides of the bars—forge a wordless and unexpected camaraderie during Christmas. I also appreciated the freedom to use the time to build mood and tell the story. We built the set in a studio in Belgrade, Serbia.

“Abandoned” for satellite TV provider HD+. The script was such an absurd idea that bordered on a horror film, and you rarely see that in advertising—so again, I jumped on it after one read. Many scripts I see these days are dealing with technology and the future, which I don’t mind, but I also enjoy working on fantasy like this. HD+ is a German satellite TV provider, but the streets of Old Town in Vilnius, Lithuania, gave us the perfect canvas to paint this story on.

“Forest” for Interstate Batteries. I liked the simplicity and clarity of the idea, which enabled me to tell the story with two long shots. I also love shooting at night and am a fan of anything old and dilapidated, so I had a good time with a brilliant local production designer Hania Robledo staging this in a park near Mexico City.

What was it like to work on several campaigns for Disney? My relationship with Disney started in 2015 when I directed a commercial for its smart toy brand PlayMation, which led me to work on several commercials for their parks, like World of Magic. I’m a fan of the golden-era Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio and have tremendous respect for what Walt Disney and his colleagues achieved back then. So, when working on Disney commercials, I’m always trying to incorporate some of that Walt Disney spirit into the films, pushing them stylistically toward the classical, magical Disney feature-film world even when dealing with modern stories. Between Disney and the ad agency mcgarrybowen, there’s also a lot of support for artistic and cinematic integrity in work, which is excellent.

Since all the Disney commercials deal with the fantastic and have CG characters, it’s also inspiring to work with leading post-production companies like Disney Animation Studios, The Embassy, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), The Mill and Weta Digital. As a side note, for anyone interested in the history of Disney’s animated films, check out The Walt Disney Film Archives from Taschen, a fantastic walkthrough of the making of the animated classics from 1921 to 1968, with tons of concept art, photos and storyboards, among other artifacts.

What has surprised you most about how computer graphics and VFX have evolved since you began working? The innovation in digital VFX has moved forward with such an incredible speed that I’m more inspired and excited than surprised when new milestones happen. Interestingly, there are barely any movies without VFX these days, regardless of the genre. Invisible VFX work, like set extensions, sky replacements and clean-up work, is done for probably most of the films out there. Often, it’s the invisible work that requires the most talent, like in Forrest Gump, or more recently in the historical dramas First Man by director Damien Chazelle and 1917 by director Sam Mendes, which all won Oscars for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.

Among the latest inventions, I find ILM’s StageCraft LED wall technology developed for the TV show The Mandalorian quite intriguing since it enables the incorporation of interactive virtual set extensions, like landscapes, into live-action scenes with set pieces and actors all in-camera, which is exciting.

I would also love to utilize performance and face-capture technology more in my films in the future since it enables me to work with actors instead of animators when dealing with CGI characters. The Lord of the Rings, the latest Planet of the Apes series and director James Cameron’s Avatar series are good examples of films where actors—like Andy Serkis, in the first two examples—used performance capture to bring CGI characters to life.

What’s the essential skill you need to succeed in VFX and animation? Digital technology enables me to tell stories I couldn’t otherwise, but my goal is always to make things look like we filmed them. So, I think the most critical skill is using VFX without distracting the audience from the story. Especially when dealing with genres like science fiction or fantasy, the result needs to be visually authentic enough to give the audience a chance to suspend their disbelief and go with the story. When working on heavy visual-effects scripts, I’m always trying to minimize the use of VFX and achieve as much as I can with live-action shooting to have a real-life base to build the effects upon. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and Dune and writer/director Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina are good examples of the seamless integration of VFX with live-action footage within the modern science fiction genre.

Are there any tools you’ve recently found that you would recommend? During pitching and developing a film, I use a lot of references from movies, art and photography, among others. Even though I have an extensive reference library, I often browse SHOTDECK, a film reference library started by cinematographer Lawrence Sher. It has the most extensive searchable collection of high-resolution film screenshots online that I know of. For anyone in need of reference images from films for pitches, SHOTDECK is a fantastic research tool.

I’ve also enjoyed the MasterClass online classes about filmmaking by Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese and Aaron Sorkin. Other courses worth checking out are by James Cameron, Jodie Foster, Samuel L. Jackson, David Mamet and Neil Gaiman.

If you like art books, Parka Blogs’s List of Art Books Reviewed offers an extensive list of reviewed art and movie books for reference and inspiration.

Some books about cinema and filmmaking I’ve enjoyed are Making Movies by Sidney Lumet; John Badham on Directing by John Badham; Hitchcock/Truffaut by François Truffaut; A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away by Paul Hirsch; The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb; Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone; Ready When You Are, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Crowe by Jerry Ziesmer; The Stanley Kubrick Archives by Alison Castle; The Star Wars Archives. 1977–1983 by Paul Duncan; The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ by Piers Bizony; Scorsese: A Retrospective by Tom Shone; The Making of Alien by J. W. Rinzler; Raging Bull: The Making Of by Jay Glennie; and Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull.

Lastly, I find the following apps handy during production: Cadrage Director’s Viewfinder for demoing camera and lens combos, Sun Seeker and HeliosPro for gauging the sun, and Afterlight for color grading location shots.

What do you look forward to most about the future of advertising? I treat commercials like short films or scenes from a feature film, like little pieces of cinema. So, I’m always looking to work with scripts and clients who call for cinematic execution. Because of digital technology, it’s now possible to tell almost any story, no matter how fantastic it is, and I see a lot of scripts incorporating ideas that call for heavy uses of VFX. However, I’m still most looking forward to telling compelling stories with intriguing characters, whether real or digital.

Do you have any advice for people just entering the field? If everyone in the world saw your work, someone would be willing to hire you. Don’t wait for somebody to find you. Put your work out there, everywhere. And do your research. If you know your subject, it’s easier to be creative.

Be a sponge for all things creative: modern movies, classic movies, photography, literature, museums, illustrations, paintings, theater, graphic novels, music and concerts. Soak it all in and saturate your mind with it so you can put out your unique vision. Then guard that vision. That’s what separates you from the others. ca