Smoke & Mirrors New York proudly welcomes award-winning VFX Supervisor/Senior Flame Artist, Kirk Balden into the fold. Most recently, Kirk was a VFX supervisor/Flame/Smoke artist at LA-based A52 where he worked on notable projects for Microsoft, Nike, Lexus, Jeep and the main title sequence for HBO's Emmy nominated original program, Rome. Prior, Kirk permalanced as a Fire/Inferno artist at Sea Level, Venice working on Superbowl spot Visa Snowball, Gillette, and Toyota to name a few. In Addition, Kirk has held posts at Hydraulx (Santa Monica), Ring of Fire (Hollywood), and Sony Pictures Imageworks (Culver City). ... »
Rhinofx recently signed VFX Supervisor/Artist Jim Rider to reinforce their growing feature film division. With considerable experience across the entire realm of effects projects, Rider's talents include motion control, Flame, compositing, and animation. Jim is able to effectively synthesize his effects expertise, evidenced by a body of work that includes a long line of significant feature film projects including Across the Universe, Evan Almighty, Chicago, and Titanic. Rhinofx has also generated an impressive list of recent film credits, which include Perfect Stranger, The Nanny Diaries, and the current production of the Dreamworks/Paramount venture, Ghost Town. ... »
Working from her New York apartment, Nina Paley expanded the scope of a series of shorts she had been working on (they set stories from an ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, to the tunes of early jazz singer Annette Hanshaw) to feature-film length. Talk about a personal film.... »
When the visual effects crew for Speed Racer arrived in Berlin four months ahead of production, they put systems into play that would rock filmmaking. With visual effects occupying an increasing amount of screen time in films, tasks formerly thought of as post production have moved further upstream and visual effects artists have taken on a more integral role in production. Speed Racer drives that notion to the extreme. “On Speed Racer, I believe post-production began on the very first day,” says John Gaeta, co-visual effects supervisor.... »
Noise Industries, developer of visual
effects tools for the postproduction and broadcast markets, today
announced that partner Idustrial Revolution
(www.idustrialrevolution.com) has released CoverFlux, a brand new –
FREE - FxFactory FxPack plug-in for Apple Final Cut Studio 2.0 and
Apple Final Cut Express 4.0 applications. Much like the image carousel
effect seen in Apple iTunes® and the new Apple OS X 10.5 Leopard®
finder, CoverFlux dynamically displays user selected images in 3D
proportionally fanned across the screen with reflections and
transparencies. The CoverFlux FxPack automatically calculates the
stack and fan while providing comprehensive controls for adjusting
about any element of the display including, perspective, animation,
and text.
... »
FMX again exceeded expectations in delivering this year. Held in Stuttgart Germany at the excellent Haus der Wirtschaft conference facility, FMX is Europe’s biggest and most remarkable conference covering all categories of digital entertainment. More than 7,000 people signed up this year, from over 40 different countries. I enjoyed meeting a few of you there. I hope to meet more of you next year.... »
NewTek, Inc., manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation and video products, today announced award-winning LightWave® 9.3.1 is now available as a free 30-day trial for Mac OS X and both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows immediately... »
Click for a wink. Click again for a smile. Facial animation has never been simpler as DAZ 3D, a leading developer of professional quality 3D models and software, today announced the immediate availability of Mimic Pro for Carrara, a plug-in enabling seamless lip-synching, sound analysis and speech animation simulations directly within Carrara 6.2.... »
Zoic Studios is excited to welcome 3D Supervisor Paul Ghezzo to the company. Ghezzo is part of Zoic's award-winning Episodic Division and is currently supervising production on a variety of pilots, new shows and name brand programs for the Fall television season.... »
For the recent commercial for the new Ford truck Click 3x made liquid chrome coagulate from a cobblestone street to form the vehicle. Watch the exclusive video on how Click3x created the effect reminiscent of liquid chrome effects in Terminator 2. ... »
Autodesk, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of REALVIZ S.A., the privately held developer of image-based content creation software. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.... »
A major tenet of the production was keeping things real—from the suit to the cameras. By the end of post-production, however, animators at ILM were helping to design shots, including tweaking the camera. “Production drove the bus,” says Academy Award-winning VFX supervisor John Nelson, “but everybody was involved. Jon [Favreau] and I both believe the best idea is going to win, wherever it comes from.”... »
In one key scene, actress Emma Bell gives a terrific performance in a two-minute close-up. The only problem with the shot? No tears. Guava, which was already looking to expand into feature-film work, said it would see what it could do about that.... »
The new cineSync Pro beta has been released today, with some options for larger brush sizes in the drawing tools, brush size shortcuts ( larger is ], smaller is [ ), a fix for some reported colour "clipping" issues to ensure accurate colour representation on calibrated systems and other general speed and performance improvements.... »
