The Red Dwarf: Back to Earth mini-series recently debuted on the UK Dave Channel to a record 2.6 million viewers, almost triple the channels previous highest ratings, placing it as the highest-rated commissioned show on a digital network ever. This week we speak to one of our own as John Montgomery interviews Mike Seymour on fxphd’s involvement with this classic and beloved Sci-fi comedy.

The Hollywood Post Alliance describes their 15th annual technology retreat on their web site with the heading “Now more than ever! Arm your Brain”. In these challenging economic times it is important to be thinking in new directions and looking for all opportunities. We take a trip to the desert for some inspiration and to see what the HPA Technology Retreat has to offer.

Today GenArts made good on recent talk of expansion and announced the acquisition of SpeedSix. We speak to Steve Bannerman, Chief Marketing Officer of GenArts about the new expansion. He talks exclusively with fxguide and discusses the possible move to market custom plugins.

SPI has produced some spectacularly seamless visual effects for the period drama of Valkyrie from director Bryan Singer (Usual Suspects, Superman Returns) and staring a serious dramatic performance from Tom Cruise (War of the Worlds. Rich Hoover, vfx supervisor on Valkyrie spoke to us about the complexity of doing such a powerful historical film.

We learned with great sadness that The Pixel Farm’s Richard Spöhrer suddenly passed away on the last day of 2008. We reflect on what he added to our industry and how he touched many of us not only with the many products he was involved with, but with his kindness and generosity as a person.

With the Bake off for the Oscar Nominations this Thursday in LA, we speak to Iloura’s Peter Webb about the film Australia. One of seven films in the running for the Oscar’s three nominations for best visual effects. Peter was part of the team at iloura that handled much of the end of the film, including much of the bombing of Darwin.

The Foundry today announced that it was slashing the prices of its Sparks by approximately 90% in response to no longer being a part of the Autodesk Spark program. While it may still find a full solution, this is a complex issue that we have been tracking for a month. To get the full implication of what is happening, fxguide spoke directly to the Foundry’s co-founder Simon Robinson.

It is that time of year when all media organizations like to produce lists. Lists of top 10, lists of best of the year, a look back with a Year in Review, or 2008: The Year That Just Was. So not to be out done – and just for fun – we jumped on the bandwagon and compiled our own special ‘fxguide Completely Unscientific List of Cool Things from 2008’.

This week in our fxpodcast, we speak to Richard Lambert principle at Fin Design. Fin recently won a host of Awards for their amazing Herringbone TVC. We speak about this spot and some of their other work. Ironically while the TV ad was winning awards, fashion label Herringbone itself has fallen victim to the global slowdown by going into voluntary administration.

GenArts is a pivotal player in the image processing plug-in market, but are they happy to stay on the sidelines as a plug-in supplier? With the Foundry’s move into full products such as NUKE, could GenArts be looking at some major expansion? It certainly seems so. fxguide spoke to the new company CEO Katherine Hays about her first 100 days at the helm of one of the most successful plug-in and spark companies in the world.

After seeing the papers and Electronic Theatre – we turn our attention to the serious courses and classes. Plus, we’ve got to catch up with senior members of the gaming and film industry, including Rob Cook from Pixar.

This week in Singapore marks the first Asian Siggraph. More than 3,200 artists, researchers, developers, gaming experts, filmmakers, as well as academics gathered over four days to discover new techniques, technology and approaches in the graphics. In all, a total of 49 countries were represented in an array of amazing animation and breakthrough ideas presented at the show.

Kids show with very adult tech. Sid the Science Kid from Jim Henson Studios is a remarkable project for the complexity and simultaneous simplicity of its motion capture. fxguide spoke to Steffen M. Wild, Visual Effects Supervisor, Digital Supervisor at Jim Henson Co. for this week’s fxpodcast.

The Anim-FX conference was recently held in Wellington. New Zealand has transformed its industry over the last 10 years and in conjunction with the VES, this conference provided a great platform for the local post and vfx industry.

Today RED announced their new plans for Epic and Scarlet. We examine the implications of this plan, the viability of the company and speak one on one with Ted Schilowitz to find out a lot of the missing information that fleshes out todays plans and answers a wealth of questions we had as to how this would all work.

If you are in the USA – VOTE. We don’t care care who for, ok we may care, but don’t listen to us.. exercise your democracy.

Clearly we are aren’t the only ones saying this, New Deal Studios teamed with Leonardo DiCaprio, Will.I.Am, Tobey Maguire and Forest Whitaker to make these viral historical PSA spots.
Seriously cool as they are – the message is the thing… V o t e

In 1998 Avid bought Softimage from Microsoft for $285 million. Today, Softimage has been sold to Autodesk for $35M. Admittedly back then the deal included DS, but has Autodesk just done the deal of the year? To find out more about how this deal came about and what it means to the 3D visual effects community we spoke to Marc Stevens, GM of Softimage and Marc Petit, Sr. VP, Autodesk Media & Entertainment.

It started with a press release from AVID stating they were looking to restructure and cut staff, including the news that they intended to sell Softimage. “Plans to” sell Softimage was all they said. Moments ago an email was sent to Softimage customers saying that Softimage had in fact been sold to Autodesk. Click through for the various press releases and the letter sent to Softimage customers.

In the comedy Ghost Town, Rhinofx provided visual effects, but two effects in particular made us curious here at fxguide: a non motion control timelapse helicopter shot and the principle ghost passing through effect. We figured it would be interesting to find out how these two special visual effects were achieved, so we spoke to the team at Rhinofx.

The series John Adams received 23 Emmy Award nominations, the most of any program this year. Among those was the nomination for Outstanding SVE for a Mini-series. This week we speak to Jeff Goldman, at CafeFX about their Emmy-nominated work. As second President of the United States, and one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the USA, the story spans decades of Adams’ life UPDATED: EMMY WINNER

In this week’s fxpodcast, Mark Breakspear of CIS (formerly Rainmaker) discusses how Blades of Glory showed his company how fundamentally different the pipeline needs to be for visual effects in comedies. We follow up with more details and background in our online story.

The VES recently held a Motion Capture event where a range of motion capture experts presented a snap shot of the state of the art in the industry, David Stripinis reports a personal perspective, from someone who works with it daily.

We visit the job fair, catch up with Eyeon, Pixel Farm, check out some new fast hardware from Sony and Texas Memory Systems and discuss the FJORG! winning entry.

With the trade show now open and the event fully under way we do a quick survey of cool events and tech on the Tuesday and Wednesday of this years Siggraph. Today we focus on XSI, Massive, C4D, RealFlow, coffee and the great Stan Winston.

Siggraph opened on Monday. On day one, highlights included the conference keynote from Ed Catmull (Pixar), Nuke and Autodesk User groups, new software from Maya, Renderman, Motion Builder and some great technical papers – and Fjorg started.