Is Tom Cruise’s Plane Stunt in the new Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation his Craziest?
Tom Cruise’s stunt exploits are legendary, and in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, he might of completed his most insane stunt ever. Cruise hung off the side of a an Airbus A400M as it rose 5,000 feet in the air above the British countryside. Is this Cruise’s stunt masterpiece, and can it ever be topped?
Previously, in Mission: Impossible 2 (in which he tore a shoulder muscle jumping between rocks),
How’d They Film That? Inside the Fault Lines on San Andreas
When your film is about the San Andreas fault giving way and a magnitude 9-plus earthquake turning California into so many dominoes and sinkholes, decimating cities and their historic landmarks, you’re going to need some serious CGI. Yet you’d be surprised how much of San Andreas was shot in camera, using practical stunts and a lot of old fashioned movie magic (and a whole lot of chutzpah from the stunt professionals).
Stormtroopers, Snoopy & a Virtual Reese Witherspoon: Highlights From the 2015 Creativity Conference
Stormtroopers, Snoopy and a one-on-one audience with Reese Witherspoon—the 2015 Creativity Conference was manna for film buffs, tech geeks and policy wonks alike. The stormtroopers, unusually accommodating, were on hand to help conference goers create the ultimate selfie (the James Bond gun barrel backdrop, where one could get their photo taken against the iconic opening montage in the opening credits to Bond films, was also pretty awesome), ditto Snoopy, who offered as many fist-bumps as he did hugs.
Before & After: Watch What Crowdfunding Did for Aurora in 2 Trailers
On April 26, 2013, Aurora was posted on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Aurora’s an ambitious sci-fi love story set after a human-created apocalypse has destroyed the Earth and left the machines they created to protect them in control. The machines, led by a super-computer named Kronos, take over under the guise of creating a utopia. Sixty years later, the protagonist, Andrew (Julian Schaffner), finds himself living in this Kronos-ruled world when he meets Calia (Jeannine Wacker),
VFX Supervisor Chris Harvey On Bringing Chappie to Life
For Chappie, the visual effects weren’t there to complement the story. They made the story.
“There are huge visual effects movies out there that have lots of explosions. That isn’t this movie,” said Chris Harvey, visual effects supervisor. “[Director] Neill [Blomkamp] shot it all on location without any kind of stage work, so we didn’t do environment [creation] work on this movie. There are no big explosions or destruction scenes. The visual effects work was focused on the creation of those robots.”
VFX Supervisor Dan Glass on the Vast World Of Jupiter Ascending
When Andy and Lana Wachowski release a picture, moviegoers can rely on it to be a visual experience. In large part, that is because of the talent of their visual effects team, which has been supervised since The Matrix Reloaded by Dan Glass. Glass, who has worked with the Wachowskis on two Matrix films, Speed Racer, and Cloud Atlas, is also credited as the visual effects supervisor for Jupiter Ascending,
Top Flight Stunt & Effects Team Jacks Up Horrible Bosses 2
Horrible Bosses 2 is both a comedy and an action movie; its' protagonists spectacularly idiotic schemes lead to all manner of mayhem. The first Horrible Bosses, bowing in 2011, was a hit, follwing a rich cinematic tradition of pitting hopelessly maligned employees against their superiors. Some of the more memorable horrible bosses in film history include Meryl Streep's humiliator-in-chief Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Gary Cole's all to real turn as supervisor Bill Lumbergh in
Paramount Hosts Interstellar Oculus Rift Experience
I went to space. I've seen the stars and the distant worlds that occupy the endless, mysterious vacuum above us. I went where few have gone before, leaving behind everything I knew as "home."
Well, actually, let me clarify. My mind went to space, and not in a way that intends "I've finally gone insane." My physical self sat in a chair (quite comfortable if I may add) at the AMC Lowes in Lincoln Square and strapped on an Oculus Rift to take part in an experience based around Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Interstellar.
Creating the Incredible Time Travel Sequence in Lucy
If you have not seen Luc Besson’s Lucy but plan to, do not read this article. Just stop. There are SPOILERS AHEAD.
Towards the end of Luc Besson’s mind-bending Lucy, Scarlett Johansson's title character, having nearly reached harnessing 100% of her brain capacity, travels back in time. This capability, which was brought on by having a drug she was forced to smuggle, internally, leak inside of her, sends her back eons to the birth of the universe.
