Picture it: You’re at the Oscar nominees’ luncheon, someone tells you it’s time for the class photo, and you somehow find yourself between Benicio del Toro and Michael B. Jordan, with Kate Hudson just behind.

That was Adelaide visual effects supervisor Guido Wolter’s afternoon in Los Angeles, just a few weeks ago.

Wolter was there because he’s nominated for best visual effects at the 98th Academy Awards for his work at Adelaide’s Rising Sun Pictures on Sinners – Ryan Coogler’s supernatural thriller (and, with 16 nods, the most-nominated film in Oscar history).

He shares the nomination with Michael Ralla, Espen Nordahl and Donnie Dean.

The annual nominees’ luncheon is largely media-free, and Wolter said that changed everything. Without cameras, the gap between the people who make the films and the people who appear in them basically disappears.

“Everyone is very, very warm,” he said. “There are no real attitudes – it’s more like acknowledging each other’s abilities and craft.”

He brings the same feeling home to his team.

“This recognition belongs to the entire Rising Sun Pictures team, past and present,” Wolter said. “It’s an incredible privilege to see that collective work acknowledged.”

From left: Rising Sun Pictures’ Donnie Dean, Guido Wolter, Espen Nordahl, and Michael Ralla at the Oscars lunch in LA. Photo: AAP

From chicken legs to cinema screens

Wolter spent his early childhood in what was then East Germany. The “spark” that set him on his path to visual effects was a Soviet-era animated film featuring the folk witch Baba Yaga’s creepy moving house.

That house on legs had an onscreen personality all its own, and it really impressed the young Wolter.

“I realised that someone decided to make this house on chicken legs walk through the forest,” he said.

“I was like, that is amazing. That you can make something and make people believe it’s real – that’s something I could potentially do.”

That idea never really left him. Wolter built a career that took him from Germany to big-name studios in Sydney and London, before Rising Sun Pictures came calling and he landed in Adelaide. Nine years on, he and his family haven’t looked back.

“My wife and I ride our bikes to work through the parklands. Our kids walk to school,” he said. “You drive an hour out and you’re in the wine valleys, or down at Port Elliot, or up in the Flinders Ranges.”

The move also paid off professionally.

“Adelaide enabled me,” he said. “It gave me the platform to establish myself.”

Wolter with wife Juli at the AACTA awards. Photo: The Post SA

Making the impossible real

So what actually is visual effects? “Very simply put,” Wolter said, “[it’s] the manipulation of an image on screen to shape it into a form that serves the filmmaker’s vision”.

That covers everything from the obvious stuff – burning vampires, people flying – to the work most people never clock at all. More than half the runtime of Sinners is visual effects shots, and it holds the record for the most VFX shots delivered for an IMAX film. Yet most viewers wouldn’t pick it.

“That’s the whole point,” Wolter said.

On Sinners, RSP’s biggest contribution was also the film’s most technically difficult trick: Making Michael B. Jordan appear twice in the same frame as two fully distinct characters, twins Smoke and Stack.

“Human faces are the hardest thing to do in VFX without setting off that uncanny valley effect,” Wolter said.

“We’re intrinsically attuned to what a human face looks like from the moment we’re born. A face is either right or wrong – and you always have the real MBJ right there in frame as the perfect reference. Bridging that believability gap, especially at IMAX resolution, is one of the hardest things you can do.”

Sinners is the most nominated film in Oscars history. Photo: Warner Bros

Thirty years in the making

That Rising Sun Pictures could pull off something like that – on a Hollywood tentpole, at IMAX resolution, from Adelaide – is the payoff for almost 30 years of problem-solving, innovation and meticulous work by a group of very talented people.

In 1995, cinematographer Tony Clark and three mates sat down at the Rising Sun Inn, in Adelaide’s east, 13,149 kilometres from Hollywood, with a simple, stubborn theory: That world-class visual effects could be made anywhere, if you had the right people.

Thirty years later, the studio has worked on more than 250 productions, from Harry Potter and X-Men, through to Gravity, Elvis, A Complete Unknown, Mickey 17, and now Sinners.

Its client list reads like a Hollywood roll call – Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros, Netflix – and its mantlepiece carries multiple AACTA awards. In 2015, the studio’s work on X-Men: Days of Future Past earned nominations for visual effects BAFTAs and Academy Awards. Last year it was inducted into the Australian Export Awards Hall of Fame.

None of it would be possible without the right conditions. RSP’s ability to attract Hollywood work – and hold onto the talent it needs to deliver it – is backed by the South Australian Film Corporation’s 10 per cent Post-Production, Digital and Visual Effects Rebate, and a 30 per cent federal rebate.

“Without the help of the government, we wouldn’t exist,” Wolter said.

“The rebate enables us to stay competitive in a market that is incredibly competitive on margins. It allows us to grow and maintain a local workforce – and to make it attractive for studios to place work with us.”

Work backed through the SA government rebate supported more than 1000 jobs across 31 productions in the state in 2024-25.

The Oscars ceremony is on March 16. Avatar: Fire and Water is the VFX frontrunner – Wolter cheerfully calls it “David against Goliath” – but for him, just getting a nomination was already unimaginable.

“When my colleague first said we were going for the Academy [Award], I literally laughed,” he said. “I thought he was crazy. And then suddenly we were nominated. An absolutely unreal moment.”

Republished from The Post SA