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.... »
When Dean DeBlois (best known as co-director of Lilo and Stitch) got a phone call from the manager of Sigur Ros, the Icelandic music group with the otherworldly sound, he was pitched anything but a conventional music-video project.... »
Entity FX handled all the film’s seamless visual effects (over 100). Some of the effects were relatively straightforward, matte paintings, sky replacements, hair and make-up fixes, while others were more challenging than they ever expected... »
Editor Jay Cassidy discusses working with Sean Penn, formulating the structure of the film, editing on location, the benefits and pitfalls of doing a DI before picture lock and editing techniques to reveal the mindset of character Chris McCandless for Into The Wild. ... »
Too often, the post workflow is the last thing on a first-time director's mind — nothing can throw a monkey wrench into a filmmakers best-laid plans like bad decisions that add expense or compromise quality. But for Ben Affleck, making his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone, post was just another opportunity to get his hands dirty.... »
Gone Baby Gone was originally set up with an SD editorial pipeline — but director Ben Affleck was unhappy with what he saw, and wondered if there was a way to upgrade the resolution of his images. Enter Runway, a Culver City, CA-based technology provider that re-engineered his editorial workflow to accommodate Avid's DNxHD 175 HD codec. The challenge was not just setting up the hardware and storage that could handle the increased bandwidth requirements, but in picking up where the SD-based process had left off. F&V interviewed Daniel McGilvray, senior systems engineer and tech department supervisor at Runway, by email to get the details.... »
How much work can a clothing commercial be? A lot, especially if your mandate is to recreate the look and feel of an elaborate pop-up book as a backdrop for clothing models wandering through a catalog. The VFX crew at Zoic Studios found that out as they tackled a series of spots for Sears that involved real people living in a quaint fantasy world apparently made entirely of cardboard cut-outs folded and hinged into the pages of a Sears Book.... »
Filmmaker Bob Landis may have a home office, but his soundstage is Yellowstone National Park. More than 300 days out of every year, he takes his trusty Sony HDW-730 camcorder out on the road, driving into Yellowstone and following the wildlife around in search of beautiful and revelatory instances of animal behavior. ... »
For Modern VideoFilm, it boiled down to a lucky break. Cinematographer John Toll was a regular customer of Modern’s for digital dailies, so when he started work on Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, he referred executive producer David Crockett to them. Modern’s VP of sales, Marcie Jastrow, wasn’t sure whether the studio would eventually pony up for a DI, but she knew she wanted to keep Modern close to the project. “I knew it when I had the dailies,” she tells Film & Video. “I knew there was something special about this film.”... »
“Fix It in Post” is an old adage used on production (usually one meant to be reassuring when used by producers, an inside joke when the crew says it). In most cases its better, and cheaper, to get it right on set than to try to do it in post. But on Road to Empire, there was no other option. ... »
“Dense” is a word that's often used to characterize a film’s sound. But when it’s coupled with certain other adjectives, such as “piercing,” “jangling” and “shrill,” that indicates something more unusual. That may be an apt description for the aural setting of American Gangster, director Ridley Scott’s vivid retelling of the tale of Frank Lucas, the African-American hood who challenged the Mafia for dominance in the heroin trade in New York in the 1970s. ... »
For a Eureka spot commissioned by the Doner agency, Blur Studio's design department and its 3D department worked together to show a photoreal, all-CG house being swept clean by the new Capture vacuum model.... »
In the new Nike spot directed by Michael Mann via Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Asylum FX was charged with seamlessly transitioning two star football players – Shawn Merriman and Stephen Jackson – from game to game, stadium to stadium in varying weather conditions, day and night.... »
