Month: July 2017

  • Head stretching and stomach holes: re-visiting the visual effects of ‘Death Becomes Her’

    “Bob had said to Meryl Streep: ‘Whatever Ken asks you to do, no matter how silly, just go with it. You can trust him.’ Because she must have been thinking, ‘What am I? What is this stupid thing?’ – Death Becomes Her visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston. By the early 1990s, ILM had already been…

  • SIGGRAPH’s Real-time Live!: a preview

    One of the coolest things at SIGGRAPH is Real-time Live! The event has actually changed quite a lot since its inception to include game engines, VR, real-time rendering, real-time sims and more. Check out this preview I wrote for Cartoon Brew.

  • ‘We’re making a movie about emojis’ – so how do you animate those things?

    One of the appeals of being an animator must be new character challenges – finding the right movement, finding the personality, finding the ‘voice’, even when the characters appear to be quite simple. That challenge was awaiting Sony Pictures Imageworks for The Emoji Movie, and I talked to anim supe Sacha Kapijimpanga for Spark CG…

  • Quickshots: ‘Valerian’s’ multi-world oner

    Weta Digital’s Valerian visual effects supervisor Martin Hill discusses that insane ‘oner’ of Valerian (Dane DeHaan) dashing through multiple worlds. Martin Hill: What’s happening in that sequence is, Valerian’s trying to get from one place to another as quickly as possible – that being a straight line. He’s just travelling in a straight line as…

  • Designing Baby Groot

    Marvel has released a short featurette from its Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 Blu-ray/DVD focusing on designing Baby Groot, and it includes comments from overall vfx supe Christopher Townsend and the concept art and practical build required for on-set shooting. Check it out below.

  • Seven years of dragons

    What the VFX teams have been able to do over six series of Game of Thrones is incredible – and there looks like some even more amazing CG dragon work to come this series. For Thrillist, I talked to BlueBolt, Pixomondo and Rhythm & Hues about their dragon VFX so far.

  • Why ‘Air Force One’ has some of the most talked about visual effects in history

    When Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One was released 20 years ago this week in 1997, it would be one of Boss Film Studios’ very last visual effects projects before founder Richard Edlund shut the effects company’s doors. The studio spectacularly delivered and destroyed a number of intricate miniature aircraft for the show. It also dived…

  • Planning out ‘Valerian’ used some lower-tech methods

    At FMX I got a chance to sit down with Valerian vfx supe Scott Stokdyk. We went through how the film was made, including a look at the video-vis director Luc Besson shot with his film school students. See the story at Cartoon Brew.

  • Behind the boldness of Bad Ape

    Weta Digital had to tackle a new hilarious character for War for the Planet of the Apes in Steve Zahn’s Bad Ape. Here’s how they did it, over at VFX Voice.

  • The social (VFX) lives of Hollywood

    One of the toughest things about covering visual effects can be getting great VFX imagery to display with a story. There’s often a lengthy approvals process, and sometimes film and TV distributors just want to keep certain things under wraps. That can make it hard to produce interesting stories; in visual effects, behind the scenes…