Nicholas Bateman ’08 Finds Success in VFX

Nicholas Ashe Bateman ’08, owner of visual effects company Maere Studios and founder of Anmaere Pictures, has made quite the name for himself in the filmmaking and visual effects industries over the past few years. He has worked on projects such as David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) and National Geographic’s Free Solo (2018). He even made his directorial debut with The Wanting Mare in 2020. His passion for filmmaking can be traced back to his roots in Loyola Blakefield’s Speech & Debate Program.

“Charles Donovan and Tom Durkin were huge forces during my formative years at Loyola,” said Bateman. “Mr. Durkin definitely saw me as someone who just would not shut up in class and was like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll find something productive to do with that.’ Being a part of Loyola’s Speech and Debate team became kind of the real foundation for me.”

Bateman was a freshman on the team when the program won its first National Championship in 2005 in Milwaukee. “I still have a picture with him rubbing my bald head after they shaved me,” said Durkin, who is now retired from education. “Nick is one of the most talented students with whom I had the pleasure of working in forensics.” Bateman would go on to serve as president of the program his junior and senior years. He was the only Loyola student to ever win the Harvard Tournament in his event, Dramatic Performance. He also still holds records for the most individual championships at National Invitational tournaments in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

After Loyola, Bateman attended George Mason University on a small speech scholarship, but quickly came to realize his passion for filmmaking outweighed the all-consuming lifestyle that collegiate speech demanded. He found himself getting home from classes in the evenings and renting movies or reading old film books that were gifted to him by former Loyola art teacher Michael Iampieri. A year later, Bateman transferred to Towson University to study theatre, but only lasted for half of a year. He dropped out and moved to New York City to follow his dream.

“I didn’t know anyone in New York, and I especially didn’t know anyone who was making movies. I just found myself there with a couple hundred dollars and was like, well, I have to figure out what to do now,” said Bateman. “Through some amazing miracle, the person across the hall in my apartment building was another such person who had found themselves in Brooklyn in 2010 and was trying to make movies. We became buddies, and he is someone I still work with to this day.”

The two set out to make a short film, which Bateman sent out to any filmmaker or visual effects artist he could find. The only two individuals who responded to his call were making movies of a similar scale in Los Angeles. “They were like, we can’t pay you, but they invited me to come out and join the circus, which was exactly what I was hoping for.”

Bateman spent the next several years bouncing around offices and on friends’ couches working on low-budget projects and trying to make a name for himself. This is when he noticed a lot of low- and mid-budget films were in need of affordable visual effects artists, so he taught himself the ropes with the hope to eventually make his own film.

Then, in 2016, he decided it was finally time to stop hoping and start doing. He began a crowdfunding campaign with his friend and got to work on his first feature-length film, The Wanting Mare, an epic sci-fi fantasy about a post-apocalyptic realm ripe with wild horses, fantastical cities, and denizens experiencing a cycle of eternal misery with the slight promise of a better future elsewhere. Over the course of the next four years, Bateman shot much of the film in a storage unit in northern New Jersey, while other shots were filmed along the coast of the northeastern United States and in Nova Scotia. The film featured around 500 visual effects shots.

The set of The Wanting Mare in Paterson, NJ.

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

VFX shot from The Wanting Mare

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

Filming The Wanting Mare in Nova Scotia.

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

Bateman working on costumes for The Wanting Mare.

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

VFX shot from The Wanting Mare

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

VFX shot from The Wanting Mare

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

The set of The Wanting Mare

Photo Credit: Maere Studios | Nicholas Ashe Bateman '08

The response was not overwhelming on the film festival circuit, but it was praised by local directors for its visuals, and more specifically, how it was created. “I think other filmmakers saw someone making a movie with five hundred visual effects shots, and the fact that we did it in an office, not in some big production studio, it was just great news for all filmmakers—that the production process didn’t have to be as expensive or require so many people,” said Bateman.

The way in which the movie was created has been very much publicized in the past two years. Bateman has been interviewed by several media outlets including Indiewire, VFX Voice, and No Film School about his creative process.

His film caught the attention of director David Lowery, who at the time was in the process of finishing his critically acclaimed film, The Green Knight, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I remember him saying he was a big supporter of The Wanting Mare, and then he kind of just put his faith in me to do the visual effects for his film.” Bateman spent nine months with Lowery and his assistant editor producing about a third of the visual effects in the film. “It was kind of surreal to be working on this movie that was budgeted for fifteen to twenty million dollars, but from all appearances it was no different than how I was making my movie.”

After working on The Green Knight, Bateman’s popularity exploded. Most recently, he directed and produced the visual effects for American musician Father John Misty’s newest music video, which released this January.

He is also helping Lowery on his next project, Disney’s Peter Pan and Wendy. “We essentially went right from The Green Knight into this movie. Originally, I was just doing design, drawing out the film’s characters, but now my company is doing a bunch of the visual effects for it as well.”

Now living in New Orleans with his fiancée, Claire, Bateman is also hard at work on his next feature-length project, which Sailor Bear (David Lowery) and SpectreVision (Elijah Wood) are producing. He plans to shoot the film in either New Zealand or Ireland for seven months. Bateman tries not to think about what lies ahead beyond that, but he does often find himself reflecting on where it all started.

“The core of what I’m interested in—all of the visual effects stuff—has really just been a structure to be able to tell my own little stories. And I’m constantly reflecting on my time at Loyola, because I’m very aware, as I bounce around over the years, how extraordinary of an education I was lucky enough to receive, and the sense of philosophy, self-examination, and constant rigor in trying to be as good of a person you can be are all intrinsic ideas to the stories that I’m interested in telling.”

To view more of Bateman’s work, please visit MaereStudios.com.