How They Filmed the Climatic Final Battle in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
At the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the ground literally shakes when Rey faces off with Kylo Ren in an epic light saber duel. Then, it starts to give way. The scene required a lot of heavy duty effects work, which was handled by the team at Industrial Light & Magic.
Variety reports that the ILM team, led by f/x technical director Dan Pearson,
Star Wars, The Revenant & Game of Thrones Shine at Visual Effects Society Awards
A bear, a dragon and a scavenger from Jakku walk into a bar. This start to a bad joke also functions as a decent (okay, not really) summation of the big winners at the 14th Annual VES Awards, the annual celebration that recognizes the real people behind the surreal, photoreal, and out-of-this-world visual effects that are such a huge part of the entertainment industry. The now infamous bear attack suffered by Hugh Glass (Leonadro DiCaprio) in The Revenant won the Outstanding Animated Performance in a Photoreal Feature.
In the Near Future, Star Wars Will be Told in Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is becoming a creative practicality for filmmakers and studios, as the technology is finally catching up to the ideas storytellers have had (for years) about how they would use the medium to give viewers an unprecedented cinematic experience. The Sundance Film Festival has included VR films in their New Frontiers lineup, with this year’s crop including American Bison, Kiya and Waves of Grace.
With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that Lucasfilm and Disney are planning on taking Star Wars into the VR realm.
The Real Effects Used to Simulate the Raging Sea in The Finest Hours
The Finest Hours tells the incredible true story of a daring rescue mission conducted by a handful of men from the Chatham, Massachusetts, Coast Guard when a huge storm struck New England on February 8, 1952. The storm ripped two 500-foot oil tankers in half, leaving their crews stranded at sea. Despite hurricane-force winds and 60-foot waves Bernie Webber (played by Chris Pine) successfully skippers a 36-foot wooden lifeboat, with a destroyed compass,
Check Out How They Updated This Classic Scene in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Once again, if you haven't seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens, read no further. This video, produced by Tested, unlocks how Phil Tippett and Tippett Studios created the classic Dejarik holochess game for The Force Awakens, which was seen in the very first Star Wars. Don't remember that scene? Here's a refresher— R2-D2 plays Chewbacca while aboard the Millennium Falcon, and after the little droid pulls off a successful move against Chewie,
BB-8: From Napkin Sketch to Starring Role in The Force Awakens
We're just hours away from the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and here's a great, spoiler free way to pass the time until you see it—a featurette on the new droid BB-8.
BB-8 is perhaps the most emblematic creation in all of The Force Awakens because this adorable "soccer ball" droid represents a return to the practical effects that director and co-writer J.J. Abrams was insistent upon.
How They Made the White Whale in Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea
“There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”
This is the moment in Herman Melville's iconic "Moby-Dick" that the titular white whale is spotted, the demon that mad Captain Ahab has made the Pequod's suicidal mission. It's one of the most breathtaking moments in American literature, coming on page 624 (in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition, at least), on chapter 133. For the final three chapters of arguably the greatest piece of literature in the American canon,
Making Mountains With Everest VFX Supervisor Dadi Einarsson
Everest tells the true story of two groups of climbers who were hit with a deadly blizzard during their 1996 expeditions to scale the world’s highest mountain. We talk to visual effects supervisor Dadi Einarsson about the responsibility of recreating real events and why, being from Iceland, he may just have the edge when it comes to working with snow.
As Everest is shown in 3-D and on IMAX screens,
The Return of “In-Camera” Effects in Krampus & The Force Awakens
With the technological leaps and bounds that CGI made after the turn of the 21st century, the mid to late aughts brought with it a deluge of films relying heavily on newly discovered and increasingly honed special effects, particularly in genres like sci-fi and horror. But after years of reboots and remakes that sought to improve upon the original like Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and the 2011 retelling of John Carpenter’s The Thing,
Industrial Light & Magic’s Ed Kramer Discusses What It Takes To Work in CGI
Ed Kramer is interested in “historically significant moments” for computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the movie industry. It’s no wonder this has become his passion, since as a computer graphics artist or supervisor he has been a part of many of them —from the seamless blend of real and computer generated water in The Perfect Storm to the dynamic cloth simulation of Jar Jar Binks.
Kramer worked at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light + Magic (ILM) for 12 years as Senior Technical Director.
