Year: 2018

  • Animation tools of the future?

    SIGGRAPH’s tech papers often herald new features in vfx and animation tools. I highlighted a few for Cartoon Brew.

  • Jurassic Week: the history of Viewpaint

    This week vfxblog is celebrating Jurassic Week, a whole week of Jurassic Park-inspired articles to celebrate the imminent 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park and the upcoming release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. First up, a look at ILM’s secret weapon in bringing its photoreal dinosaurs to life: Viewpaint, a 3D texturing tool that let artists…

  • James Cameron on the state of 3D, his plans for immersive filmmaking, how he approached Avatar creature design, why machines won’t like being slaves, and his promise to do a commentary track for The Terminator

    I was lucky enough to score a ticket last night to see James Cameron speak in Sydney. It was at a Vivid event, a festival here famous for lighting up city landmarks and for presentations on culture, new ideas and art and technology. Cameron shared his journey on all sorts of things, mostly related to…

  • All about cymatics

    For Side Effects, I talked to Method Studios about their cymatic effects work done in Houdini for Black Panther. It’s awesome when science guides the art.

  • Colossus rides again

    For Cartoon Brew, I asked Framestore how they completed the CG Colosuss for Deadpool 2.

  • Enter the Trojan Horse Golden Ticket Challenge

    I’ve been a regular attendee at Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn for a few years now. Formerly in Portugal, THU is landing in Malta this year, and the location looks stunning. What’s exciting is, you can enter the Golden Ticket Challenge art competition to get there yourself. There are two categories – student and professional…

  • Retro vfx: Godzilla is 20!

    In vfxblog’s ‘Man-in-suit, miniatures, mechanics and modern CG: looking back at 20 years since Godzilla’, we chat to visual effects supervisor Volker Engel about this massive 1998 release and its use of practical, miniature, animatronics, puppet and CGI effects – all at once. The Q&A has some fun new facts about the teaser trailer for…

  • Invisible effects and how they were invisible

    There’s always so much great film work around that’s invisible, and for 3D World magazine, I highlighted a few recent releases. My favourite bit is this feature image which just has the sand bags for a deer that will be later added in for the film, Three Billboards.

  • Behind the scenes of Altered Carbon

    For 3D World magazine, I talked to vfx supe Everett Burrell about the making of Netflix’s Altered Carbon – an amazing show.

  • Willow is 30!

    It’s very nearly the 30th anniversary of Ron Howard’s Willow, a huge effects film full of practical fx, miniatures, optical composites, matte paintings…and digital morphing. This was ILM’s big breakthrough into 2D image manipulation. I recently wrote about for VFX Voice magazine, and you can check out that article here.