visual effects

This 20-minute behind-the-scenes Oblivion featurette includes the cast and crew explaining the story and the world-building of the futuristic sci-fi thriller. It also highlights some of the movie's more impressive visuals and VFX.

Says director Joseph Kosinski, "The two words I had from the very beginning of the project was a beautiful desolation. It's almost primordial Earth, feels like Earth maybe the way it looked a million years ago...but against that rugged landscape, I wanted to bring a very clean, forward-looking technology."

Watch below. (via io9)

In this VFX breakdown video from Worldwide FX, see how Washington DC was brought to explosive life via greenscreen, composites and CGI in action thriller Olympus Has Fallen.

Dell’s comprehensive media and entertainment solutions helped Soho VFX deliver 214 visual effects for Jack the Giant Slayer, a fantasy—adventure film based on the Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tales.

Director Vaughan Arnell and visual effects Framestore didn't take Olly Murs' single title "Amry of Two" literally when they created nearly 80 Murs to populate the music video.

Explains Framestore's head of Flame Ben Cronin, "With limits on the track length we settled on a series of 25-30 second moves with a motion control track, using the full 4:3 sensor at 3K and locking the cameras tilt and pan...We rotoscoped/soft masked and composited the Ollys at 3K. To achieve the camera moves we didn't ‘pan and scan’ but panned the Flame camera around the 3K image, which produces a more realistic result. Along with that we countered the lens distortion before and re-distorted after to reflect the zoom lens changing its field of view.”"

Watch the video below and read more here.

When Sam Raimi wanted to capture authentic performances for two of his fantastical characters in Oz The Great and Powerful, he turned to a unique combination of performance capture, puppetry and CGI.

Says Raimi, "More than anything, the strength of this script was the humanity in it and that’s the strength of the great classic Wizard of Oz movie. So I challenged my visual effects designer with 'How can I make these characters more human than human? I want to capture Joey [King]’s performance absolutely. I want to capture Zack [Braff]’s performance absolutely. I don’t want a CG performance.' Then he said, 'Then we will do just that. We will capture them with the camera. We won’t do the motion control. We won’t have their performance drive some computer android.'"

Brickyard VFX delivered animation for Adobe spot “Animals,” a tongue-in-cheek reflection on huge Super Bowl ad spends, which premiered exclusively online. Conceived by ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners and directed by Tom Routson of Tool of North America, the spot features a pair of whip-smart talking animals.

FXGuide talks to visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell about four of the major sequences in A Good Day to Die Hard. Find out the inner workings of creating Chernobyl, crashing an Mi-26, shootouts, car chases and more. Read the full piece here.

ILM has posted a series of behind-the-scenes video showcasing their visual effects work for The Avengers, last year's biggest box office hit. First off, they explain how they recreated New York City for an epic climactic battle scene.

Below are a couple of featurettes all about creating the fully CGI Hulk using motion capture.

Weta has released a 4 1/2 minute behind-the-scenes clip of its visual effects work for The Hobbit. See how Ian McKellen went from being in a greenscreened room all by himself to attending a feast with dwarves and how many of the film's fantastical creatures, including Gollum, came to life. Weta's work is nominated for a visual effects Oscar this weekend.

Big Sky Editorial relied on Imagineer System's mocha to deliver a spot for TBS' Conan. Explains visual effects supervisor Ryan Sears, "We used mocha Pro and mocha AE extensively on this TBS spot with Conan O'Brien introducing their new mobile app. In the scene, Conan is wearing this suit of mobile devices - smartphones, tablets, you name it - and all of the screens were supposed to be displaying some footage from different Conan episodes.All of the screens that were attached to Conan had to be replaced with footage from the show. We heavily relied on mocha's Planar Tracking and manual tracking features for adjustments.  We also used its rotoscoping capabilities to create shapes to help with the enormous amounts of roto work needed as well.”

Much of Alex Gibney’s new documentary feature We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks relies on the graphic dramatizations of events that occurred through the internet. Framestore’s New York Design team took on this great creative challenge and created over 35 minutes of rendered effects for the film, which premiered at Sundance last month.

The initial conversations with Gibney focused on two integral aspects of the story: the first being the chat logs between Private Bradley Manning and computer hacker Adrian Lamo, and the second a visual representation of the world wide web and all the articles, tweets and products that help tell the story.

Method Studios, a Deluxe Entertainment Services Group company, has collaborated with agency David&Goliath on two commercials for KIA which premiered during Super Bowl XLVII. "Space Babies," directed by Jake Scott (RSA), and "Hotbots," directed by Carl Erik Rinsch (MJZ) provided a wealth of inspiring VFX challenges to Method's creative team in Los Angeles. Stephanie Gilgar, Method Studios' Executive Producer comments, "It's an honor to have been entrusted to deliver two of the most VFX-heavy ads seen during this year's big game - a yearly highlight in the US television commercials industry".
 

The Credits talks to Mama visual effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub about the contortionist and CG effects that were behind making the horror hit's creepy ghost.

Says Weintraub of the seven-foot-tall contortionist Javier Botet (who donned a dress and played the ghost), "He’s very frail and can get his body into all these weird positions...Every once in a while [director] Andy [Muschietti] would shout, ‘Yank [the strings that were attached to his limbs].’ Javier’s arms would jut in these really strange, unnatural ways that look amazing. We’d take that and speed it up or run it backwards or mix in bits from other takes to get this really unique performance.”

