Hall of Fame Inductee’s Post-Production Team Nominated for VES Award

Published Mar 26, 2025

Hall of Fame Inductee’s Post-Production Team Nominated for VES Award

Culley Bunker and his team at Skulley FX received recognition for their VFX work on an episode of Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake.

Culley Bunker stands with four special effects artists from Skulley FX in front of a VES Awards backdrop. They are wearing suits and smiling.

Hall of Fame inductee Culley Bunker and the team at his studio, Skulley FX, have spent years working in post-production for TV shows, movies, commercials, and a range of other projects. Recently, Culley and his team (many of whom are also Full Sail grads) were honored with a nomination for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode at the Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards for their work on “It Has to Do With the Search for the Marvelous,” an episode of Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake.

The VES Awards is an annual celebration that “recognizes outstanding visual effects artistry and innovation in features, animation, television, commercials, games, and new media, and the VFX Supervisors, VFX Producers, and hands-on artists who bring this work to life.” For “It Has to Do With the Search for the Marvelous,” Skulley FX used a combination of traditional VFX strategies and AI tools to de-age the show’s star, Natalie Portman, in flashback scenes.

“[When we were de-aging Natalie Portman] we would make the nose slightly smaller, because when you age, all your cartilage keeps growing,” Culley describes. “So, the ears and nose get bigger and lips get smaller because some of the fat comes out of our face. We increased the lip size, we decreased the nose size. We made the eyebrows a little bushier and we did a lot of painting of creases and crevices and smile lines… This project had the time and money for us to be able to put everything that we've done in the industry to task.”

Culley says that the nomination was a welcome acknowledgement of the hard work they put into Lady in the Lake and the other projects they’ve contributed to over the years.

“I have 20-plus years of experience with this, and a lot of these guys have been doing thousands and thousands and thousands of beauty shots [in film and television]. So, it's a little bit of recognition of that skill set and that experience and that artistry. And it was recognized as some of the best [beauty VFX] work that people have seen [over the past year].”