CG Society just came out with it’s list of the 100 Greatest 3d Movies and it’s chock full of tasty links to a treasure trove of material on how the films were created. The list was generated by an online vote on entries from a short list of 150 films. Because of this, this list is a bit skewed towards newer films (Final Fantasy The Spirits Within is number 9 while TRON comes in at 18!). Aside from my feelings about the ordering of the list itself, the article is chock full of useful info. There are several charts and graphs (interesting to see that most of the fx work was done by only 3 companys) as well as a spiffy timeline. But by far the best part of this article is the related links associated with each film. You’ll find, among others, a great article on Low End Mac chronicling the birth of CGI and tid-bit from Alvy Ray Smith’s site talking about the genesis of The Genesis Effect. It’s worth taking the time to cruise through all links to get a taste of what it took to put these films together.
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Great read! I would recommend checking out the VES page for last year’s festival which included the VES 50: The Most Influential Visual Effects Films of All Time. From there you can view the trailer and download the pdf with the official list.
LINK: http://www.visualeffectssociety.com/vesFestival.cfm