Read more here.

Harken back to the days of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Wired profiles how Derek Van Gorder and Otto Stockmeier made the short sci-fi film "C 299,792 km/s" with only $40,000 (raised on Kickstarter) and no digital effects. Explains Stockmeier, "Digital technology has made basic filmmaking tools available to everyone, but undertaking a project like this is still considered way outside of the indie filmmaking spectrum. What we hoped to achieve with combining practical effects and digital equipment is to show that with a little ingenuity people can make really cool movies with very little resources."

Watch the film below and read the full story here.

Image Engines provided more than 300 shots for the critically acclaimed feature film Zero Dark Thirty, which is now playing in theaters nationwide, and has been nominated for a 2013 Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature Motion Picture. This included creating the computer generated Stealth Hawk helicopters (top-secret military vehicles used during the operations), as well as augmenting the bustling military encampments with computer-generated environments, digital soldiers, vehicles and effects.

FXGuide breaks down the visual effects of Zero Dark Thirty, including making CGI helicopters and dust, creating a crash sequence, substituting day for night and more.

They write, "When U.S. Navy SEALs raided a Pakistan compound on May 2nd, 2011 and killed Osama bin Laden, it was an almost moonless night. So when director Kathryn Bigelow sought to re-create the raid in Zero Dark Thirty, she and DOP Greig Fraser had a very clear mandate to film the scene in almost pitch darkness. The result is an authentic re-telling of the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader, but also one that posed a significant challenge for the visual effects crew from Image Engine, called upon to create photorealistic stealth helicopters used in the daring raid, as well as several other key effects in the Oscar-nominated film."

Read the full piece here.

Les Misérables' compositing supervisor Greg Spencer talks about the visual effects done for the movie, including realizing Tom Hooper's direction to make the skies into another character in the film.

Says Spencer, "We needed to get a solid idea of what each sky looked like before we started. We knew there would be a lot of roto involved so while that was getting done, myself and the VFX Supervisor began taking single frames from what we considered 'hero' shots and began throwing as many skies into them as possible. That way we could see what did and didn't work. It was a quick way of getting a strong visual idea of how things would look. When we had narrowed it down to two or three skies, we chose a few key shots from each of the scenes and did rough versions to see if they would work on the move. We also did a couple of matte paintings of the city."

Visual effects house Framestore explains how they created visualizations of web chats and Internet headlines for the new documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.

They explain, "The intention was to create a technique by which footage and images could be broken apart and drawn together over time and within a dynamic 3D space, sometimes abstract and often only legible from certain angles of view. This concept, along with the design and animation of the main title sequence, would serve as a springboard for many of the project's sequences."

Read more here.

ILM has released a behind-the-scenes featurette showing how the Oscar-nominated visual effects of The Avengers came together. They used ILM Zeno for modeling, Maya for animation and Pixar Renderman for rendering. Watch the process in action below.. (via The Verge)

The British Film Institute profiles the unsung work of effects house Rhythm and Hues, responsible for creating many of Hollywood's CGI animals in films ranging from Babe to Yogi Bear to Life of Pi. They write, "In a way, Rhythm & Hues has taken its digital safari full circle. 17 years ago with Babe it transformed real live-action animals with discreet tweaks to their mouths and faces. They then sought to transform cartoon animals into full-bodied photorealistic forms. With Life of Pi, they’ve accomplished a work of near-total photorealism, where each painstaking detail intensifies a sense of heightened reality that is cinema, extending beyond the animal into a setting that itself is largely digital."

Find out how ILM created the climactic shot of The Avengers, which shows the superheroes finally working together as a team in one long and detailed shot throughout New York City. Says visual effects supervisor Jason Smith,"Because the shot was so massive, we had to break it into sections so that we could give each section to separate groups of artists and work on them as though they were a single shot. And then we had a separate team whose job it was to pull all those sections back together and make a cohesive shot out of it."

See the pre-viz, CGI, and greenscreen magic come together below.

This behind-the-scenes featurette explores the mix of motion capture, CGI, miniature work and more that went into the special effects of The Hobbit. Says visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, "Our goal has always really been to understand the science, the physics, the underpinning behind these techniques that we're creating so that as we advance them, they're based on principles that will actually live from one film to another and will stand the test of time."

Watch below.

FXGuide goes in-depth with the crew and special effects team of The Hobbit, which involved a return to Middle-earth for many of the key players from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Says DP Andrew Lesnie, "Once again I’ve been immersed in Middle-earth, and this time around, it’s a completely different technical experience, showcasing the amazing developments that have taken place in the digital realm in the last 10 years. In front of and behind the camera."

Read the full piece here.

The Hobbit's visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri talks about revisiting his iconic CGI creation Gollum, finding new ways to make Gandalf appear 8 feet tall in 3D, and the challenges of creating a digital world that would look good in 48 FPS. He says, "What was great coming back to it is it really was a homecoming. We were looking forward to doing Gollum again. In this business you don't often get to go back and revisit a character...[even though] underneath he's completely different."

Read more here on CinemaBlend.