After years of waiting for signs of life in the Autodesk package of Sapphire sparks, GenArts has resoundingly delivered with a new release. The new version includes over 45 new effects and enhancements to previous sparks. We speak with GenArts founder Karl Sims and several beta testers about the new release.

Two recent spots from Sony really caught our eye at the fxguide tech bunker. The simplicity of the ideas and the faultless execution of these commercials has become a hallmark of Sony’s advertising internationally in the last couple of years. We caught up with Dave Morley, one of the founders of FUEL international, about their work on the spots.

Picture Mill is a leading design and effects house doing title design for films such as War of the Worlds, Panic Room and logo film titles for studios such as SPYGLASS and Universal. In this podcast Mike sits down for a discussion on design issues, the role of titles and the nature of branding design with Creative Director William Lebeda.

In a global community TVC spots are now often being made ‘overseas’. This inventive spot was for the chinese market, shot in Shanghai, made in Australia for a Japanese car company.

Motion capture has forced actors to don blue lycra to provide animators with artistic interpretation of characters. But the race is on to make this process easier, faster, cheaper and less awkward for the actor. One such advance is the recent showing of markerless motion capture from Organic Motion.

With a weekend opening of over $120US million, Shrek the Third continues the box office success of the franchise. In this fxpodcast, we speak with Larry Cutler and Matt Baer from PDI/Dreamworks including their insights into how working on a series of films changes the workflow. Our online story also contains a large gallery of images.

Hatchfx is a specialist matte painting company, although as we discovered when talking to the founders, a “matte painting” is now a hard term to define. As the line between matte painting and visual effects blurs, we explored some of their work on the film and the methodology they use to tackle shots.

In this podcast we speak with Stu Maschwitz, author of The DV Rebels’ Guide. Maschwitz is one of the founders of The Orphange and has a been a huge proponent of bringing desktop tools such as After Effects to the high end post market. We also get his thoughts about the current compositing software market.

James Bond, The Queen and Hannibal Lecter have all been through Framestore CFC’s Digital Lab. We caught up with senior Colourist Asa Shoul, and Executive Producer Jan Hogevold in London to discuss the role of DI in the London film market.

Spider-man 3 delivers on its promise with three sensational CG villains and new side to the web-slinging superhero. Bill Dawes and Kelsey Brookes go behind the scenes with the Sony Pictures Imageworks VFX and animation team of what is reported to be one of the most expensive movies ever made.

MPC was given over 750 shots to kick start the sun and bring to life the mission to save the world. As the sun is a major ‘character’ of the film, it’s visual development was a key aspect of the effects work. VFX supervisor Tom Wood headed up a team that produced some of the most stunning images of the sun ever put on film.

Just two and a half weeks ago Oscar winning director Peter Jackson shot a short film shot on the RED 4K camera in NZ, which premiered this morning on the RED booth at the NAB trade show in Las Vegas.

UPDATE: Now with our second NAB podcast, a roundtable discussion of Monday at NAB 2007.

Wrap up of Sunday’s user group and our first NAB 2007 podcast, a “Live” podcast from the Autodesk Pool Party at Caesar’s Palace. Let me tease you with these words – Standard Filesystem Volume. Not enough? How about batch in Smoke… or multilayer timeline in batch?

We have an fxguide team attending the Apple Event and plan on bringing you live updates as announcements are made.

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Having launched just one year ago, fxphd is about to start a new term. fxphd is the sister site of fxguide providing professional training for artists who want to lift their careers to the next level. Classes this term include character design/drawing, flame, Matte painting, Maya, Max, toxik AE , Photoshop – 15 different classes in total.

Based on a true story, “The Heart of the Earth” is an epic film that takes place in a late 1800´s mining town at the edge of the world’s biggest open air mine. This film didn’t come without its challenges. The first was that the town ceased to exist in 1923, the solution was of course visual effects, done in Madrid headed by Alex Ortoll.

Fox presents a new TV show “Drive” featuring visual effects by Zoic Studios. We spoke to co-founder Loni Peristere about work on this and the companies amazing run in cutting edge episodic television effects from CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Buffy to Battlestar Gallactica, 24 and now Drive.

“All the characters in this book are fictitious, and anyone finding a resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, should proceed no further…” that’s the disclaimer from the novel The Number 23, the centerpiece of the movie from Director Joel Schumacher. We talk with Raymond Gieringer at Intelligent Creatures to discuss the film.