Lost Boys was unlike any previous educational experience I’d had before. There were only a dozen of us, from all corners of the globe, with a passion for the same thing. It was never a case of go in to school, do work for 8 hours, then go home back to your actual life. It was friends coming together each day, helping each other, learning, collaborating, and often times then hanging out afterwords with board games, movie nights, or going out for meals. Working in a VFX studio is a very unique atmosphere compared to a lot of jobs, and I think the structure of Lost Boys really captures that feeling well. Because we were all working on the same shots, we could help each other when we discovered a neat trick or a useful technique. On projects like the Ethereal Effects, everyone had such wonderfully unique visions for their shots that it was a great source of inspiration seeing the different approaches during weekly review. There was room to explore, take risks, and try new things with the shots. There’s very rarely only one way to do something in VFX, and the projects never felt like “Here is exactly how you do this shot, go recreate this”. Our instructor, Ganz, would give us all the tools we needed, guide us when we needed it, but ultimately let us find our own paths to the final shot.