The Visual Effects Society (VES) Technology Committee & American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) held a session this past Tuesday in Hollywood called Image Quality Considerations for Cinematography and Visual Effects. This was a standing room only event at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater, Eric Roth (head of the VES) said in his opening remarks that over 100 people called VES looking to confirm after the event was already full. Scheduled to appear were the Cinematographers from Iron Man, Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Dark Knight as well as the Visual Effects Supervisor from Benjamin Button.

What follows is not meant to be a detailed recap of the evening, rather to give you a flavor of the event and some of the important issues raised.
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Autodesk today released an update to SOFTIMAGE|XSI, which it acquired from Avid back in November, and the update renames the product to Autodesk Softimage.

Read the press release after the jump

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A talk from the 2009 TED Conference has been posted featuring Ed Ulbrich, from Digital Domain, explaining the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create younger and older versions of Brad Pitt’s face for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

Watch the clip here

The 81st Academy Awards® were held tonight at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

In the category “Achievement in Visual Effects” the nominees were:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron

The Dark Knight
Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin

Iron Man
John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mah

And the winner is… (dramatic pause…) after the jump:
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It was a good night for Digital Domain at the 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” took home four awards and a commercial for Bacardi made it five. The HBO series “John Adams”, “The Changeling”, “WALL E”, and “The Dark Knight” all took home multiple awards and New Deal Studios swept the Models and Miniatures categories.

You can see the complete list of winners in our other article and click read more for our recap of the night and a link to slideshow photo gallery.

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The 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards were held tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

In addition to the award categories a VES Lifetime Achievement award was presented to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall and the George Méliès Award for Pioneering was presented to Phil Tippett.

The winners in individual categories are after the jump: (more…)

One of the more interesting products in development over the last year has been Gridiron Software’s Flow — an asset, versioning, and time tracking package for artists. It works behind the scenes to track what you’re working on and what files were used to create the end result. Just drag a render to the Flow icon and you get a visual display of what assets were used to create the file. But it’s way more than just asset tracking (see the features page for a breakdown)…and the best thing is that it really doesn’t get in your way of working.

We’ve been on the beta program of the software and the folks up north have been doing a bang up job at bringing features and stability to an incredibly complex task. The software took a bit longer to get out in public, but that was because they were spending the time actively working with users in a private beta to add features and make things work more smoothly. The software is still in beta and has some rough edges, but it’s now ready for the general public. Well, at least the OSX public. Check it out for yourself at Gridiron Software’s web site.

It’s that time of year again, when manufacturers are looking for material to add to their tradeshow reels. The Foundry is prepping their reel for NAB and looking for cool stuff that features work done in their products: Nuke, Furnace, Keylight, Ocula, Tinder, and Tinderbox.

If you have work that you’d like to have featured at the booth and online, click through for information from the Foundry on how to be included….

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Starting the award season the British Academy of Film and Television Arts held the BAFTA Awards tonight. The winner for the category Special Visual Effects is:

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan McGuinness, Edson Williams

Full list of BAFTA winners can be found here.
The VES Awards are next on February 21st, followed by the Oscars on February 22nd.

Late yesterday we got word that The Orphanage in San Francisco was suspending operations. The confirmation came quickly on Orphanage co-founder Stu Maschwitz’s ProLost blog.

The company was founded in 1999 by Stu and co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart and according to The Orphanage website had a staff of more than 160 artists with offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Orphanage worked on feature films like Iron Man, Sin City, The Spirit, Pirates of The Caribbean as well as commercials.

The Orphanage contributed greatly to the visual effects community and Stu in particular has been a champion of the sharing of knowledge with his DV Rebel book and insightful blog posts. There has been an amazing outpouring of support from the twitter community as this news broke.