Category: vfxblog
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The things you find when you’re doing retro vfx research…
Love these old ads for Rising Sun Pictures and Animal Logic (from a publication called Cinema Papers, June 1999.)
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Guillermo del Toro on the language of visual effects
If you haven’t seen Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water yet, I heartily recommend you do. It’s simply a great story, which I won’t spoil. But it’s also incredibly engaging as a film that combines practical make-up and suit effects with digital augmentation. Del Toro has taken that approach in several of his films…
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Making memories with BUF
When Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 came out, I remember thinking one of the coolest scenes was Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri) designing replicant memories – you see her scrubbing through moments and making slight tweaks and adjustments. One part of that scene features a children’s birthday, which was achieved by shooting real kids on…
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Woh, a VFX event on Last Jedi, Apes, Blade Runner, Paddington 2, Star Trek and Neill Blomkamp shorts
Check out that list again in the heading – those are some of the biggest visual effects projects around, and they’re all going to be discussed by the studios behind the work at the upcoming SPARK FX 2018 in Vancouver. It’s on Saturday 10th February at the VIFF Vancity Theatre, a neat cinema venue which will…
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Miniaturisation secrets: Eric Brevig on ‘The Indian in the Cupboard’
Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, soon in theatres, marks the latest in a rich history of films that have dealt with miniaturisation – that is, showing shrunken-down characters in a real-sized world. Films such as Fantastic Voyage, Inner Space, Willow, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Hook, The Indian in the Cupboard and Ant-Man are all ones that have…
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Titanic’s VFX producer on how James Cameron brought her onto the movie, and how she made it *into* the movie
It’s now 20 years since James Cameron’s Titanic was released. Back in 1997, somehow the film made it through an incredibly challenging shoot, a tense studio environment, constant media scrutiny and a gruelling post-production schedule to become the then most successful box office hit of all time. But Titanic was not without its challenges, especially…
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The secrets behind the life (and death) of Titanic’s propeller guy
A man falls from the poop deck, hitting the bronze hub of the starboard propeller with a sickening smack. That line from James Cameron’s script for Titanic, coming deep into scenes of the chaotic sinking of the famous cruiseliner, might sound simple enough. But it would turn out to be the basis of one of…
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‘Flubber’ turns 20: how ILM made the shape-shifting green goo come to life
Twenty years ago, the film release schedule was awash with CG and VFX-heavy projects. Industrial Light & Magic, which had had a hand of course in a number of these, further demonstrated a diverse visual effects skill set with its work on Flubber. Brand new challenges for the studio came in the form of Flubber itself,…
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Olivier Gondry on the making of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Come Into My World’
My recollection of music videos from the 1990s to early 2000s is that they were almost like the ultimate VFX showreel. Of course, this was at the same time that CGI was making headways in feature filmmaking, with music videos taking advantage, too, of advancements in digital effects, particularly compositing, to help tell their stories,…
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Quickshots: It’s 40 years since ‘Close Encounters’, but you can see it on the big screen again
Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the other big sci-film of 1977. In a year without Star Wars, the film’s effects practitioners would likely have won the visual effects Oscar (they were, of course, nominated). That’s because Close Encounters managed to use miniatures, motion control, optical compositing and even cloud tanks to…
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