fxguide, in partnership with Stan Winston Productions, is proud to announce that we will now blog an entire visual effects film, from start to finish. In an unprecedented move, we have been given full access to cover The Death’s of Ian from inception to completion: from concept art to final print. If you think you’re having a bad day, consider Ian Stone, an all-American kid who is murdered by horrifying pursuers only to wake up in a slightly diffe

Alien Smackdown was the title of a recent lecture by Grady Cofer from ILM, we caught up with him in Sydney and asked “Just what the heck is a Sabre ?” And how does it differ from a discreet flame? We got to hear first hand how the team at ILM use the 3D compositing environment of Flame and Inferno to comp shots such as the opening of Star Wars Ep 3 and War of the Worlds. Grady showed us indepth how ILM uses Flame and especially how they use imported 3D g

The Da Vinci Code found the box office glory, opening at US$77 million (USA) and a record US$147 million overseas. To be successful the Da Vinci code required both seamless visual effects and detailed visualisations. This week we speak to the team at Double Negative in London about their work on the film and how they solved the visual effects.

Rarely is a vfx team called upon to so faithfully recreate something so significant to so many people, and so vividly recalled by so many of the film’s audience. United flight 93 was hand crafted back to life by the team at Double Negative in London.

UPDATE: Digital Domain has been sold to Michael Bay. We first heard rumours from equipment suppliers on Monday. For those who follow Nuke and D2 Software, this is especially good news! Carl Stork, Digital Domain’s new CEO, has a 20 year history as a technology innovator, and one of the things he’s looking forward to is continued expansion of Digital Domain’s software offerings. We have Carl Stork’s initial comment on D2, with more to follow soon.

In this week’s fxpodcast we talk to Evan Jacobs about his role — on set and off — for the feature filmSilent Hill. In the companion story we focus on the issue of camera tracking on this film, and applying bugs.

Smashing cars is always fun in Visual effects, in the recent Allstate “Girls Day Out II”. Chris Kreynus talks us through how SOL designfx achieved the spot and the pipeline they used with Flame and Silhouette Roto.

Following up from last week’s very successful podcasts is the rest of the interview with Red Camera’s Ted Schilowitz – so called Leader of the Rebellion.

Today’s podcast covers the first day on the show floor at NAB 2006. We combine a roundtable discussion with guests Wally Rodriguez from Upstairs, Miami and Fred Ruckel from Stitch, NY with interviews recorded on the show floor. Topics include: The Red Camera, Apple, Film Scanning, Dust busting, Plug-Ins, Mokey, storage, fxphd… and much more in a wide range of topics in a freeform discussion.

This week we test drive visual effects stock footage and explain what to expect and examine how useful it really can be.

Apple has just released version 1.1 of Aperture. Some would say this is not only in direct response to initial criticism to the quality of the RAW tools in version 1.0.1 but also in response to Adobe’s ‘beta’ release of Lightroom. Aperture is now available as a Universal – running up to 4 times faster and Apple have slashed the price. We compare Aperture 1.1 to Adobe Lightroom, and suggest how you can best use them in a visual effects environment.

Warren Lynch has graded on huge hollywood films such as Lord of the Rings, but with his new company he has also engineered interesting approaches to indie feature digital grading. In this week’s podcast we discuss diamonds in vodka, 2 perf, bleach by-pass, and more

Autodesk has announced a new version of Toxik – Toxik 2007. The release, expected to ship this summer, includes a new HDRI paint module, wiretap support, improved AMD optimizations, and more. We’ve got some exclusive images from the UI in addition to the Autodesk press release.

You think you’re hot ? Well check out the flame work on this Sprite spot where the talent is literally on fire. Its all thanks to some cool — you guessed it — flame work by vfx supervisor and artist Rohit Misra.

After a hugely successful three year run, we’re taking a break from doing fxguide live at NAB in order to cover the convention for all of our readers who can’t make it to Vegas. With no fxguide event at NAB this year, Autodesk took over and is holding their own style of smoke and flame master classes at NAB on April 23rd. In this week’s podcast, we speak with Jake Parker and Michael Ruzicka — two of the artists who will be presenting at this year’s event

Sooner or later everyone wants thinks about jumping ship and relocating to a new company. This week we speak to Teresa Hall, a top talent agent who places people at companies like MPC, Framestore, Pandemic Studios, and Digital Domain. We discuss how to prepare your reel, what to expect, and how companies select staff – especially staff from overseas.

In this week’s podcast, we speak with AE power user Stu Maschwitz of The Orphanage about the recent release of After Effects 7. With the new 32-bit workflow in the software, its potential for use in high end compositing has been expanded greatly. Our online story has highlighted information from the interview and we’ve added new tips in our After Effects tips section about using a 32-bit linear workflow.

After the amazing response we got from our recent story on Date Movie and the stages of production, we figured we’d follow up with some more of the great work from the guys at Furious FX. As mentioned in that story the team also worked on Underworld: Evolution. So here now is a similar shot by shot break down on their work on a very different – much darker vfx film.

We track a typical visual effect sequence done by Furious FX for the film Date Movie, 2006. We follow the shots from on set to finals in the finished film.

Furious does great work, but rather than discuss the whole film, we drilled down on just one small sequence and tracked it to show exactly what happens on a typical visual effects shot on a major Hollywood film.

Software developers try to cram as many new effects as possible into their product -after all, it’s those features which lead to sales. Workflow changes and fixes which help artists get their work done often get left behind. In this week’s podcast and story, we take a look at the new release of Adobe After Effects and how they bucked this trend.

RealViz Stitcher, perhaps the best program available for patching together multiple images to produce a master high resolution wide angle master shot. We talk to RealViz Product manager Stephane Negri about Stitcher 5, and examine its relationship to Photoshop.