Visual effects are the bane of Hollywood movies and jobs in the industry are starting to disappear to more distant locations. As global competitors creep up on Hollywood’s expensive salaries, studios want to maximize their investments and save money. So how bad is it in the visual effects industry if you’re considering a career?
If you [...]

Learning to understand visual effects and how they are applied in the movies is always interesting. Summer movies are ripe with effects shots galore. For James Mangold’s Knight & Day, vfx supervisor Eric Durst oversaw more than 700 effects shots to help tell the story of a secret agent and his unwilling partner [...]

Director Paul Greengrass, whose frenetic filmmaking style has been popularized by the successful Bourne franchise, revs it up for the Green Zone, a political thriller starring Matt Damon about the futile search for WMD during the chaotic early days of the Iraq War.
Once again, Greengrass chose Double Negative to make it all look convincing with his own [...]

When an audience at the Dubai International Film Festival today becomes one of the first in the world to don 3D specs and watch James Cameron’s Avatar, a number of things could happen. If the pre-release hype and any number of early reviews are to be trusted, they will leave the screening having seen something [...]

Creature design in the movies can be done with physical effects or computer-generated imagery. Often it comes down to the designers eye and imagination. Neville Page, the creature designer for “Avatar”  who created the dragon-like banshees that fly through the skies of Pandora, takes us through what it means to create fantastical creatures for an other [...]

Hell hath no fury like a geek scorned, and there is no species of geek more dedicated or passionate than the Trekkie (or Trekker, as they prefer to be called). Roger Guyett, the visual effects supervisor for Paramount’s “Star Trek” prequel, knows this all too well.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll meet someone on a dark [...]

His credits include Sin City, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean and Iron Man, now Scott Stewart - who brought the FX of those aforementioned titles to life via his company The Orphanage - is making his feature directorial debut with Legion, starring Paul Bettany as the archangel Michael. His mission? Protect a mother-to-be in a diner full of people who are [...]

Outsourcing to India, long dominated by software engineering and back-office work, is expanding in new terrain: special effects for movies.
India’s rise comes at a difficult time for U.S. special effects outfits, some of which have buckled as the 2008 L.A. writers strike cut productions and the financial crisis curtailed financing. Executives in India say cost [...]

Reuben Langdon is a motion capture artist in motion pictures and games — you’ve probably directed his actions without knowing it in such games as Resident Evil 5 and Dead Rising. Most recently he’s been working on James Cameron’s epic CG film, Avatar. He took some time out of his busy backflipping schedule to talk to [...]