Selected Press
Print and online coverage of the paintings and the film work, 2005 to now.
-
Eki Magazine · Liquid Light · Winter 2025 …artist and filmmaker who captures the unseen, transforming fluid dynamics, light, and organic motion into immersive visual worlds.
-
UK Screen Alliance · 30 January 2024
Union's stunning VFX work for Yorgos Lanthimos' award-winning comedy Poor Things
These 'inky' sky and ocean environments were created referencing the work of artist Chris Parks.
-
VFX Voice · 9 January 2024
Liberating the Wealth of Surreal Visual Artistry of Poor Things
by Chris McGowan
We were already coming up with ideas for the design, such as the use of inks and paints in water tanks and shooting slow-motion to create surrealistic liquid-sky effects that had cloud-like properties. We also looked to the art world for further inspiration and uncovered artists using these techniques in practice.
This led to the production designers' discovery of Chris Parks, whose liquid photography experiments were then incorporated into the skies.
-
The Art of VFX · 2024
Poor Things: Simon Hughes & Tallulah Baker — Union VFX
by Vincent Frei
We presented some previous water tank and liquid experiments shot in slow motion along with similar examples from within the art world, to the production team leading to a collaboration with artist Chris Parks.
As mentioned, we collaborated with artist Chris Parks who has created a whole host of these strange liquid experiments. He allowed us to experiment with his work within our skies at low resolution.
-
Digital Trends · 15 December 2023
Poor Things VFX supervisor Simon Hughes on creating Yorgos Lanthimos's surreal world
by Jason Struss
We knew that things like sky environments were something that they wanted to find a way of elevating. We wanted to come up with something surreal and fluid and unusual, but still within the realm of believability. We did a lot of research looking at things like slow-motion photography of different liquids in water, like inks, to see how they create a sense of miniature clouds that move in unusual ways.
We also looked at artists within the art world to see how they were using them to create unique shapes. That really influenced Shona and James, who looked at an artist named Chris Parks. He created a lot of these liquid experiments in water that influenced the visuals in the movie. It was a big cross-collaboration project between the VFX and Production Design teams.
-
Animation World Network · 15 December 2023
The Perfectly Imperfect VFX of 'Poor Things'
by Trevor Hogg
I offered up the idea that when you shoot inks and detergents in water tanks at slow framerates, you get these bizarre shapes and patches that almost feel like cloud textures… We started looking at the art world to see if there were any artists doing experiments with this kind of material, and there are hundreds of them.
This led us to an artist named Chris Parks who does in-camera experiments using different liquids and oils. The production team chatted with him, and he allowed us to use some of his footage, which could be composited into what we were creating rather than going into a big special effects shoot.
-
fxguide · 11 December 2023
fxpodcast #363: Poor Things
These skies had to have a fluid quality about them and looked stylised and surreal. The VFX team worked closely with the art department to create a distinct look and feel from the early stages of pre-production, referencing the fluid art and films of Chris Parks.
-
befores & afters · 9 December 2023
Miniatures, LED walls and live-action animals stitched together: the VFX of 'Poor Things'
by Ian Failes
The production also did some research and found an artist named Chris Parks who has created a whole host of these strange liquid experiments that are actually available to buy! They spoke directly with him and together we came up with a process where we could experiment with his work for our skies at low resolution. We'd drop them behind real skies and put them in the deep background. Once we worked out which things worked well, we could go back and purchase them at higher resolution and work them up.
-
Frame.io Insider · 10 July 2023
A Question of Perception: How This Innovative Studio Sees VFX From a Different Angle
by Laurence Grayson
And you can see this connection to the physical world in particular with the Quantumania MOE, where the Perception team worked with Chris Parks. Chris is an expert not only in creating violent and beautiful chemical interactions, but also in capturing them on film. And they’re a perfect match for the fantastic sub-atomic setting of the Quantum Realm, where the normal rules of time and space no longer apply.
