Creating next Star Trek, then the visual effects department will be pretty important to you in terms of planning all that out in pre production. So even if you are on a tight budget and cannot afford a team in production design to build out your set, know that visual effects might just be the trick for you. Now, both production design and visual effects takes extensive time in all phases. So it is important to get your team started on visual effects as soon as you can, using concept art and storyboards to convey your ideas to the visual effects team and supervisor. For my short film, The painter, what I essentially did was not only plan out a type and visual effects shots I will have in the film, but also started on some 10th visual effects and rough drafts just so that everyone including myself would have a rough idea of what the final shots might look like.

As you can see here, I've put together a cheat sheet for all the visual fixtures So I may or may not have in my shot. At this phase of pre production though, I can first start creating some mock ups or drafts of how it might look like later in the final cut. For example, in my shot, I had a visual effects artists do a rough draft of how a paint splotch would fall to the ground. Here's a reference that was shot on set as a test shot in slow motion, not slow enough, in my opinion. So that's why I hired a visual effects artist later in post production to come in and exaggerate that slow motion effect. Now this shot is interesting because what we had to shoot was essentially just a blank shot of nothing.

But here is where rough visual effects jobs would help show to your dp and crew. What exactly is going to be in that blank slate this case, I'm going to place this real paint blockage with cG 3d cool