I wonder, if this is just the result of an technology shift. Twenty years ago, one needed highly specialized guys to build star ship models and coordinate a sto

I wonder, if this is just the result of an technology shift. Twenty years ago, one needed highly specialized guys to build star ship models and coordinate a stop motion animation of a space battle, ten years ago one needed for basically the same scene guys with really expensive workstations and Maya licenses. Today one can do very high quality work with free tools on an standard PC. ( And one can easily copy a few GB of rendered scenes to a server half a world away.) At least my observation is, that quite a few short films ( often as projects from film schools) are getting to a point, where they have really amazing VFX. This trend is probably accelerated by the more general use of VFX. Someone who specializes in building star ship models can only find work in SF films, but today someone who can render a complex transition for an advertisement uses the same technologies as someone who does 'real' VFX and can consequently transition much easier to real movies.