The result is something that’s both abstract and emblematic, with vibrant organic moments grabbing the viewer’s attention without drawing too much focus from the credits as they roll. “It was just magical and one hundred percent not makeable in CGI, it’s so detailed,” says Greg, who’s clearly a huge fan of Chris Parks’ work.
-
Broadcast · April 2023
How holograms and chemical reactions enhanced Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania
Marvel Studios licensed content from Chris Parks, an artist specializing in microscopic chemical experiments that helped build the visuals for the Quantum Realm, and it was passed along to Perception to edit, design and manipulate.
-
Perception · 2023
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — main-on-end titles
To help inspire the appearance of the Quantum Realms within the film, Marvel Studios turned to Chris Parks, an artist specializing in microscopic chemical experiments. When our team saw the incredible work from Chris Parks, we immediately knew that we wanted our title sequence to reflect his work from the visuals of the Quantum Realm.
-
British Cinematographer · 12 May 2022
BlueBolt delivers epic VFX on The Northman
This film is very heavily rooted in Norse mythology, which brought with it a few sequences that centred around Yggdrasil (the tree of life), Valholl, and the "Place of Visions" that depicted Amleth's ancestral lineage. These were all CG constructions, paired with macro chemical photography element by the artist Chris Parks, that had to sit within the gritty realism of the film. Finding that balance between mysticism and photorealness was a challenge in itself that required a lot of collaboration of ideas.
-
EarthEcho International · June 2021
Award-winning cinematographer Chris Parks teams up with Philippe Cousteau Jr.
Chris Parks, an artist with a reputation for creating vast expansive worlds and impossible to film visuals, without digital enhancement… is teaming up with explorer, social entrepreneur and ocean advocate Philippe Cousteau, Jr. to auction off a series of Parks's original fluid painting NFTs.
The three pieces are created using the same optics and equipment as was created to film flows of plankton for documentaries such as the BBC's Blue Planet. It utilizes the most up to date lighting controller systems and cameras, combined with 200-year-old Victorian microscope optics, and hi resolution digital cameras together with control systems built in the 1800's.
-
shots · 18 November 2019
Consol Glass gets down to the nitty gritty
by Linda Codega
With beautiful, painterly transitions and shots that look like galaxies made out of cellular structures, director Fausto Becatti of Bioscope Films has created a new visual language to talk about glass… So much of this ad is seamless, and in fact, 95 percent of the shots were filmed in-camera, with only two CGI constructions making it into the final cut. Creating these sci-fi inspired images was achieved with specialist rigs, macro lenses, and alchemical science.
-
IDIDTHAT · November 2019
Bioscope Films — Craft Mention, Direction
A passion project for Bioscope Films director Fausto Becatti, the TV spot involved working with microscopic and macroscopic lenses, as well as commissioning the world-renowned Chris Parks, a specialist in capturing chemical reactions.
-
The Line of Best Fit · 30 April 2018
Ambition, Uncertainty and Simian Mobile Disco
by Patrick Clarke
They were joined by new collaborators The Deep Throat Choir, conducted through an endlessly intricate weave of lush and labyrinthine melody by Louisa Gerstein and backed by stunning live displays by Chris Parks and Saam Farahmand.
The visual artists were stationed over two miles away in a laboratory in Soho, tailoring stunning and hypnotic flows of psychotropic visuals using petri dishes full of coloured fluid, manipulated in real time, filmed on the same macro-lenses used for The Blue Planet and beamed onto the gigantic Barbican screens.
There are a multitude of moving parts, any number of which could falter, but they glide beautifully in time – the choir's weaving and mazing layers of voice, rumbling and reverberating around the room's perfect acoustics as Parks and Farahmand's dazzling projections shapeshift sometimes like cells dividing, and sometimes like stars exploding. It is, in short, transcendently stunning.
-
The Line of Best Fit · 30 April 2018
Ambition, Uncertainty and Simian Mobile Disco
by Patrick Clarke
Parks and Farahmand’s dazzling projections shapeshift sometimes like cells dividing, and sometimes like stars exploding. It is, in short, transcendently stunning.
