Be Still My Bursting Chest: “Alien: Romulus’s” Oscar-Nominated VFX Team on Finding Fresh Horror for the Franchise
Alien: Romulus Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba and FX Designer Alec Gillis bring the past and future together. Set between the events of Ridley Scott’s ferocious opener Alien and James Cameron’s muscular sequel Aliens, Barba, Gillis, and their team fused the tangible, practical horror and decay of the original films with a more modern, rock-and-roll sensibility. The ...
“Star Trek: Picard” VFX Supervisor Jason Zimmerman on Charting The Series’ Final Course
The legacy of Star Trek lives on through an entertaining trio of shows. Star Trek: Discovery (2017), Star Trek: Picard (2020), and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2023) have brought new cosmic adventures for fans of the beloved franchise while tying back to the mega-narrative of the Star Trek universe, which has been taking viewers ...
How the Creative Team Behind “Army of the Dead” Built An Apocalyptic World
In Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, a ragtag group of mercenaries embarks on a life-changing $200 million dollar heist. The problem isn’t that the money is hidden in a vault underneath the Las Vegas strip—although that’s not an insignificant detail—but rather the tens of thousands of zombies lurking in their path as an outbreak ...
Industrial Light & Magic Senior Creature Artist Dane Larocque on Constructing Unforgettable Creatures
Dane Larocque hails from rural British Columbia and Alberta and grew up in what he calls a “hardcore western rodeo family.” A career in visual effects, at arguably the most prestigious VFX company on the planet, wasn’t something he grew up imagining as an option. Yet Larocque had an enduring passion for film and was ...
How “The Unholy” Visual Effects Team Created Biblical Scares During Scary Times
“In the early innings, as the pandemic was ramping up, it was like looking out at the ocean and you see a storm coming, and you’re not sure you can get to shore before the storm gets there.” That’s an observation that might describe most of the past year; certainly, it’s politics, work and school ...
“Godzilla vs. Kong” VFX Supervisor on Creating Titan Title Match of the Ages
John ‘D.J’. Des Jardin has been a go-to visual effects supervisor in Hollywood for decades, and he’s widely known as one of the best and nicest guys in the business. You can see his inventive, creative touch in The Matrix, X-Men, and Mission Impossible franchises. His work can be seen on Ang Lee’s achingly beautiful Crouching Tiger, ...
VFX Producer Andrea Knoll on Creating the Futuristic Yet Natural World in Tales from the Loop
Tales from the Loop, Amazon’s latest sci-fi offering which stars Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce, resists easy definition. Set in Ohio but based on paintings of Sweden, the residents of the small town at the center of the series are all loosely bound by a machine known as the Loop, a technology intended to unlock ...
1917’s Oscar-Nominated VFX Supervisor on Creating Relentless Immersion
“I think what’s really kind of interesting is all the movies this year are using visual effects for widely different reasons,” notes 1917’s Oscar and VES-nominated visual effects supervisor, Guillaume Rocheron. And in an Academy FX slate that ranges from Avengers: Endgame to The Irishman, he has a point. For the Visual Effects Society’s awards, ...
How Jojo Rabbit’s VFX Supervisor Helped Taika Waititi Create the Year’s Wildest Comedy
The most startling visuals in Jojo Rabbit (which opened last Friday) takes the shape of writer-director Taika Waititi dressed up as Adolph Hitler, the imaginary best friend conjured by a German boy (Roman Griffin Davis) during the waning days of World War II. But while “Hitler” commands the foreground, VFX supervisor Jason Chen worked a ...
How the VFX Team Behind Ad Astra Achieved Deep Space
How do you conceptualize a future that feels familiar yet doesn’t exist? For, visual effects supervisor Allen Maris and the entire crew detailing director James Gray’s vision behind Ad Astra, that question became a guiding theme. The 20th Century Fox sci-fi thriller puts Brad Pitt in a spacesuit and asks him to save mankind. Not ...
The Man in the High Castle‘s Emmy-Nominated VFX Supervisor on Taking Down Lady Liberty
The third season finale of The Man in the High Castle sees the show’s alternate fascist reality, based on the eponymous Philip K. Dick novel, take a giant leap forward for Nazism in America — surrounded by cheering crowds, the Statue of Liberty is brought down under fireworks, fighter jets, and Himmler’s watch. The episode ...
Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ VFX Supervisor on Giving Mythic Dimension to the Titans
Godzilla first came to life in 1954 when actor Haruo Nakajima put on a sweltering 220-pound suit and tromped around a Tokyo soundstage smashing miniature buildings. Orchestrated by special effects genius Eiji Tsuburaya, the black and white Godzilla, King of the Monsters terrified movie audiences and effectively birthed the Kaiju cinematic universe of radiation-mutated ogres. ...
Bird Box‘s VFX Supervisor on the Monster You Can’t See
What happens when Marcus Taormina tells people that he was the visual effects supervisor on the wildly popular Netflix film Bird Box? “People have a ton of questions,” Taormina says, “but the central one is the creature question. I tell them that there is a lot on the editing room floor.” What Bird Box’s invisible malefactors ...
How Aquaman‘s Colorist Battled Mera’s Red Hair—and Won
Aquaman made history over the weekend, becoming the highest-grossing film in DC Comics history. Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa)’s journey from high-seas crusader to King of Atlantis surpassed Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in his Batman trilogy. FotoKem colorist Mark Griffith was one of the many, many people who had a huge-but-invisible role in Aquaman’s success. The ...
How Welcome to Marwen‘s VFX Supervisor Transformed Steve Carrell into a Plastic Action Figure
Kevin Baillie was barbecuing in the backyard of his San Francisco home one afternoon in 2013 when he got a call from Robert Zemeckis. “Bob said ‘I’ve got this crazy script I want to send you so you can tell me what you think,” Baillie recalls. Five years and 64 million computer-processing hours later, Baillie ...
Mary Poppins Returns‘ VFX Supervisor on Bad Weather, Mary’s Magical Entrance & More
English weather wreaked havoc on best-laid plans when it came to staging outdoor sequences for Mary Poppins Returns. Director Rob Marshall expected London’s usual overcast skies to accompany Mary Poppins’ descent from the heavens early in the movie. Instead, Mother Nature delivered a perfect sunny day. The UK-based visual effects supervisor Matt Johnson recalls, “It’s ...
Black Mirror’s VFX Supervisor on the Haunting Episode “USS Callister”
Each episode of Black Mirror is designed to be memorable in its own way, but none so far have spun what appears at first to be a mere goofy period romp into an emotionally complex depiction of covert malevolence quite like the feature-length opener of the show’s fourth season, USS Callister. Brilliant but overlooked Robert ...
How Avengers: Infinity War‘s “Head of Digital Humans” Created the Purple Face of Doom
Darren Hendler‘s been changing live action humans into digital creatures for nearly two decades. Since moving from South Africa to London and finally to Digital Domain in Los Angeles, the former electrical engineer has helped designed CG effects for such spectacles as I, Robot and Furious 7. With Avengers: Infinity War, he focused on the ...
VFX Supervisor Swaps Man For Primate in Oscar-Shortlisted War For the Planet of the Apes
“I’ve pretty much spent my last decade doing almost nothing but monkeys and apes.” That’s Oscar-winning visual effects artist Dan Lemmon talking about his adventures in motion capture on behalf of the re-booted Planet of the Apes trilogy and Peter Jackson’s 2005 gorilla spectacle King Kong. “Between that and The Jungle Book I’ve been pretty ...
