The VFX Magic Behind Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man: Homecoming star Tom Holland trained tirelessly to do as many of his own stunts as possible, but some of them were just too epic to do live. In stepped the team at Imageworks VFX, who just released an incredible video giving us a glimpse at the film’s incredible CGI. Holland was charmingly awkward as ...
The New Mutants is a Haunting Spin-Off of the X-Men
The upcoming Marvel Comics motion picture, The New Mutants, introduces a thrilling and dark take on the traditional superhero series. Similar to Deadpool and Logan, the X-Men series spin-off seems to promise a fresh twist on the well-known story of this younger generation of mutant heroes. Unlike its X-Men predecessors, the trailer carries an eerie ...
Why Building This one Wight was Harder Than Making 10,000 of Them
HBO has delivered the final installment of their Game of Thrones behind-the-scene series “The Game Revealed” with a fantastic look at the most consequential Wight in the show’s history. We’re talking about the one Jon and the gang risked life and limb to bring back in “Beyond the Wall,” and dumped on Cersei’s doorstep in ...
Watch Artists Create Rocket & Baby Groot for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Digital effects are so outrageously good at this point, we take it for granted that Andy Serkis can become an utterly realistic intelligent chimpanzee and give arguably the greatest motion capture performances of all time throughout the new Apes trilogy, or, say, watch a talking, hybrid raccoon and a sentient plant-based alien, voiced by stars Bradley ...
The 55th Annual New York Film Festival Begins Today
The New York Film Festival, which runs from September 28 to October 15, is a funny bird. Housed in that Temple of Culture, Lincoln Center, the 55th edition of the festival is showing as many movies in its Robert Mitchum Retrospective as it is in the Main Slate, its showcase for the annual crop of ...
Here’s How They Created The Loot Train Dragon Attack in Game of Thrones
While we’ve written a lot about how extensive, incredible (and gross!) the practical effects are on Game of Thrones, the work done by the visual effects team is equally impressive. You don’t get to have a show with dragons, giants, direwolves, an exploding Sept of Baelor, and an army of 100,000 renanimated dead people without a really, really good ...
TIFF 2017: What We’re Excited About This Year in Toronto
It’s not the only major film festival this season — Venice and Telluride rolled out first and boasted many of the same marquee titles. But the Toronto International Film Festival, running for 11 days, beginning this Thursday, September 7, and carrying on until the 17th, has a ton of cache. Not only does it take ...
The Kong: Skull Island VFX Team Reveals Their Design Secrets
Seeing our favorite monsters come to life on screen gets more incredible each year as technology makes them bigger, scarier, and more realistic. King Kong is one of the most sympathetic monsters to stomp onto movie screens since Frankenstein. Sometimes enemy, other times hero, Kong often displays human emotions and can be both fearsome and gentle. The ...
Emmy-Nominated VFX Designer on Creating Terrible Worlds in The Man in the High Castle
Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle portrays a comprehensive and convincing alternate reality in which the Nazi Reich was victorious in World War II. It’s a disturbing world that fortunately never was, but the show is a hearty visual feast that dives unrestrained into the terror. Visual effects supervisor Lawson Deming guided his team to build entire cityscapes outside ...
Looking Back at the VFX of Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The 1980s were a pinnacle for practical effects, but CGI was still in its infancy by the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. James Cameron is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, but also tops the list for one of the most pioneering. Terminator 2 is being re-released in 3D and ...
Game of Thrones Explainer: Bringing Dragons To Life Demands Animators Follow The Sun
First a skeleton, then the meat. Next some scales, then some fire. A layer of color. A layer of shading. Then some motion. Frame by frame. It might not be as grueling as battling a dragon, or defending all of Westeros from hordes of White Walkers, but making the dragons of Game of Thrones come ...
How VFX Supervisor Conjured Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
The first time Scott Stokdyk worked for Luc Besson back in 1995, the French auteur hired him to work on his then-groundbreaking sci-fi flick The Fifth Element. “At that time I was just this computer artist sitting at a work station for fourteen hours a day in a little dark cubicle excited to be working ...
Watch How Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Utilized Practical Effects to Nearly Kill Rocket
When two of your main characters are a walking and talking (sort of) tree and a talking raccoon, you know that CGI has played a huge part. Yet, you might be surprised to find out that a good portion of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was made with practical effects. In a new behind-the-scenes look at the ...
Explainer: IMAX Vs. Standard—Here’s Why it Matters That Dunkirk was Shot on 70-mm
The big screen will feel even bigger for some moviegoers watching Dunkirk starting July 21. Director Christopher Nolan shot the World War II drama using 70-millimeter IMAX and 65-mm large-format cameras. And audiences in 125 theaters across the U.S. and Canada will get to see the fruits of those labors in their entirety through large-format ...
Dunkirk’s IMAX Release Magnifies Power of one of History’s Most Miraculous Escapes
History has decided its name: The Miracle of Dunkirk. In May 1940, Germany launched its war against Western Europe with a lightning invasion that saw Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands fall in quick succession. With the Low Countries devoured and a still ravenous appetite, the Nazis turned their gaze to France and continued their advance. ...
Tech Transformations: The Planet of the Apes Then and Now
In 1968, 20th Century Fox’s The Planet of the Apes opened to critical acclaim. At a time when science fiction stories were not taken seriously, the story of an astronaut crew crash-landing on a future planet where apes are the dominant species, captured the imaginations of audiences around the world. Today, War for the Planet ...
Pixels into Pig: Okja VFX Maestro Explains Digital DNA for Star Creature
Part super-pig, part hippo, part elephant, the CGI creature at the heart of director Boon Joon-Ho's mostly live-action animal rights adventure Okja wowed crowds at Cannes this spring without so much as a single line of dialogue. Starring alongside Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie (available Wednesday June 28 on Netflix), the pixel-built ...
How Weta Digital & Andy Serkis’s Brilliance Elevate War for the Planet of the Apes
We've written about how the performance capture technology that Andy Serkis has helped create and Weta Digital has perfected made the Planet of the Apes reboot one of the most satisfying, compelling franchise remakes of the century. Serkis plays Caesar, the new trilogy's heart and soul—a chimpanzee that has become vastly more intelligent, and verbal, after he's exposed to ...
Stranger Things VFX Supervisor on Making Monster Mayhem
The Duffer Brothers' Stranger Things was a critical smash for Netflix, a medley of throwback charm, real tension, ace casting and superb pacing. The setting (small town Indiana) and the era (1983) were handled with loving attention and period-perfect detail, as we followed the mysterious case of a missing child, his friends' courageous attempts to find ...
See how They Created Wolverine’s Claws in Action in Logan
If you had to pick a single mutant attribute as the most iconic of them all, you’d have to go with Wolverine’s adamantium claws. For 16-years we’ve watched these razor-sharp, indestructible and retractable weapons emerge from Hugh Jackman’s hands, and for most of that time, what we’ve been seeing was the work of the props ...