-
Murmurations Robert Hollingworth
-
Barbican Centre · 4 April 2018
Simian Mobile Disco present Murmurations
Featuring Live Fluid Art by Chris Parks and Saam Farahmand – microscopic fluid paintings, transmitted to the Barbican from a Central London laboratory with support from The Mill.
-
Animation Magazine · April 2018
Ironing Out the VFX of A Wrinkle in Time
We placed Storm Reid on a robotic arm, shot with a Phantom camera at high frame rates, had a lot of wind machines to give us a floating quality, and Tobias and his lighting team got creative with light projections. We put lights on the robotic arms as well to countermove across as if there's this light travelling over and behind Meg as she's floating. Then we combined CG with these beautiful organic ink tank elements created by Chris Parks. Everything came together with Storm Reid's performance to make an absolutely beautiful moment.
-
Moonraker VFX · 2018
One Strange Rock
From the magnetosphere surrounding earth to the inside of a coil of DNA, we created a look that felt as though it could have been captured in camera. We achieved this by using a combination of CG elements with real purposefully shot FX elements by specialist Chris Parks to create a very organic and optical feel to the visual storytelling.
-
Framestore · 2018
One Strange Rock — titles
The designers worked with elements of Chris Parks' photography, split out into 2.5D, to create their abstract images; posing questions of vast scale and scope, from the cellular to the planetary, and challenging the viewer to look at the Earth through a new lens.
Specialist photography by Chris Parks, Tim Shepherd and many other talents provided a library of organic textures shot at high speed, which were also layered into the CG work to give even greater realism and depth.
-
Cartoon Brew · 7 October 2016
Terrence Malick Prefers Old-School VFX For ‘Voyage of Time,’ Opening Today in IMAX
by Ian Failes
-
The Film Stage · 16 August 2016
The Making of Terrence Malick’s Ambitious Documentary ‘Voyage of Time’
by Jordan Raup
These were literally chemical experiments we were doing, to see how various liquids, dyes, gasses and fluids might behave as we filmed them at high-speed.
-
Little Black Book · 15 April 2016
Droga5's stunning Hennessy ad tells the amazing story of the pioneering Piccards
The film was directed by Daniel Wolfe of Somesuch.Co. Part of Daniel's vision was a collaboration with photography specialist Chris Parks - who's abstract imagery has been in benchmark pieces such as Tree of Life and Gravity.
-
Promonews · 23 March 2015
Daniel Wolfe wins at 2015 SXSW Awards with Iron Sky
-
shots · 7 August 2014
Paolo Nutini: Iron Sky
Visual FX — Chris Parks
-
Iron Sky — Paolo Nutini AdAge Creativity
-
Sight & Sound · 10 March 2014
Digital native: Chris Parks
by Ian Christie
Chris Parks had an earlier introduction to stereography than most. Through his father's Oxford Scientific Films, which made science and natural history documentaries, he developed an early passion for specialised filming, which led to working on IMAX 3D shorts. After the Royal College of Art, he designed and published 3D books and worked on 3D museum displays, before moving into special effects for such visionary films as The Fountain and The Tree of Life.
"While I was still at school I started working with my father, who was passionate about the natural world and always wanted to communicate what he found amazing in natural history. And I was particularly fascinated by IMAX 3D. We built an optical bench system to shoot all the things that IMAX couldn't do in 3D, which was everything under six inches in size, rather than concentrating on all the big stuff."
-
BAFTA Guru · 16 July 2012
Chris Parks: Interview
by Quentin Falk
-
{ feuilleton } · 8 August 2011
Chris Parks
by John Coulthart
Chris Parks created effects sequences for The Fountain and The Tree of Life. His showreel can be viewed here.
