Tag: vfxblog

  • When you want to know, ‘How was it made?’

    UPDATE: Russell Earl from ILM is now attending VIEW, to break down his studio’s huge vfx work in Captain America: Civil War (remember that airport sequence?). And the directors of Dreamworks Animation’s Trolls, Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn, will both be there too.   Last week I wrote about Turin, Italy. The city has had a big…

  • Up&Up&VFX

    This Coldplay music video with VFX by Vania Heymann (who also co-directed the clip and GloriaFX and others just won the MTV VMA for Best Visual Effects. Check out the behind the scenes video which shows how some of the contrasting VFX were achieved – some very neat comp work and clever design in there.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Off the wall with the makers of cineSync and Frankie

    Some of the most-used apps in visual effects and post-production are ones that audiences rarely get to see. I’m talking about Cospective’s cineSync, a mainstay in teleconferencing reviews, and Frankie, the company’s browser-based solution. I don’t often have the opportunity to cover the use of these tools, so I thought I’d have some fun with the…

  • Massive’s Stephen Regelous on future AI, competition and a Massive app?

    When Massive (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) was first revealed to the world in 2001 as part of the release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, it stunned audiences – and the visual effects community – with its use of fuzzy logic to aid in crowd animations. Developed at Weta Digital…

  • Who ya gonna call (to do vfx)?

    Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters is out this weekend and takes the franchise to a whole new level. The original films were masterclasses in using visual effects to help tell the story – and telling jokes too. For my book, Masters of FX, I got to talk to both Richard Edlund, the original film’s visual effects supervisor…

  • John Knoll’s Death Star hobby project because, well, he’s John Knoll

    “…a fun hobby project that may or may not see use in an upcoming film…” If you were lucky enough to be at the Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 event in London on Friday or watching the livestream, then hopefully you saw what I think was one of the most insightful panel presentations that’s ever…

  • Volker Engel on Independence Day: Resurgence

    A few days after delivering the final effects shots on Independence Day: Resurgence, visual effects supervisor Volker Engel spoke to vfxblog about the significant effort behind Roland Emmerich’s newest film. Around 1700 vfx shots are in Resurgence, many of them massive effects simulations depicting the impact of a new wave of alien invasion on Earth.…