VFX Oscar Shortlist announced →

Jeff Heusser writing for fxguide.com:

All members of the Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 10-minute excerpts from each of the 10 shortlisted films on Thursday, January 3. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate five films for final Oscar consideration.

 

NUKE 7.0 is out now | The Foundry →

The Foundry:

Our biggest NUKE release to date, NUKE 7.0 comes with a host of polished and perfected tools to streamline your day-to-day workflow, as well as exciting new feature additions to complement its highly acclaimed feature set.

 This is a great release of Nuke. It isn't by chance that DD has some of the best comp in the business. 

Thanks for the great release. 

The VFX in Indian smash hit Eega | 3D World →

3dworldmag.com:

SS Rajamouli:

Due to the lack of artists proficient in one specific software – namely 3ds Max, which we’d built our entire pipeline on during previous projects – animators were short if not non-existent locally. Therefore a Maya port had to be produced, coupled with a brand-new rig. The new rig worked perfectly, but getting the animation back into 3ds Max for lighting and rendering proved exceptionally troublesome. It took a lot of time in development to be able to bake out the required information due to rig hierarchy and procedural controllers designed therein.

 

fxphd | VFX Foundations: now available for purchase by non-members →

 John Montgomery:

What’s the background regarding the course? In response to a huge government and private initiative, a large cross section of people from many of the top of the VFX facilities in the UK got together in 2011 to define what was the most crucial things for educators and students in VFX to know. For professor Tahl Niran, it was a major turning point in how he approached training.

This course and the one after is a must if your new or old and wondering about some of the topics. If you know everything then don't bother.

 

Photographs of Real People Living Inside Tiny Cardboard Box Dioramas →

Michael Zhang:

Some photographers have made names for themselves by creating and photographing extremely detailed dioramas: miniature tabletop scenes that are so realistic that viewers often mistake them for the real world. Belgian photographers Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux of 354 Photographers have put an interesting spin on the diorama photo concept by Photoshopping real people into their miniature scenes. The series is titled “Box“.

Remember when all environments were done this way. Make a real model. 

 

Good evening, tonight we have a case of on-set workflow: Hitchcock →

Mike Seymour:

Hitchcock is a new film by director Sacha Gervasi, filmed and told by cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth. After a run of incredible productions, Cronenweth’s credits are at the very cutting edge of digital cinematography – they include: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, and many others. It is no understatement to say he is a world expert in modern digital workflow, especially with the RED Epic camera, which he again used on Hitchcock. (What is also interesting to note for fans of the RED camera is that much of the film was shot on the RED Studio’s Sound stages and around the offices of RED).

OSCARS: Eric Saindon On ‘Hobbit’s VFX

Christy Grosz writing for deadline.com:

When the Academy’s visual-effects peer group meets tomorrow to vote on this year’s short list, among the films they’ll be examining is Warner Bros. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

NUKE 7.0 2D Tracker

TheFoundryChannel:

In the fourth installment of our NUKE 7.0 new feature and upgrade videos we take you through the major improvements to workflow, speed and accuracy available in NUKE's 2D Tracker. In this video we show you how to track and correct difficult objects with ease thanks to finer control over core tracking functionality.

The tracker in nuke has always seemed off. I am starting to love how the Nuke 7 tracker works and feels. Looking forward to using it in production.