• Photogrammetizing Phil Tippett’s very awesome stop-mo puppets

    It was announced a short while ago that Phil Tippett and his studio were contributing to an AR game called HoloGrid: Monster Battle. Then they had a successful Kickstarter for the game, so it’s definitely happening! Also, they used photogrammetry to capture Phil’s various stop motion puppets for use in the game – here’s my…

  • Old meets new: the vfx of Independence Day – Part 2

    Under the artful watch of visual and digital effects supervisors Volker Engel, Doug Smith and Tricia Ashford, a crack team of in-house effects artists and several post houses carried out the significant CG, matte painting and compositing duties for Independence Day. Among those was VisionArt, which came onto the production late in the game to help produce…

  • Old meets new: the vfx of ‘Independence Day’ – Part 1

    Roland Emmerich’s 1996 disaster blockbuster Independence Day is about to get a very new sequel which features the latest in cutting-edge digital visual effects. Twenty years ago the director and his prolific effects team were faced with the gargantuan task of realizing big, big shots, a feat they achieved using both CG techniques – at the time still…

  • Need a CG car in your spot?

    This Blackbird car rig from The Mill is almost too cool to talk about, so just watch the vid.

  • Tentacles, and everything else

    With Hank, Pixar’s creative and technical team has once again outdone itself. I talked to supervising technical director John Halstead about bringing the octopus to life, for OnePerfectShot.

  • A long chat with a great vfx supe

    Bill Westenhofer is a great guy and a great vfx supervisor – so I really enjoyed finding out more about his experience on Warcraft. This is my first piece for MovieMaker magazine. Read it to find out which shot Bill did himself on the film – in Blender!

  • The secrets behind Bad Robot’s vfx for ’10 Cloverfield Lane’

    A lengthy Q&A with Bad Robot/Kelvin Optical vfx supervisor Luke McDonald about 10 Cloverfield Lane.

  • Animator Tom St Amand reflects on 25 years of ‘The Rocketeer’

    Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer was released 25 years ago today – on 21 June, 1991. Tom St Amand was ILM’s stop motion animator on the film and responsible for bringing to life an armatured version of the flying character which would then be composited into live action aerial plates. vfxblog asked St Amand to go…

  • Battle of the vfx

    Two of the nicest artists in vfx – Steve Kullback and Joe Bauer – are featured in this Variety video hosted by David Cohen on the Battle of the Bastards ep in Game of Thrones.

  • vfx_shot: Taking flight

    MPC CG supervisor James Rustad details the visual effects required for Angel and Archangel’s wings in X-Men: Apocalypse.