-
AnOther Magazine · 5 August 2011
Chris Parks
by John-Paul Pryor
Chris Parks is the mastermind behind what has been much touted as the 2001-esque sequence in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life – a hallucinatory swirling miasma of imagery that takes into its sway the history of time, the vast mysteries of the universe and metaphysical notions of life before birth. Considering the profundities at the heart of Malick's celluloid oeuvre, it's little surprise he was drawn to the work of the artist, who famously also worked on Aronofsky's The Fountain. There is something compellingly archetypal about the self-coined "fluid paintings" Parks creates – a psychedelic visual experience taking its cue from the natural world that is both strangely familiar and entirely alien in nature, tapping into a vein of collective consciousness like an intravenous shot of mescaline.
-
fxguide · 15 July 2011
VFX supe Dan Glass on The Tree of Life
by Ian Failes
There were two avenues we approached here. We went to the father/son duo of Peter and Chris Parks who have done work over the years on nature footage and marine biology. They also shoot small microbial creatures and organisms. They also have an experimental lab process of mixed chemicals and fluids that create these extraordinary rich shapes and designs. We commissioned them to shoot some material for us that was more apt for the microbial realm. It was very subtly augmented.
-
Animation World Network · 1 June 2011
Giving VFX Birth to 'Tree of Life'
by Bill Desowitz
Microbial, the molecular and cellular origination of life, which was primarily done by the London boutique One of Us, with supplemental work by Method… and the father/son team of Peter and Chris Parks, who shot interesting flows of colors.
-
The Sunday Telegraph — Seven · I created outer space for Hollywood – in a Pyrex dish · 28 January 2007 I'd start with a small Pyrex dish of clear liquids – this is my canvas, albeit a three-dimensional, constantly moving one. I'd then add single drops of paint, inks and dyes, and start to mix the liquids with my tiny brushes, needles and miniature palette knives. I use fluids that, through their mutual reaction, cause a microscopic movement or flow which I then capture in extreme close-up on moving film and in still photographs.
I recreated a meteor storm on our micro-level, for example, by mixing individual specks of curry powder with drops of alcohol and then capturing on film the resulting explosion. When finally ‘sized up’ and transferred to the big screen, it looks like an onslaught of flaming meteorites.
Our canvas is very small: sometimes we'd be shooting an area the size of a pinhead. Yet, by using specially developed optics, we can enlarge our pinhead-sized canvas to fill an Imax screen. It probably sounds counterintuitive for something as vast as outer space to be ‘created’ on a microscopic level, but the processes at work are very similar.
-
British Journal of Photography · New frontiers · 26 January 2007 -
Alchemy — GoldAir Arts · Liquid Assets · January 2007 Chris, who is a Design graduate of the Royal College of Art and an Engineering graduate of Imperial College, London, is also a successful Hollywood special effects man having recently created much of the special effects for the forthcoming Warner Bros film "The Fountain" starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.
Chris has created a 'Tardis' of equipment in his studio where he fuses old Victorian lenses with the most modern and high tech digital equipment to combine light, heat and liquid to capture the paintings. The effect is stunning.
-
Animation World Network · 21 November 2006
Fountain VFX: Petri Dish
by Bill Desowitz
I'm proud of the work that Dan and Jeremy pulled off because I truly believe that it's unlike anything that's been done before. There are lots of shots where the effects are on their own in their full screen glory, like the dying star, and it looks very psychedelic and very new and very different.
And I think it's going to be looking really good for a very long time because it's real particles in real physical space. It's not like the technology that was responsible for it is going to change and we're going to start to see through it, which I find in a lot of CGI work sometimes six months or a year down the line. As an audience member, you start to see the magic trick.
-
élan · Abstract Evolutions · Autumn 2006 If I did not photograph it, it would be gone forever.
-
Experience · Liquid Assets · April 2006 Looking at Chris Parks' stunning images that carry evocative titles such as "Hot Froth" and "Poseidon's Static," it will come as little surprise that the artist also works on special effects in Hollywood.
Explains Chris: "Having studied Engineering at Imperial College and then Design at the Royal College of Art, much of my professional life has been concerned with the oceans, film and photography."
The success of each fluid painting depends on many factors: the different mediums used and how they interact with each other, together with lighting, temperature control and air currents. Each simple dust particle plays a part in the success or failure of a painting.