David S. Cohen writing for variety.com:
Disney topper Robert Iger offered assurance on an investor call Tuesday, saying "We want to let Industrial Light & Magic remain as is," and saying it would continue to work for other studios, even as ILM management was working the phones to reassure its studio clients.
Disney Buys Lucas Mark Mayerson writing for mayersononanimation:
That takes money and oxygen away from original projects that potentially could become as big as Star Wars or the Marvel Universe. The company is clearly committed to milking existing intellectual property and acquiring more of it than creating new intellectual property. And so much of what Disney is buying is from the last century.
At the end of the day all this is just a way to make money. Goerges rate was 4.05 billion.
Remember when Disney did their first computer animated shot? I believe it was "Beauty and the Beast". The overly smooth camera, gave it away.
Part of me is thinking Disney buying Lucas Arts is a good thing for visual effects and its artists.
Disney now means business. Visual effects wise. Will ILM only work on Disney movies? No. But Disney can now do what Lucas did with ILM in the past. Disney now has complete control over ILM. For the visual effects industry that might be good. There has always been talk of the studios buying up vfx companies and then being self contained. As a artist you would move from studio to studio simular to how the camera operators and set lighting technicians do. This is how the rest of the movie industry works.
Disney had a really good post house called "Secret Lab". A lot of the really good painters came from there. If "101 Dalmatians" makes you anxious you know what I'm talking about. Disney decided to close it. Many think that was a mistake.
I hope Disney is saying Lucas Arts is very important. 4.05 billion important.
Mike Seymour writing for fxguide.com:
Today ILM for the first time in its history was sold, as part of a deal by Disney to buy LucasFilm. fxguide spoke directly to ILM today who commented only that “for ILM and Skywalker Sound it’s business as usual.”
The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS) announced today that it has agreed to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. in a stock and cash transaction valued at $4.05 billion. Lucasfilm is 100 percent owned by Lucasfilm chairman and founder, George Lucas.
I wonder how the ILMers feel about this.
Some neat stuff here. I posted about this here.
Losts of ideas for uses. I'll share as they come up.
Get the low down. If you are in London. A birdie says Nuke 7 Release latter this month.
Any chance of this in Los Angeles?
The idea that you can make a movie in post is crazy. As you look around at the big tent pole movies being made all of them have gone into reshooting parts of there movie. I have read reports that shooting started even before some of the final decision have not yet decided. Even comedies are such a mess that then need to go and reshoot.
Making a movie is hard. Some think it is easy. Get a camera, point it in the general direction of the action and you got a movie. This simply is not how it works. It takes planing and asking questions.
Let’s not make it harder by not making decisions and talking it out first. Sometimes all it takes for me to solve a problem is to go talk it out with someone. I had a supervisor that would sometimes explain how he would do it on a optical printer. This made the process much more simple.
Putting talent in a green suit doesn’t make him disappear. Putting tracking markers all over a iPhone doesn’t generally make a better shot. Making movies is about the small stuff.
“Smaller brush, Michael. I want to feel it not see it”
Ask us questions and listen to us. We are a group of really smart people who can do almost anything. Trust us.
Indecision might be the most expensive part of visual effects.
Shawns Hendriks Via Twitter:
Telling the guy painting your house that you don't know what color you want but just make it like BAM! you know #treatedlikevfxartists
Working nights is werid. Your times are all screwed up. You shop in the middle of the night and you are going to work when most people are driving home. Good thing was I was were I wanted to be.
I was greeted by Phillip Hoffman. At this time Phillip was a coordinator. I filled out all the paperwork and was led up stairs to the comp closet. A narrow room which had a door on the far side that led to the art department. 4 cubicles lined the right wall and 3 desks on the left wall. I was to share a desk with Craig Mathieson. Craig is a really good compositor and wasn't afraid to make mistakes and laugh at them. Everyday I would come in and Craig was chuckling about something crazy yet obvious he had screwed up in some way. I wish he was around longer, I feel I didn't learn everything he had to offer. Jim was to my left. On the night shift. There was a group of painters that were brought on to help with the heavy paint work that needed to be done. Delores Pope, and two other artist I never saw again after the project was over and for the life of me cannot remember there names. Down the hall was a additional room that had the other compositors that were all on the day shift. Brad the lead compositor on the show help me get setup and showed me rush and how the network was setup. Also setup a e-mail account so I could communicate.
Phillip sent me my-first assignment. All you could get was a scratch removal. There was really hard, hard, medium and easy. There was smoke in almost every shot. Tanks and gun shots make a lots of smoke. To help speed things up we only worked on the right third of the frame. The scans were 4k but we worked on a 2k cropped image. If we needed other parts of the frame we could ask. We used a 2k playback machine called the framethrower that you could load your image sequence and play it back realtime.
There is a reason you start in paint and roto. This is some of the hardest compositing I have ever done.
