People hear "VFX planning session" and assume it's a sales meeting. It's closer to the opposite. It's where a senior supervisor sits with the script and the director and works out, shot by shot, what is actually a visual effect and what just feels like one.
Half the value is subtraction. A script read as "forty VFX shots" is often twenty real ones and twenty that are a set-dressing job, a lens choice, or something you can do practically on the day for a tenth of the cost. Finding those early is the cheapest money a production ever spends.
The other half is the handful of genuinely hard shots getting the attention they need before they're locked. Those are the ones that decide a budget. Naming them in pre-production, while you can still change how they're shot, is worth more than any amount of cleverness in post.
Why we do it before the shoot, not after
Every production pays for its VFX decisions either early, with clarity, or later, with money and stress. I've never seen a third option.
The expensive version looks like this. The shot gets designed in the edit, months after the camera wrapped, when the only people who can fix it are in post and the only currency left is budget. The cheap version is a conversation in pre-production where someone senior asks the boring questions. What's real, what's CG, where's the camera, what can we get on the day. Before a single frame is shot.
"We'll fix it in post" is fine, as long as you've costed it. The trouble is the sentence usually means we didn't decide. A problem caught on the day costs a conversation and maybe a reset. The same problem caught in the edit costs roto, tracking, cleanup, a CG build, and three rounds of "can you make it feel a bit more real?"
What you walk out with
A real scope. A real timeline. And far fewer surprises, because surprises are a planning failure, not bad luck.
You also get an honest answer to a question most studios won't volunteer: which of these shots don't need us at all. A studio that's only paid to add shots has every reason to add shots. The work we're proud of is as often what we talked a production out of as what we delivered.
None of this is glamorous. It's just the difference between VFX that serves the film and VFX that rescues it.
That conversation is what a planning session is for.
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