This has been a banner year for blockbusters, depending on your point of view. If you're a studio exec studying box-office returns you might be unhappy with a double-digit decline in box-office revenues this summer. (Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, which is looking to rake in some serious dough this weekend, might help balance the scales somewhat.) But if you're a moviegoer, you're pretty happy — looking at CinemaScore audience reviews and Metacritic's index of movie reviews, Entertainment Weekly found that paying moviegoers are as happy with this year's big releases as last year's — and critics think this year's movies are an improvement from last year. And if you're a VFX artist, you've got a lot to look at, from the strikingly photoreal CG of The Lego Movie to the amazing character work in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

As usual, SIGGRAPH's line-up of Production Sessions will take a long look at the work that went into VFX on an array of big movies, starting with last year's Gravity and continuing through summer tentpoles X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, and upcoming releases including Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and Laika's stop-motion animated The Boxtrolls. Shorts will be represented by sessions on "The Dam Keeper" and "Feast," and Videogames will make a showing with sessions on Destiny and Killzone Shadow Fall.

Of all the sessions, the main event may turn out to be Thursday's show-closing "Twentieth Century Fox Presents the Visual Effects of X-Men: Days of Future Past," which brings together animation and VFX supervisors from four different facilities to discuss their work under production VFX supervisor Richard Stammers. Speaking on the panel will be Benoit Dubuc of MPC, Lou Pecora of Digital Domain, Derek Spears of Rhythm & Hues, and Adam Pascke of Rising Sun Pictures. Also likely to be popular are Wednesday morning's "Unmask the Secrets Behind The Amazing Spider-Man 2," with VFX supervisor Jerome Chen, animation supervisor David Schaub, and DFX supervisor David Smith; Wednesday afternoon's "Making Gravity at Framestore" with the film's VFX supervisor, Tim Webber, along with Framestore's Chris Lawrence and Martin Preston, CG supervisor and head of R&D, respectively; and, first thing on Monday morning, "Building Blocks for The Lego Movie" with CG supervisor Damien Gray, head of animation Rob Coleman, CG supervisor Aidan Sarsfield, and R&D lead Daniel Heckenberg.

SIGGRAPH also said DreamWorks Animation plans a special Wednesday-night screening of How to Train Your Dragon 2 to follow Wednesday afternoon's "DreamWorks Animation Presents The Growth of How to Train Your Dragon 2."

The Production Sessions are all held in the ballrooms in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre. If you plan to attend, you'll need a Full Conference or Select Conference pass to get in. And remember that SIGGRAPH is offering discounted registration this year to currently unemployed members of ACM SIGGRAPH or its parent organization, ACM.

Here's the full line-up of 19 Production Sessions, along with the official summaries provided by SIGGRAPH, announced earlier this month. You can also read all about them at the SIGGRAPH website.

The LEGO Movie is a CG animated feature film set in a world made entirely of Lego bricks. It was critical to the filmmakers that this world maintain a highly realistic connection to the look and feel of real Lego.

 

What resulted was a unique, photo-realistic, stop motion aesthetic and animation style, with everything on screen including the characters, sets, oceans and explosions being built and realized with accurate CG Lego bricks.

 

Essential to the story was the dynamic construction (and destruction!) of any of these elements into component bricks. And with a desire to echo the creative possibilities of Lego itself, Animal Logic's team of "masterbuilders" built a comprehensive Lego toolset that ensured artists could access and manipulate individual bricks, or the bricks within any asset, to create unique and spontaneous additions to the content of a shot. The results were often unscripted and highly entertaining.

 

Making a CG feature is complex at the best of times, but making a CG feature constructed entirely from bricks was a new and exciting challenge. It resulted in something quite different from conventional animation processes.

 

Damien Gray, CG Supervisor

Rob Coleman, Head of Animation

Aidan Sarsfield, CG Supervisor

Daniel Heckenberg, R&D Lead

 

After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Marvel’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” finds Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, living quietly in Washington, D.C. and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy—the Winter Soldier. Marvel Studios, ILM, Scanline VFX, and Lola take SIGGRAPH audiences through their VFX journey as they created some of the movie’s most heart-stopping moments.

