Directors Guild of America President Michael Apted today announced the five nominees for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for 2007.
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The Visual Effects Society (VES) today announced the nominees for the 6th Annual VES Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding visual effects in over a dozen categories of film, television, commercials and video games. Nominees were chosen Saturday, January 5, 2008 by numerous panels of VES members who viewed submissions at the FotoKem screening facilities in Burbank. ... »
The setting of the $250 million The Golden Compass, based on a novel by Philip Pullman, is an alternate world where humans’ spirits are embodied in animals — talking “daemons” that follow them everywhere — and polar bears are ferocious armored creatures with a kingdom of their own in the arctic north.
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If the Golden Globes are still to be considered a harbinger of Oscars to come, consider this morning's announcement of nominees by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association an indication of many future plaudits for Atonement. The World War II-era period drama directed by Joe Wright led the field with seven Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture (Drama) and Best Director (Motion Picture).... »
As cable channels get more adventurous with original programming, the scope of VFX jobs for TV is expanding dramatically. For the recent six-hour Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Tin Man — a loose contemporary adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — Vancouver VFX shop Anthem FX ramped up production to crank out no fewer than 1500 FX shots for delivery in the HDCAM SR 4:4:4 format.... »
Generally, when an Internet site dedicated to information on "scene releases" (read: pirated material being widely distributed online) receives email from someone involved in the movie industry, it's a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist notice or worse. But when the administrator of one such site got an email from producer Eric D. Wilkinson, it was full of sincere, if grudging, gratitude for the role of "the scene" in raising awareness of his movie.... »
For Scourge, a low-budget horror film with the tag line “you are what it eats,” cinematographer Corey Robson employed a pair of JVC ProHD camcorders to capture high-quality, high-definition images — his producer's GY-HD250 was the main camera, and his own HDV GY-HD100 served as B camera — and then broke out a copy of Apple’s Final Cut Studio and Color to edit and finish the movie. We talked to him about the good, the bad, and the buggy.... »
Todd Haynes' I'm Not There is no ordinary biopic. Inspired by the life and music of Bob Dylan, it uses six different actors, including Cate Blanchett and an 11-year-old African-American boy, to portray him at various stages of his life. Brilliantly edited, I'm Not There adds up to more than the sum of its parts — it honors Dylan's legacy while suggesting the flaws of rock music's myths of sincerity and authenticity.... »
It’s easy to believe that toys in a toy store might come alive, but the store itself? That was the challenge for the visual effects crews who put the magic into writer/director Zach Helm’s fantasy comedy Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.... »
For an animated short making the festival rounds, filmmaking team Andy and Carolyn London didn't seek out the most cutting-edge workflow, or the most efficient one. Instead, they ended up shooting Hi-8 video, loading it into Adobe Flash, and then painstakingly tracing each frame on a Wacom tablet in stark, graphic-novel-influenced strokes. The process was nothing if not tedious — but it got the job done, and the Londons now have an animated short with enough detail in the image to survive a 35mm film-out.... »
