Scott Farrar received his first Oscar nomination for best achievement in visual effects for Cocoon, and went on to win the Oscar in 1996 for his work on that film. At that time, he was a visual effects cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic. Since then, as a visual effects supervisor at ILM, he has stacked up five more Oscar nominations, the sixth for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, an award he shares with Scott Benza of ILM, Matthew E. Butler of Digital Domain, and special effects supervisor John Frazier.... »
Wiseman may be best known as a pioneer of the cinema vérité school of documentary, which minimizes the director’s presence, but here, he comes close to Busby Berkeley territory, as he acknowledges in the following interview. Working for the first time in HD, he shows new possibilities in the medium, asCrazy Horse matches the color and beauty of 35mm.... »
Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is an unconventional look at American violence. The first 20 minutes of the film are a radically nightmarish montage. While the rest of We Need to Talk About Kevin is somewhat more conventional, it never loses its dreamlike feel, enhanced by a combination of 35mm and Canon 5D Mark II DSLR video.... »
The latest collaboration between Tedeschi and Scorsese is George Harrison: Living in the Material World. Here, Tedeschi talks about his collaborative process with the director.... »
As President Obama watched live video of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a scene from Patriot Games where Jack Ryan witnesses a covert military strike on a training camp in Libya.... »
When your movie is all about a runaway train, you need sound effects that convey the mass, momentum and danger of that disaster in waiting. For Mark Stoeckinger, sound effects editor on Unstoppable, the challenge was to work with director Tony Scott to convey something of the experience of being next to the tracks when a huge locomotive barrels by at high speed.... »
Not only did Inception come out on top of the Visual Effects Society Awards, handed out earlier this week, but it's been nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar — the only one of the 10 films cited as Best Picture nominees to also receive a nod for VFX. We got Paul Franklin on the phone in London in between one of his many trips to Los Angeles, where he had just participated in the Academy's VFX bake-off. We asked him about the hardest thing in Inception, getting his start in the business, and blurring the line between practical gags and digital FX.... »
AIX Media Group founder Mark Waldrep knew he wanted to work in 3D, directing and editing a series of seven "3D Music Albums" for Blu-ray Disc that would give the impression of a live performance in your home theater. What he didn't know until he really dug in on the project was how he would capture his stereo imagery.... »
Asked to create a music-video companion to The Raveonettes song “Heart of Stone,” designer Chris Do conceived a Victorian, steampunk-influenced world that could illustrate the lyrical idea. The resulting clip won Do, founder of motion graphics design studio Blind, a Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation last month.... »
Randall Dark says he’s always keeping his eye out for something that will rev up his creative gears and throw him into a new world of images, workflows, and storytelling possibilities. When he saw the first images of Panasonic’s new AG-3DA1 3D AVCCAM camcorder, he knew he had found it. “That thing looks like Wall-E,” he remembers thinking. “Physically, seeing that camera, I was excited.”... »