 

Victoria Alonso, EVP of Visual Effects and Post Production, Marvel Studios/Executive Producer Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Solider

Dan DeLeeuw, VFX Supervisor

Russell Earl, VFX Supervisor ILM

Bryan Grill, VFX Supervisor Scanline VFX

Edson Williams, VFX Supervisor Lola

 

From Marvel, the studio that brought you the global blockbuster franchises of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, comes a new team–the Guardians of the Galaxy. An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy" expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits–Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon; Groot, a tree-like humanoid; the deadly and enigmatic Gamora; and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Quill discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand–with the galaxy's fate in the balance. Marvel Studios, MPC and Framestore take SIGGRAPH audiences through their VFX journey as they created some of the movie’s most heart-stopping moments.

 

Victoria Alonso, EVP of Visual Effects and Post Production, Marvel Studios/Executive Producer Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

Olivier Dumont, Associate VFX Supervisor

Kyle McCulloch, VFX Supervisor Framestore

Vincent Cirelli, VFX Supervisor, Luma Pictures

Nicolas Aithadi, VFX Supervisor, MPC

 

Merzin Tavaria and Stefen Fangmeier present a showcase detailing Prime Focus World’s groundbreaking work on Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Creating the world of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was a monumental task that involved an incredible amount of production design, as well as a tremendous amount of care to honor Frank Miller’s original vision of the popular graphic novels, while at the same time making the film aesthetically appealing for the big screen. Shot entirely on green screen, almost everything from the largest sets, to the smallest details had to be created in a computer environment. Tavaria and Fangmeier will give an insight into how the CG world of Sin City was created around the action, and discuss the challenges of completing over 2,000 stereo visual effects shots for a major feature film at a single company.

 

Merzin Tavaria, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Director, Prime Focus World

Stefen Fangmeier, Visual Effects Supervisor, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

 

In this behind-the-scenes panel on the feature animated film, How To Train Your Dragon 2 (June 2014), Writer/Director Dean DeBlois charts the growth of the characters and the nuanced filmmaking necessary to fully realize this next adventure in the secret and emotional world of dragons. Set five years later, Dragon 2 embraces the aging up of the characters, the matured tone, the heightened stakes, the more sophisticated design of the world and the growth of the technology required to meet these challenges. The artistic leadership of Dragon 2 will discuss the creative contributions that went into advancing the complexity and believability of the storytelling and the cinematography, as well as the leap forward the animators were able to make using Apollo, DreamWorks Animation’s ground-breaking next generation animation system.

 

Gil Zimmerman (Head of Layout)

Simon Otto (Head of Character Animation)

Dave Walvoord (VFX Supervisor)

 

"Maleficent" explores the untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the classic 'Sleeping Beauty' and the elements of her betrayal that ultimately turn her pure heart to stone. Set in a fantastical world of faeries, magical creatures, and otherworldly environments, the panelists will discuss the large range of challenges they tackled during the production. From facial motion capture to virtual character and set design and everything in between.

 

Carey Villegas, Senior VFX Supervisor

David Seager, MPC CG Supervisor

Kelly Port, Digital Domain VFX Supervisor

 

Visual effects artists from MPC (Moving Picture Company) and Double Negative will describe the creative and technical challenges behind Gareth Edward’s acclaimed Godzilla remake. The panelists will describe the processes involved in creating the hit movie of the summer, from the animation techniques used to bring the King of Monsters to life, through to final compositing methods.

 

Moderator

Mike Seymour (FXguide)

 

Panelists

Ferran Domenech, Animation Supervisor, MPC

Axel Bonami, 2D Supervisor, MPC

Stuart Farley, CG Supervisor, Head of 3D, Dneg Singapore

Christoph Ammann, CG Supervisor, Dneg London

 

Sony Pictures Imageworks created much of the visual effects for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, the sequel to the 2012 blockbuster directed by Marc Webb. The VFX team was challenged with the introduction of new villains, extensive digital environments and CG animation. Join Sony Pictures Imageworks visual effects leads for an inside look at this "amazing" film.

 

Jerome Chen, VFX Supervisor

David Schaub, Animation Supervisor

David Smith, DFX Supervisor

 

With the arrival of next generation consoles comes more processing power and memory… and with that, a whole lot more possibilities. Take an exclusive look behind the scenes of this Playstation 4 launch title and hear about the challenges the team were faced with during production. Learn more about the engine's new lighting and shading tech and take a closer look at how some of the effects like dynamic dust, rain and various particle effects are achieved.

 

Marijn Giesbertz, Lead Visual Effects

Michal Valient, Lead Tech

 

Join Walt Disney Animation Studios filmmakers including director Patrick Osborne (Head of Animation, Oscar(R)-winning short "Paperman") for a screening and presentation of the short "Feast".

 

Patrick Osborne

Head of Animation, "Paperman"

 

Josh Staub

VFX Supervisor