Director Julie Taymor’s Across The Universe could be the first western film to follow the Bollywood formula – it’s a drama/musical/warflick/love story that compresses the sixties — anti-war protests, civil rights, the Detroit riots, Vietnam and psychedelia — into two hours surrounded (literally) by a 5.1 soundtrack of Beatles songs, including the title track.... »
It’s one thing to do groundbreaking VFX work on a show like Battlestar Galactica, which dramatically reinvented the look of the original 1970s TV series for a contemporary audience. But it’s quite another to start working on an upgrade of a not-so-long-in-the-tooth program like Babylon 5.... »
When Creative Director Greg Hahn of New York’s Gretel started thinking about opening titles and category opens for Spike’s Guys Choice awards show, he gravitated toward ultra-high-speed imagery. ... »
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. ... »
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 Technicolor Creative Services announced it would open a Digital Intermediate facility on the Sony lot, the idea was that the proximity of DI to sound mixing and other studio services would create massive efficiencies. That was just proven true, with the 4K DI of Spider-Man 3... »
For a set of high-octane show openers for ESPN's NASCAR coverage, The Syndicate intercut animated races featuring colorful CG cars with super-glossy live-action footage from the Arri D-20. Watch the package, below, then read our interviews with The Syndicate's creative director, David Hwang, on the ideas behind the animation, and with FX supervisor Ben Grossman on the decision to use the D-20 and its implications for the pipelines for TV spots.... »
The post-production gurus behind Next say it's the first studio feature to be edited entirely in HD using Avid's DNxHD codec — and they figure it represents the latest forward leap in post workflow. ... »
Working with editor Bernat Villaplana on post for the acclaimed Spanish film, Schiff had to organize an editorial process that involved assets moving between Spain, Mexico, and California — with a DI in Toronto.... »
