Every web-nerd’s favorite comic strip xkcd just wrapped up a 5 part series called “The Race” featuring stick figure likenesses of Nathan Fillion, Summer Glau and chock full’o inside VFX/Sci-Fi geek humor. It’s laugh out loud funny. if your into that sort of thing.
(LINK) to Part 1
Smashing Magazine has posted a list of Best Tutorials For Cinematic Visual Effects. The post links to 62 techniques ranging from the 007 Intro to Meteor Crashes. So this one post contains all the knowledge you would need to make a tent-pole VFX feature or start your own effects boutique. Right? Seriously, if all this information was available to me when I got started, it would have been much harder to impress people by showing them a chrome sphere on a checkerboard.
(LINK) to the full post
Filmmaker Kris Wong has put together Command+Z, a nifty little short that has tons of energy and a lot of VFX moxie. According to Kris’ website
Our main influences came from action films from the 90’s, art deco, and war propaganda
The result is kinda like if the Hudsucker Proxy and Kill Bill had a love child. And I mean that in a good way. Make sure you check out the Making Of section. These guys obviously had a blast making this thing.
(LINK) to the Command+Z microsite
If you laughed at the title of this post you will defiantly be jealous of my VFX geek-tastic Birthday Cake. A handcrafted, custom baked and iced, full scale replica of the Millennium Falcon (from the movie Star Wars, maybe you’ve heard of it). I can’t quite figure out what is more nerdy, the fact that I grinned and giggled like an 8 year old boy at the sight of the thing or how much the other VFX dudes in my office wished they had one of their own.
LINK to Hansen’s (the company that made the cake) Cake Diaries blog
Thanks to L.E. for the pix
Nowadays aspiring your visual effects artists have a lot a resources that weren’t available in the old days (like 1990-2000) Fancy modeling,animation and rendering tools had yet to hit the market in large affordable numbers not to mention the lack of decent CG training on-line or otherwise. One side effect of all this is that the bar is set so high that something that was once a staple of the industry is near extinction.
I’m talking about truly awful imagery created on a computer.
There was once a digital shrine created to hold those works that had transcended from just bad to sublime. It was called The Gallerie Abominate an offshoot of Richard Morris’ Maya resource site.
It was a place you could always count on for a laugh and to gain small comfort in the fact that there was always something out there worse than what you you were doing. The archive hasn’t been updated since 2001 but it’s still worth more than a few chuckles.
LINK to The Gallerie Abominate Archive
Ever get sick of being referred to as a “3d Guy”? Well if you have you may enjoy an open letter rant posted on cgpov.com. It’s got some gems including.
Please do not ever again refer to us as “3D guys, THE 3D guy” or the particularly nauseating “3D Guru”. It’s dismissive, degrading, and just sounds f**king dumb.
The fun continues from there.
LINK to the whole rant
(via Eric Alba)
The folks over at Sci Fi Scoop were nice enough to interview me about the effects work I’ve had the pleasure of working of for J.J. Abrams’ series Fringe. Not only did they write up a nice little piece, but also posted a recording of parts of our conversation along with a nifty slide show. Check it out, and try not to get too mesmerized by my droning vfx blather.
LINK to the full Fringe article
’nuff Said
(via io9)
You know that Visual Effects has truly come into it’s own as a cultural phenom when there’s a story about it in The Onion. It’s like being a musician and having your song cover by “Weird” Al Yancovic. I have to hand it to The Onion writing staff for doing there homework though. The article talks about Vicon, a real life mo-cap company. and it features this quote.
“Our 78-person team is committed to capturing each and every nuance of the Obama administration,” Vicon CEO Douglas Reinke said. “Years from now, historians will be able to access high-quality images of what the former president might have looked like while he was, say, meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on April 3, 2009, or tying his shoelaces on the afternoon of June 3, 2011.”
Get this, Douglas Reinke really is the CEO of Vicon. You gotta love well researched fake news.
LINK to the full Onion article
That “guy” is Bruce Branit, one of the creators of 405:The Movie and film he made is called World Builder. It was shot fully on greenscreen in 1 day and then spent about two years in post most of the work being done by Branit himself. The results are pretty impressive even if the ending is a bit maudlin. Sit back and relax with some popcorn the clip is a bit long.
(VIA Gizmodo)
