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 [...]

A Weta Digital researcher, Iain Matthews, has joined university academics in Britain and the United States to develop a way of “cloning” facial expressions.
The computer scientists have challenged assumptions about human behaviour and what influences that behaviour when people communicate by tracking the expressions of individuals during live conversations on a video conference, and mapping [...]

What do you do if you’re a filmmaker trying to capture a scene in which an onrushing tow truck slams into a parked car, sending the car rolling neatly up and over the truck’s back, but you face the reality that the car, vaulted into the air by a cannon shot from below, actually flies high [...]

David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’ was released in theaters to little fanfare but will surely find life on DVD. Here’s take a look at the deft behind the scenes CGI work of some scenes from ‘Zodiac’. The surprise is that most of the San Francisco background was computer generated which is truly amazing.
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