• Ian Spriggs on CG portraits and designing characters for Neill Blomkamp

    Ian Spriggs is a character artist with experience at several visual effects studios and most recently at Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios. Here, he has taken on some of the most elaborate modelling and texturing tasks of his career. Spriggs is also well-known for his CG portraits and self-portraits, including one of Blomkamp himself. I sat…

  • Thor vs. Hulk

    During the filming of this cool scene in Thor: Ragnarok, vfx supe Jake Morrison mixed up the scales of the stunt doubles. And ILM did a stellar job helping to re-imagine CG Hulk. Find out more at SYFY WIRESYFY WIRE.

  • Reflecting on ‘Valerian’: concept artist Ben Mauro

    At Trojan Horse was a Unicorn in Portugal recently, I got to sit down with Ben Mauro, an art director, concept artist, creature designer and illustrator whose work has appeared in such films as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Lucy, Elysium, Chappie and the Hobbit films, plus several games and other places.…

  • vfxblog readers get a discount to SIGGRAPH Asia

    One of the reasons I try and get to different conferences is that there often ends up being presentations on VFX and animation that you get early access to or don’t get shown anywhere else. That’s exactly what looks set to be shown soon at SIGGRAPH Asia in Bangkok, taken place between 27 and 30…

  • Behind the scenes with anim and rigging tool Akeytsu

    Check out the Akeytsu tool from Nukeygara, a new release that’s been in the works for a while but approaches animation and rigging in a new way. Story at Cartoon Brew.

  • Let’s all move to LA, in 2049

    Los Angeles in 2049 is an over-populated metropolis, threatened by rising sea levels, and featuring vastly different scale buildings, from sprawling favelas to mile high pyramids. That’s how the city is presented in Blade Runner 2049, which had to show a location 30 years into the future from the original Blade Runner and had the benefit…

  • What happens in Vegas

    In the third act of Blade Runner 2049 we arrive at a stark orange-y Las Vegas, now a wasteland where the replicant and Blade Runner K (Ryan Gosling) has sought out the old-school Blade Runner Deckard (Harrison Ford). Much of the visual effects work in that sequence was handled by Framestore (overseen by visual effects…

  • More Joi: how the giant ‘Blade Runner 2049’ hologram shot was pulled off

    As a follow-up to my earlier coverage of Double Negative’s ménage à trois hologram work for Blade Runner 2049, overall visual effects supervisor now shares with vfxblog how Dneg also carried out the stunning giant hologram scene also featuring Joi. This time, actress Ana de Armas is playing Joi as a hologram advertisement as she…

  • Special effects secrets

    For SYFY WIRE, I got to chat to the team at Blood Brothers FX about the joy of practical effects for horror films (warning, slightly gory).

  • How ‘Blade Runner 2049’s’ virtual ménage à trois was made

    The ménage à trois between K (Ryan Gosling), his companion hologram Joi (Ana de Armas) and Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a stunningly realised sequence. It involves the real human Mariette interacting with K, while also ‘merging’ at times with Joi. The sequence involved significant visual effects planning and execution,…