Veteran VFX Supervisor Scott Farrar of ILM (center) with ILM's Russell Early (left) and Transformers D.P. Mitch Amundsen on set in Detroit. Farrar says Transformers is the film where CG robots became more "real" than anything that could be physically built.... »
At CineGear a group of esteemed pros joined a panel discussion to talk about the 4K workflow on a couple of short films using the DALSA Origin Camera and the exerience all the way through editing and color correction. ... »
In March, Adobe made the biggest release in the company’s history. Last week it made a splash in Manhattan as it unveiled an interactive installation meant to illustrate the power and diversity of each of its many design tools ... »
About six years ago Grzegorz Jonkajtys came up with the concept of a CG-animated short film. In March he completed the film, The Ark, employing motion control for many of the background environments and managing to create and render virtually the entire 1920x1080 short on just his laptop.... »
If you’ve seen Live Free or Die Hard — or even if you’ve just seen the trailers, which emphasize the film’s trademark outlandish action sequences — you may think of the various stunts, including the “money shot” involving a car tumbling through the air and smashing into the hoods of two more cars traveling on the ground, as a veritable CG-fest. But you’d be wrong.... »
Gone are the days when a few well-placed strobe lights and smoke in the footlights thrill crowds at a concert. Big scale, wrap-around video displays, in sync with the musical performance, are now expected parts of the scenery. ... »
Director Brandon Dickerson just finished a Switchfoot music video that featured painstakingly realized "photomation" scenes — created by inkjet-printing 1224 separate frames of HVX200-captured performance footage, hand-tearing the band members out of each frame, and then re-photographing the performance, frame by frame, on a cardboard-box stage. ... »
With footage shot on location, and stock footage, used essentially just for background plates, it was up to Asylum to show the evolution of the earth in CG. ... »
Mid-way through the animated mockumentary Surf’s Up, one of the penguins faces the camera and asks an invisible camera crew if they’re hungry. We hear a voice answer, “Uh, yeah.” ... »
The History Channel's new hit show, Ice Road Truckers, is all about the men who drive big trucks across frozen Canadian lakes, hauling essential supplies to the diamond mines in the far north by traveling roads built across great expanses of frozen lakes. If it takes nerves of steel for the drivers, who can actually hear the ice cracking under their groaning rigs, it also takes a certain kind of grit to ride shotgun with an HD camera. That's what DP Gavin Brennan found out last January, when he hit the Northern Territories to start the three-month shoot. F&V asked him about extreme cold, frozen pixels, and dangerous driving.... »
When the boards for the Finnish coffeemaker, Paulig Presidentti, came to Stardust Studios in New York, they were instantly attracted to creating animation with the brand’s signature green and gold color scheme. ... »
Editor Robert Bramwell is not using hyperbole when he says that a large majority of editors have been stuck in an archaic, inefficient approach to their projects that cost time, money and possibly their reputations... »
While new Sci-Fi series Sanctuary premiered earlier this month, it wasn’t on any TV network. Rather, the show, which stars several familiar faces from Sci-Fi Channel’s popular series Stargate SG-1 (including Amanda Tapping and Christopher Heyerdahl), made its debut on May 14—as an online-only webisodic series.... »
