• Going back to the early days of Weta

    It must have been an amazing time at Weta in the mid-90s. Here’s a piece I wrote for One Perfect Shot which looks at the making of The Frighteners with vfx supe Wes Takahashi, who got brought in from ILM to help Weta finish making the film. He and the studio did a stellar job.

  • Seeing more

    It isn’t that long ago that the visual effects and animation industries were concentrated mostly in Los Angeles. For lots of reasons (ask me again sometime) the work is now spread throughout the globe. One outcome of this ‘globalisation’ of VFX and animation is that there’s never been more conferences, events and meet-ups to hear…

  • OK, what is this Megascans thing?

    A few months ago I started hearing about Swedish company Quixel’s Megascans and that it had been used by MPC on The Jungle Book for some of the intricate plant and jungle life textures on that film. But it was still unclear exactly what Megascans, a material library based on real-life scans of mostly vegetation…

  • Houdini. So hot right now

    SideFX asked me to find out what visual effects and animation studios were looking for in Houdini artists, and where they can learn more about the software, which I have to say is on something of a hot streak right now.

  • Stop. Stop-motion.

    Laika’s work on Kubo was just incredible, and although it hasn’t been a huge success, it showed off the magic that still exists in stop-motion animation. So I took at look at some present and previous innovations in the field, for Inverse.

  • From 20 years ago, Dr. Moreau

    This week will be the 20th anniversary of the release of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), a film plagued with problems. The original director Richard Stanley was replaced by John Frankenheimer, who then faced dealing with the eccentric stars Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, and even Stanley himself who snuck back on set in…

  • ‘It seemed insane, so of course, we did it’

    That’s how Laika vfx supervisor Steve Emerson described the making and stop motion animation of the 16-ft Giant Skeleton for Kubo and the Two Strings. Check out my Cartoon Brew breakdown of how they did it.

  • VFX_on_DVD: Warcraft

    There’s a couple of big films released recently that I think are going to have great Bluray and DVD releases. One of them is Warcraft, partly because of the opportunity to see some of the extensive art direction, production and visual effects that went on behind the film. Already you can check out a taste of…

  • The stuff you see at SIGGRAPH often becomes real tools one day

    Hoping this StyLit research, which I wrote about at Cartoon Brew, will do exactly that.

  • Facial tracking and AR about to get even more friendly

    I noticed researcher Hao Li was behind a new startup called Pinscreen which seemed to be doing some mysterious face tracking and AR app. So I talked to him about it for Inverse.