The Great Gatsby VFX →

Chris Godfrey: 

Baz has graciously agreed to let us release this 'before and afters' reel to show our peer group the VFX work completed on his film 'The Great Gatsby'. While this specific reel was the work of Animal Logic (as my primary vendor), in total I worked with 7 vendors including Animal Logic, Rising Sun and Iloura in Australia, ILM in San Francisco and also Prime Focus and Method Vancouver. We also ran an amazing internal SWAT team that completed over 400 shots. Congratulations to all who did such fabulous work on almost 1500 shots and especially to Andy Brown from Animal Logic who put this sequence together.

 

Hollywood's History of Faking It →

FilmmakerIQ: 

Go inside the history of the travelling mattes (now called chromakey) and learn the history of visual trickery used by filmmakers from the earliest filmmakers through to the modern day.

 

Every back issue of Cinefex on your iPad. It’s now possible. →

Ian Failes: 

The Kickstarter campaign will allow supporters to pre-order the whole Cinefex Classic Collection – 126 issues! You can also pledge for collections of issues such as Star Wars or Star Trek-related Cinefex coverage.

 

Yes, Please. This would be great. I'm going to need a bigger iPad thou. The issues are huge.

DuctTake →

Ok here's the problem.

Nobody knows that the take is bad til it is shot. It's not til you are watching the cut that you realize it. You never do a spitscreen if the take is perfect. The director says while in post production,

"Wow I'd love to use her from take 3 and him from take 13".

This never happens on the day. Ok maybe it does but not in this capacity. The only planned spilt screens I have done are explosions or animal comps.

This is why they call it fix it in post. If you knew the talent was going to screw it up. You would just do another take. If you want to impress me do it to shots already shot and need fixing. Also notice that most of the shots they are demoing are lock offs. Not a good sign.

The Foundry has had a tool called Rig Removal for years. It has worked 3 times. Those 3 times required a huge amount of clean up.

Love the name.

The State of Rendering – Part 2 →

Mike Seymour: 

In Part 1 of The State of Rendering, we looked at the latest trends in the visual effects industry including the move to physically plausible shading and lighting. Part 2 explores the major players in the current VFX and animation rendering markets and also looks at the future of rendering tech.