The Atlantic interviews Cyriak Harris on his peculiar animation technique. The Atlantic: How did you find American Thrift and decide to give it the Cyriak treatment? Cyriak Harris: I regularly use the archive.org website to look for interesting stock footage and inspiration. In this case the whole film had such a classic dated look to it and an almost sinister consumerist ideology, Read MoreRead More
Sam Raimi employs an interesting technique with having video monitors puppets take the place of characters that would be later dropped in digitally. Sam Raimi was faced with a predicament. Two of the characters in his upcoming film Oz The Great and Powerful are completely fantastical (a flying talking monkey and a foot tall talking/walking breakable china ceramic doll) but Read MoreRead More
Art of the Title speaks to LAIKA/house artist and illustrator Aaron Sorenson about the gleefully spooky and charmingly realized main-on-end titles of ParaNorman. How did the first meeting about this sequence go? Arianne Sutner, one of the co-producers, spearheaded the process. She contacted me and asked, “Are you interested in directing our title sequence?” Of course, I said yes. Read MoreRead More
Rather than build each level of their new game, “Rustclad,” directly in 3D, developers Skull Theatre have turned to photogrammetry – a process of creating 3D environments using an array of photographs of real world models. Though the technique is nothing new, the tools are getting more accessible: the team uses Autodesk’s 123D Catch Nearly Read MoreRead More
Grantland takes you into the storied confines of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic headquarters to marvel at the art and relics from Lucas’s films, including the Yoda fountain, original ‘Star Wars’ character sketches, Slimer from ‘Ghostbusters,’ and much more. Produced and directed by Joe Braswell Behind the scenes at Industrial Light and Magic, we Read MoreRead More
Christian Brown explains the Visual Effects Artist Protest at the Oscars as the visual effects industry rushes toward the bottom. You have to hand it to the Academy—there’s hardly a higher profile way to draw attention to the plight of the Visual Effects industry in Hollywood than playing the theme from Jaws before cutting off an Oscar-winning VFX Read MoreRead More
ILM showing off again.. Although roughly a third of “The Avengers” is set in New York City precious little was actually filmed there. ILM crew members photographed 7-miles of city streets from a variety of heights and at different times of day totaling 250,000 images. The crew then digitally recreated roughly 20 square blocks of Read MoreRead More
Ian Failes reviews a few of the special effects challenges on John McClane’s latest outting. You can’t make a Die Hard film without some crazy stunts, massive explosions and, these days, incredible visual effects. We talk to overall VFX supe Everett Burrell and several of the studios behind the previs and effects for four of the biggest Read MoreRead More
The animating team at Pixar discuss the challenge of rendering and shading Merida’s hair as well as keeping preserving the performance in CG animation. https://vimeo.com/59720996Read More
Need to have a repeating sound for an animation? Rather than set up audio points for each keyframe, use this technique of telling After Effects to play a sound or animation at every marker. Animating stuff that pops on and off of the screen in After Effects can become a pain as you’ll have to Read MoreRead More
From Rhythm and Hues Studios – here is a retrospective by Kevin B. Lee of animals from Babe, Garfield, Narnia, Life of Pi and others. http://vimeo.com/59284310Read More
Here’s a Photoshop tutorial (which can easily be replicated in After Effects) for turning the interesting cracked surface of a baking tray into the surface of a distant planet. Believe it or not, this photo planet was made entirely from a shot of a grubby old roasting tin and a simple but cunning combination of Photoshop Read MoreRead More
