Journey to the Center of the Earth, directed by Eric Brevig — a filmmaker with lots of experience in the VFX realm — might not have the same historic impact as The Jazz Singer or Becky Sharp, but as the first live-action VFX-driven feature film to be shot for 3D, it can’t help but break new ground.... »
When M2G Media in Irvine, CA, was hired by a global marketing firm to create a video piece introducing the new design for the 2009 Nissan Maxima at the New York Auto Show, M2G producer Jeff Granbery saw Red.... »
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.... »
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.... »
Visual-effects artists at CIS Hollywood worked with Clooney and production designer Jim Bissell to turn a junior-high-school football field in Boiling Springs, SC, a middle-school football field in Travelers Rest, SC, and Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, NC into ever-larger stadiums that they filled with crowds of digital people. ... »
Building out storage and rendering power for Hollywood projects at a new facility in Santa Monica, PostWorks executives think they see the future of the high-end television pipeline — and it looks a lot like a feature-film DI workflow. The proof of concept is its recent implementation of a datacentric, largely tapeless workflow for the five-nights-a-week HBO series, In Treatment.... »
Fight for Life focused on the body’s ability to fight life-threatening health issues from infancy through old age, and Jellyfish’s work enabled producers to go into the body to examine trauma, all the way to the microscopic level.... »
Technical supervisor Clark Graff devised a tapeless workflow for Captain Abu Raed, a Jordanian film produced by GigaPix Studios (Chatsworth, CA) that played in competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, using custom-built digital film recorders both to capture footage from the production’s Arriflex D-20 cameras and to conform the feature using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.... »
The massive number of tapes resulting from multiple 18-camera shoots of U2’s 3-hour "Vertigo" concert tour was just the beginning. The production attempted to clone the original tapes as quickly as possible. Then the edit began. And 3ality Digital Systems got into gear to solve some of stereo filmmaking's most persistent problems.... »
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.... »
