Rising Sun Pictures has spent 30 years building a global reputation from South Australia. Now, with an Academy Award nomination for Sinners, the studio is showing just how far local talent can travel.
Picture the scene: you’re at the Academy nominees’ luncheon, someone tells you it’s time for the class photo, and somehow you find yourself between Benicio del Toro and Michael B. Jordan, with Kate Hudson just behind you. That was Adelaide visual effects supervisor Guido Wolter’s afternoon in LA, a few weeks back.
Guido was there because he’s nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 98th Academy Awards for his work at Adelaide’s Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) 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 Guido says that changes 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 says. “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,” he says. “It’s an incredible privilege to see that collective work acknowledged.”
From chicken legs to cinema screens
Guido spent his early childhood in what was then East Germany. The “spark” that set him on his path to VFX was a weird 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 little Guido.
“I realised that someone decided to make this house on chicken legs walk through the forest,” he says. “And 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 has never really left him. He 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 says. “You drive an hour out and you’re in the wine valleys, or down at Port Elliot, or up in the Flinders Ranges.”
Professionally, the move paid off. “Adelaide enabled me,” he says. “It gave me the platform to establish myself.”
Making the impossible real
So what actually is visual effects? “Very simply put,” Guido says, “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 ever delivered for an IMAX film. Most viewers wouldn’t pick it. “That’s the whole point,” Guido says.
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, the twins Smoke and Stack.
“Human faces are the hardest thing to do in VFX without setting off that uncanny valley effect,” Guido says. “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.”
Thirty years in the making
That RSP could pull off something like that – on a Hollywood tentpole, at IMAX resolution, from Adelaide – is the payoff for almost thirty years of problem-solving, innovation and meticulous work by a group of very talented people.
RSP started the way a lot of the best South Australian ideas do – over a few pints of Coopers.
In 1995, cinematographer Tony Clark and three mates sat down at the Rising Sun Inn, 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.
Their client list reads like a Hollywood roll call – Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros., Netflix – and their mantlepiece holds multiple AACTA awards. In 2015, their work on X-Men: Days of Future Past earned them nominations for both a Visual Effects BAFTA and Academy Award. Last year they were 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 (PDV) Rebate, stacked on top of a 30 per cent federal rebate.
“Without the help of the government, we wouldn’t exist,” Guido says. “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.”
Across South Australia, PDV work backed through the state rebate supported more than 1,000 jobs across 31 productions in 2024–25.
Could this be your career?
Here’s something Guido is keen to clear up: VFX is not a tech job.
“Visual effects is filmmaking on the computer,” he says. “Every decision is an artistic decision, a storytelling decision.”
He says the software can be taught. What can’t be taught is an eye for photography, colour, shape and form – and the ability to actually work with a team of people.
“Come in, be curious, be wanting to learn,” he says. “And we have a rule: don’t be an asshole. We need people who can receive feedback, action on it, and give it back in a healthy way.”
If you’re a talented South Australian thinking about a career in VFX, the way in is closer than you think. RSP’s partnership with Adelaide University for its Bachelor of Visual Effects has launched more than 250 VFX careers since 2015 – students spend up to 60 per cent of their degree on-site at RSP, working on real projects to real deadlines. No portfolio required to apply.
The Oscars ceremony is on 16 March. Avatar: Fire and Water is the VFX frontrunner – Guido cheerfully calls it “David against Goliath” – but for him, just getting to the nomination was already unimaginable.
“When my colleague first said we were going for the Academy, I literally laughed,” he says. “I thought he was crazy. And then suddenly we were nominated. An absolutely unreal moment.”
Find out more about South Australia’s screen industry here.
