Today we’d like to introduce you to Corbin Huggins.
Hi Corbin, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I started in elementary school making short films with my brother on an old VHS camera. We would make our own James Bond films in the house and we would have to shoot it in order and if we didn’t like what we shot we would wind the VHS back and record over it as we didn’t have a way to edit it. Our favorite films were Back to the Future and Terminator and I vividly remember when I was about 7 recording our “Back to the Future vs. Terminator” film at my fathers house. This inspired me to start making my own films and when my brother got his Macbook I would take his laptop and use his webcam as a camera to film videos and when I got my own laptop I wanted to make my own terminator film. This lead me to my first “vfx” shot at the age of 8. I downloaded Sony Vegas on my laptop and shot a POV sequence of the terminator walking through a home with the iconic red tinted screen and a series of faces flashing by as it scans for his target. Obviously all of this was very poorly done, and although it is probably advanced for someone of 8 years old to be doing, it was just about as well done as you would a 8 year old could do it haha, but this started my journey as a film maker and ultimately a professional visual effects artist.
When I got into middle school, me and my friends would make funny skits we would upload to Youtube and show our friends. There ended up being things we obviously could not do such as blow up buildings, so I would learn to do it, albeit poorly at the time, on my computer. This continued up to the end of high school where I ultimately needed to decide where my career would go. I had zero hope and no reason to believe at the time I could have any career in film or video as it seemed like such a fairy tale to me at the time. On a long family trip up to Nashville during winter break of my senior year, I had nothing to do but sit in the back of the car with my headphones listening to music and contemplate what direction my life would go after school. On the way up it was only negative thoughts, what career would I pursue in college? What would I do with my life? On the way back from this trip I again returned to my thoughts, but this time the thinking was different. I know film was the only thing I enjoyed and the thing I clearly had a talent for. The ride up was worried about success, money, a secure future. Obvious things people went after, but the drive back that changed, I didn’t care for any of that. I had decided on that trip that I was going to chase this industry and career, fully aware that it could blow up and I could fail. None of that mattered to me, I was going to make this happen or die trying and that was it, I didn’t not have another option and I accepted that. This gave me both a clear goal and so much peace in my decision.
I began creating music videos and commercials for free and building up my skills in a professional setting rather than the hobby like skills I had made and expanding my portfolio. I was lucky to have a supportive mother who encouraged me to chase this dream and allowed me the flexibility to make this my sole goal alongside school. I learned the proper way to do things at every stage of the pipeline, I learned how to plan, shoot and edit. M0st film makers specialize but I had been doing this my whole life so picking up skills at every stage was a breeze as I already had a decent knowledge of each stage. Around 2022 I was opening up some online independent contractor accounts when I decided I could get more work if I specialized and if I was going to be working under somebody it needed to be with something I knew I was both good at and something that was niche and easily marketable. I knew I had a skill that no one else had and that was visual effects.
Something that sets me apart from a lot of professional visual effects artist is that I am a very resourceful “generalist” meaning I can professionally do just about any visual effects shot on my own. There are a lot of hobbyist vfx artists who can do quite a few things, but they don’t have the professional pipeline knowledge or knowhow to carry the shot to a polished film ready quality and work within a professional team when necessary. This gave me the ability to fill a niche of working for smaller budgeted productions as they would not need to hire a entire vfx studio with individuals who would need to handle, planning, editing, compositing, fx work and cg, rendering. They just needed me.
I had not been doing paid work really up to this point, just working on my portfolio, but within a month of my free trial on ProductionHUB, a film specific job site, I landed a major job working at a company that produced training videos for Firefighters. They would shoot POV style videos and I would 3D track the footage and implement CG fire into the shots. They needed fire specific control over the fire in these videos as they needed to behave in identifiable ways to a firefighter so stock flam assets would not do. I would have to simulate the flames in smoke as described to me by a firefighter and render this 3D flames out and composite them in.
This was the start of my professional career and I have since been able to work full time as a vfx artist. I attended both University of Miami for film production with a minor in Spanish and studied abroad in Argentina and Costa Rica and have since become fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, I also currently attend University of Central Florida for Computer Science to help build upon my programing and neural network and large language model skills which has been a big shift in the industry lately. I work full time doing visual effects for small to medium sized film productions as well as commercials and short films and have learned a ton about running my own business and marketing, honestly that has been the hardest part and I feel I am only just now getting that ironed out haha.
My most recent venture is me and a partener are opening up a multi media studio in between downtown and the airport. It features a large film studio space complete with a cyclorama that we currently have painted green for greenscreen work vfx work, all prelit. We also have both a audio recording and podcast studio inside. The studio is fantastic honestly and we aren’t trying to get rich off of it. We just want to rent it out enough for it to pay for itself and make our own projects with it inbetween that and we already have clients lines up for it and we haven’t even completed the site and have not been pushing it which is great. The studio is called Central Florida Studios.
I would say that about covers my joureny so far. I plan to just keep creating and growing my business and maybe even one day helm my own project, but if I can just make a living doing what I am doing I think I will be perfectly happy.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The business side of things has been the most difficult, branding, website creation, trying to appear as professional as possible to someone who doesn’t know me to sell myself. Even more so the pre-production side of things like creating a proposal and budget estimate has been the most difficult thing to overcome as I came from someone who just would do with needing to both plan and simultaneously sell myself, as this planning stage usually also means I need to come across as the right choice to a client who is most likely feeling you out as someone he may or may not hire.
I have been lucky to have a ton of friendly and easy going clients for the most part who love to work with me, I maybe have only had 2 “nightmare clients” who I unfortunately had to deal with. 1 of which was very brief for about 2 months, but another I had accidentally signed my life away on a contract with early in my career and have been stuck with for multiple years now and am only now getting my self out of that mess. I will say that, that job in particular has been a massively educational experience for me in negotiating, estimates and proposals and was probably the biggest reason for me ironing out my pre-production and negotiating pipeline.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I do visual effects for film and television. I work as a generalist specifically in this field meaning I do a little bit of everything. This job involves either all as well as only specific parts of the vfx pipeline such as coordinating with other film departments and being on set to make sure data is collected and things are filmed as properly as possible to help the vfx artist doing the actual work on the computer, and in that respect I do everything from compositing the vfx shots, doing CG and FX work and rendering and exporting scenes. I have worked both on incredibly small and large projects. If you see a monster on screen or an explosion that was created digitally, that is my job.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I am entirely self taught as there aren’t a ton of vfx schools out there. I have gone to school for “film production” but that is everything for on set production, nothing with post production although I will say learned about cameras and film making in general is incredibly important for just about every stage of vfx as you’ll be doing everything you can to “recreate” that camera that was used on set.
My biggest teacher was Youtube, after you get your foot in the door, your biggest teacher is going to be your network and people you meet on set.
Pricing:
- On set I charge more but it includes equipment, it varies depending on the size and length of the production but it hovers around 750-1,500$ a day
- with actual post production work it is 400-800$ a day
- the studio is 70$ a hour or 600$ for a 12 hour day
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.corbinhuggins.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/corbinhuggins_VFX/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corbin-huggins-vsfx
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CorbinHuggins-vfx
- Other: https://www.cflstudios.com/
Image Credits
Corbin Huggins
Liam McNeeson
John Orphan
Marco Ruiz
Damijin Mynz