Why The Walk’s VFX Team Used Largest Amount of Cloud Computing in Film History
Director Robert Zemeckis’s long gestating project The Walk, on Philippe Petit’s once in a lifetime high-wire walk across the Twin Towers of The World Trade Center on August 7th, 1974 finally reached the screen this month, in glorious 3-D utilizing breathtaking visual effects. We spoke to VFX Supervisor Kevin Baillie & VFX Producer Camille Celluci by phone on how the production team was able to re- create in such immense detail both the Twin Towers and the 1974 New York skyline on a tight budget and production schedule,
The Martian’s VFX Supervisor on Creating Zero Gravity Without a ‘Vomit Comet’
As The Martian continues its impressive box office run and enjoys some early Oscar buzz, The Credits talks to Richard Stammers, the film's visual effects supervisor and a frequent collaborator with Ridley Scott, about the dual challenge of recreating the Mars landscape and simulating a convincing zero gravity environment without anyone having to get in a “vomit comet”.
You've worked with Ridley Scott before on films like Prometheus?
Go Behind the Scenes of Spectre
A plane crashing through a house and skidding down a huge, snowy slope? Check. James Bond (Daniel Craig) scrambling, for real, across the rooftops of Mexico City while real helicopters corkscrew 360 degrees above him? Check. A chase involving a plane, a helicopter, and three cars along an alpine road with a precipitous drop off the side of a cliff. Check.
Access is everything, and for the folks at ScreenSlam.com,
Watch the Daredevil VFX Reel
One of the nice surprises about Daredevil is how the show has relied less on showy CGI effects and more on fine storytelling. Eschewing the big budget bomb of Daredevil the film, which put Ben Affleck in tights and had him leaping off buildings, Netflix’s version, created by Drew Goddard, builds on the story of Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock), the blind lawyer who uses his other, hugely enhanced senses,
Creating Star Wars: The Force Awakens Newest Droid—BB-8
When it came to creating a new droid for the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the task for J.J. Abrams and his fellow filmmakers was not without potential disaster—R2-D2 and C-3P0 are such iconic characters in the Star Wars universe that any new droid that was to have a decent sized role (larger a role than, say, the jealous droid R5-D4) would have to be worthy of its legendary predecessors. The folks at StarWars.com published this eye-opening long form article about the newest droid in the galaxy—BB-8,
Imagine Engine’s Awesome VFX Breakdown Reel for Chappie
Imagine Engine helped turn actor Sharlto Copley (District 9) into the robot Chappie for director Neil Blomkamp’s film. Using performance capture equipment to track Copley’s every move, Imagine Engine was able turn man into machine with flawless precision.
Imagine Engine's work became more widely know with Blomkamp's first film, the visually stunning District 9. They've put their stamp on a wide variety of critically acclaimed films, from Zero Dark Thirty
Here’s How They Made the Incredible Inception Hallway Fight Scene
CineFix’s latest Art of the Scene video tackles one of the more ambitious, wild sequences in modern film history: the rotating hotel corridor fight scene in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. In the scene, Joseph Gordon-Levitt grapples with a bad guy in zero gravity dream battle. The beauty of the scene was in no small part due to Nolan’s decision to find a practical way to film it rather than rely on CGI.
Fantastic Four “Invisibility” Featurette Includes Actual Invisibility
As we inch closer to the August 7 premiere of Fantastic Four, the re-imagining of Marvel’s iconic and longest-running superhero team, the studio is dropping little nuggets to satiate us until the release. The latest is this “Invisibility” featurette, which stars…theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku?
Yup, that’s right, the author of “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension,” “Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers,
Ant-Man VFX Supervisor on the Power of Shrinkage
Jake Morrison, Ant-Man’s VFX Supervisor, talks to The Credits about the challenges of bringing a tiny superhero to life and convincing the audience to come along for the ride, especially when he's riding a flying ant.
You must be happy for people to be able to finally see Ant-Man? I imagine it’s a long process for you?
Yes, I'm looking forward to Friday being the big day.
Meet the Crew That Worked on Both Jurassic Park & Jurassic World
Universal's new Jurassic World is being heralded as a proper folllow-up to Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic Jurassic Park, the film that raised the bar for what CGI could accomplish and blew the minds of kids and adults alike. When director Colin Trevorrow took the helm of Jurassic World, the first film in the franchise in 14-years, both he and executive producer Steven Spielberg wanted to recapture the magic of that first film.