Industrial Light & Magic’s Cody Gramstad on Painting Lucy’s World
There have been plenty of spectacular special effects to feast on this summer, which has really been the case every summer since the blockbuster was invented. Edge of Tomorrow offered Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt on a time-looped platter for voracious aliens, while Guardians of the Galaxy’s glorious, color-soaked space epic includes the spectacle of a gun-toting raccoon and a sentient tree-person that feeds off the flowers that grow on his own body.
Master of Mayhem: Prosthetic Supervisor Conor O’Sullivan
There’s not a scratch, scrape, slash or bite mark he can’t create. Broken bones and severed heads aren’t a problem. Welts, warts, rashes and burns are perfectly doable. Whether you need prosthetics for a superhero, war hero, or son or daughter of Westeros, Conor O’Sullivan is your man. O’Sullivan doesn’t only work in the realm of gore—he’s also created one of the most famous noses in film history, turning Nicole Kidman’s perfect sniffer into Virginia Woolf’s more pronounced proboscis for The Hours,
Tech Evolution: The Wild Ambition of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
When director Matt Reeves took the helm on Dawn of the Planets of the Apes, he wanted his apes, which would far exceed their numbers in Rupert Wyatt's excellent 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, to have an even greater level of emotional reality. Reeves was starting fresh with an entirely new cast of humans, but he retained some crucial actors from Wyatt's film, including performance capture extraordinaire Andy Serkis and two other notable ape performers,
Super Computing: Inside Industrial Light & Magic’s Wonder Emporium
We interviewed three different Industrial Light & Magic employees last week to find out how they helped create the visual splendor that is Transformers 4: Age of Extinction. We got so much out of the interviews we couldn’t fit it all in to last week's interviews, so we've compiled a lot of the hard facts on the magnitude of their computing powers for today's story, which have grown each year to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated computer-generated demands of directors like Michael Bay.
Two Industrial Light & Magic Wizards on Creating Destruction for Transformers
When your film centers around alien robot colossi laying waste to each other and their surroundings, it's pretty crucial that the wreckage look real. Two of the job titles responsible for making Michael Bay's latest carnival of destruction, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, look realistic (and, in its way, beautiful) are the creature supervisor and the FX technical director, so we spoke to both, Michael Balog and Sheldon Serrao.
“My group deals with anything geometry based,”
How Industrial Light & Magic Makes Transformers 4: Age of Extinction Shine
Michael Bay’s Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is the most technologically ambitious film in the franchise. Working again with Industrial Light and Magic, Age of Extinction showcases astonishingly fluid, realistic robotic shape-shifting—somehow they’ve managed to make robots transforming into vehicles and back again into a kind of visual poetry. Age of Extinction, which will be released in 2D, 3D, and Imax 3D, is the work of hundreds of people,
Looking Back at the Original Godzilla
In August of 1954, Toho Studios began shooting a film unlike any that ever been made in Japanese cinematic history. Three photography teams were required: a special-effects photography team to cover the film's star, a principal photography team to capture dramatic scenes between the rest of the cast, and a composite photography team who would help mesh star and cast into a cohesive whole.
That film was, of course, the original Godzilla,
I, Frankenstein Digitally Re-Mastered for IMAX Premiere
“I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” So said Frankenstein’s monster, some 196 years ago in 1818 when Mary Shelley anonymously published her groundbreaking book “Frankenstein” in London. In nine days, her creation will loom larger than ever before when he enters IMAX theaters on January 24 in Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein.
Writer/director Beattie’s film,
Looking Back on Some of our Favorite Stories of 2013
When we launched The Credits a little more than a year ago, we aimed to shed a light on the many talented filmmakers who often don’t get much press for their work. While we’ve occasionally spoken to folks who need no introduction (John Waters, for example), most of the filmmakers we’ve focused on have a little less name recognition but a huge amount of talent. We interviewed a lot of people, so the below roundup is really just a taste—there were far too many people to mention in a single post.
Video Featurette: Behind-the-Scenes With the Creators of Walking With Dinosaurs
Ever since June of 1993, audiences have grown to expect a lot out of their dinosaur movies. You can thank Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park for turning audiences into very exacting judges of what does, and does not, look like a believable dinosaur on screen. Jurassic Park was a huge leap forward in what CGI can do for a film, but for dinosaur fans (which is just about everyone who was ever a child at one point),
Star Wars: Episode VII’s Galaxy of Talent Behind J.J. Abrams
As useful as IMDBpro is, it’s recommendable to take the “projects in development” rubric with at least a grain or two of salt. Because really, how could one man have 28 projects in development, including the next Star Trek and Mission Impossible, while also working on a little film franchise called Star Wars?
If it were any one other than J.J. Abrams, you’d be right to assume that most of these would fall through,
