Month: February 2018

Thanks to Fox Renderfarm for sponsoring vfxblog

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My thanks to Fox Renderfarm for coming on board as a new sponsor of vfxblog.com. I’m grateful to them for helping me continue publishing a whole bunch of original content here, including retro VFX pieces.

Many VFX and animation studios already rely on Fox Renderfarm for cloud rendering, and they are one of the leaders in the field. There’s a bunch of case studies of companies and how they’ve taken advantage of Fox Renderfarm here.

vfxblog readers will soon be able to access some exclusive rendering credits from Fox Renderfarm with a special sign-up code. Look out for that on my Twitter feed.

And if you’re also interested in sponsoring vfxblog, please email me.

Dark City at 20: a conversation with colorist Peter Doyle

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Illustration by Aidan Roberts.

Filmed in Sydney and released 20 years ago this week in 1998, Alex Proyas’ Dark City surprised many by instantly becoming a neo-noir sci-fi classic. Fans of Proyas’ earlier works, including The Crow, were perhaps not surprised at the director’s adept skills in crafting a film around a dark sun-less world run by a mysterious group known as the ‘Strangers’.

Helping Proyas to achieve a distinctive look and feel to Dark City was Peter Doyle. Doyle is best known as championing the digital colour grading on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as lending his colorist skills on the Harry Potter films. Now he’s a supervising visual colorist at Technicolor, with recent credits on films such as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Darkest Hour and Paddington 2.

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Peter Doyle.

But before Lord of the Rings and all those other blockbuster films, Doyle made his mark at Dfilm in Sydney, a film production services lab formed in 1995 that Doyle joined to help establish a wider digital post-production ambit. One of Dfilm’s first prominent gigs in that regard would be Alex Proyas’ Dark City (the company would later go on to work on The Matrix, also filmed in Sydney).

On Dark City’s 20th anniversary, vfxblog asked Doyle, who is credited as visual effects creative director on the film, about his time on the project, which came right as traditional film workflows were truly transitioning to digital, and as Australia’s own visual effects industry was just ramping up. Continue reading “Dark City at 20: a conversation with colorist Peter Doyle” →

Tips from the VFX Oscar nominated supes for working with directors

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Joe Letteri. Chris Townsend. John Nelson. Stephen Rosenbaum. Ben Morris. They all weigh-in in this piece for Cartoon Brew on how they worked with their director.

An amazing part of this piece is that I was able to speak to three of these visual effects supervisors (John Nelson, Joe Letteri and Chris Townsend) at VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy in October 2017. That’s three Oscar-nominated supervisors at the one event (incredibly, VIEW in 2017 also featured the Oscar nominated animated features The Breadwinner and Loving Vincent).

If you haven’t been to VIEW before, I strongly recommend it – in 2018 the conference is on October 22-26. It’s a small event compared to say a big SIGGRAPH or FMX, but this intimacy is VIEW’s selling point. You actually get to interact with the speakers themselves, and they are presenting on THE big films and projects of the year, as evidenced by the Oscar nominees who tend to be there.

Keep an eye out on vfxblog.com for information on what will be coming up at VIEW this year.

Aaron Sims on the secrets of crafting compelling characters

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The creatures and characters you see in some of the biggest films and television shows are the result of countless hours of design, research, re-design and skilled artistry. Among the most prolific of creature and characters designers is the team at Aaron Sims Creative, headed up by design veteran Aaron Sims.

In recent times, ASC has worked on designs and visual effects for such projects as The Mist, It, War for the Planet of the Apes, Wonder Woman and Stranger Things 2. To do that, they follow what’s dubbed a ‘Sketch-to-Screen’ workflow involving concept design, key scenes and layout, 3D asset modeling, lookdev, rapid prototyping and previs, rigging, animation, compositing and final rendering.

Sims is going to be talking about that process – and a bunch of other aspects of ASC’s work – at the upcoming CG Futures event in Melbourne on 2-4 March. vfxblog got a special sneak preview of a Sketch-to-Screen futuristic robot project that will be shown at CG Futures, which Sims runs through below. Continue reading “Aaron Sims on the secrets of crafting compelling characters” →

‘We tried a million things’ – the oral history of Sphere’s sphere

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Illustration by Aidan Roberts.

Barry Levinson’s 1998 film Sphere, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week, brought with it a diverse array of visual effects straddling both the practical and digital worlds. Its central ‘character’, the sphere itself, was a CG creation by Cinesite, and proved to be one of the toughest design challenges on the movie.

Overall visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun and Cinesite laboured for months over the appearance and textural qualities of the sphere, which needed to be other-worldly, ‘perfect’ and non-reflective – all at the same time. In this oral history of the sphere, vfxblog looks back with members of the visual effects team on the film at how the CG creation was realised – even actor Samuel L. Jackson hilariously weighs in.

Note: Okun’s comments are taken from the fantastic documentary appearing on the Sphere DVD called ‘Shaping the Sphere: The Art of the Visual Effects Supervisor’, while Jackson’s words are from those he made during the audio commentary on the Sphere DVD. Continue reading “‘We tried a million things’ – the oral history of Sphere’s sphere” →

Industry news: Iloura merges with Method Studios, and the lost Pirates 3 interview

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Sister visual effects studios Iloura and Method, both owned by Deluxe, are combining under a single brand – Method Studios.

Iloura, an Australian VFX studio with a 30 year history in Melbourne and Sydney, had in particular been knocking it out of the park recently with killer work on projects such as Game of Thrones, Fury Road, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and many other feature films and TV shows. And Method, itself a studio with a rich 20 year history, continues to be a major contributor to big visual effects films, including Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming.

You can read more about Iloura and Method’s long histories in VFX and about their new combined pipelines at methodstudios.com, but after hearing about them coming together into one brand, I wanted to share a fun story about one of my first interactions with Method from more than a decade ago.

The first time I tried to cover a project by Method Studios, it actually didn’t work out. Well, an interview happened, but I never published it. This was in 2007 for the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, in which Method Studios contributed 13 shots of miniature Jack Sparrows (Johnny Depp) hanging around the dreadlocks of the larger Jack.

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It was a cool sequence – dubbed ‘Little Jacks’ – and one that involved, I thought, some nice compositing to integrate live action miniature Depps into the plates. I was publishing occasional interviews on vfxblog back then, and after some Method employees answered my questions, I looked to put the piece online.

Except, there was a problem.

I wasn’t able to get any images from that scene (this was a Disney issue, nothing to do with Method). Without any visual aids to go with the story, I never published it. Back then, it was hard to source images (sometimes it still is). And although YouTube had been around for a couple of years, it was extremely rare for specific clips to be available at the time.

Ten years later, that’s all changed. So now, here, only a decade late, is my first ever vfxblog interview with Method, with plenty to illustrate it from At World’s End. And I hope to continue to cover the great work of Method, including by the teams in Sydney and Melbourne from the former Iloura offices, into the future. Continue reading “Industry news: Iloura merges with Method Studios, and the lost Pirates 3 interview” →