Between the rise of digital media and the shortcuts many theaters have taken to alleviate waning profits – forgoing film rigs for digital projectors, replacing projectionists with button-pushers, lowering projection-bulb levels to cut replacement costs – many filmmakers are concerned about the state of their industry. Visual effects veteran and filmmaker Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, The Tree of Life), for one, is doing something about it: He hopes to bring back the spectacle of the theater-going experience – and revitalize the industry in the process -- with a project he’s shooting at 120 frames per second, in 3-D, to be projected at seven times the luminosity often seen in theaters today.
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Yes, I just wrote the words "Transformers Oscar campaign." Sigh. It's time we come to terms with the fact that each installment in Michael Bay's robot action series has technically been nominated for one or more Academy Awards -- deservedly so, really, given the technical achievements these CG metal-on-metal bashfests have under their belt, even if everything else in these films are aggressively, brain-numbingly mediocre. But Paramount aims to take home one of them statuettes this year, by god, and so they've created an awards campaign to break through to Oscar voters in the most effective way possible: Through their TV sets.
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Perhaps in response to all those people left stymied by Hereafter's Oscar nomination for visual effects (especially when Tron: Legacy got shut out of the category, poor thing), Warner Bros. have released a shot-by-shot reel showing how VFX supervisor Michael Owens and Scanline VFX put together that nine-minute opening tsunami sequence. And when you see how the live-action parts came together combining CG, green screen, water tanks, and on-location photography -- well, "Oscar-nominated Hereafter" doesn't sound so silly anymore.
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