In the second part of our series blogging the film The Deaths of Ian, we go on set with the visual effects supervisor, Dennis Michelson. A veteran of countless productions both behind the camera and behind the computer, Michelson talks about how the production tackled many of the issues of combining physical and digital effects.

With the release of the first public beta of CS3 – we take a first look from the stand point of a VFX artist or matte painter. We answer the question “What’s new in it and is it any faster ?”

Visual effects artist Victor Wolansky recently finished a spot involving complex 3D tracking in HD. fxguide caught up with Victor and got a detailed breakdown of the shot. We also picked up a few tricks about how to agressively use 3D tracking in a tv commercial world.

Over the last several weeks, there have been some high-profile layoffs in Montreal at Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment Division. For most flame artists, the most recognizable departure would be the “mayor of discreet”, Martin Helie. We cover those changes and interview Autodesk’s Marc Petit about the reasons behind the reorganization.

Increasingly there is a move from shooting mirror balls to shooting wide angle lens shots for both texture reflection maps and HDRs. In this exclusive interview we explore the new Stitcher 5.5 and hear about the new plans for an HDR pipeline, from the team at REALVIZ headquaters in France.

Last night Hunt Angels won 3 Australian Film Institute awards including Best Visual Effects. On the podium to receive the award was fxphd Professor Rose Draper and fxguide co-founder Mike Seymour.

SWAY Studio has just contributed to the new U2 and Green Day music video entitled “The Saints are Coming.” SWAY integrated many photo-real CG elements including Harrier jets, Apache helicopters, Stealth Bombers and tanks into existing news footage from Hurricane Katrina. The result is a thought-provoking and emotional video that shows what it might have looked like had the government responded differently to the disaster.

fxguide (well 2/3 of it) are on the road this month, talking in London at CVMP and in India at CGtantra 3Dec.
John Montgomery and Mike Seymour will be in Europe and India in the coming weeks – and we’d love to met up with fxguide readers and share a beer or two.

xyz studios recently needed to paint the town yellow for a Sensis yellow pages ad. Miniature motor bikes drive down the gutter and footpaths of an inner-city street, and in so doing, painting the world a handdrawn yellow. The spot is interesting for the 3D overlay and the need to often rebuild all the live action in 3D. The workflow highlights the recent move towards both shortrun freelance teams and the use of Shake since its price drop.

The first major motion picture created without using film or tape. Andreas Wacker was the tech guru and Angus Wall the editor on the David Fincher film “Zodiac”. In this podcast we talk with them about the innovative process used to create this feature.

Sure…IBC was several weeks ago, but we’ve got some more stuff we found interesting in the show. We cover items such as the RED camera, Gridiron Software’s AE plugin Nucleo Pro, announcements from The Foundry, as well as a few more bits on wiretap apps for Autodesk products. This week’s podcast contains interviews with RED camera principals as well as Blackmagic Design’s Grant Petty.

Double Negative has just completed Flyboys. Shot on Genesis – Double Negative managed to pull off an astonishing schedule to deliver some amazing digital environments, air to air combat and period drama for the first World War I aviation film in over 40 years.

In light of Ascent Media’s decision to only buy da Vinci colour correctors, for transfering and DI – this week we speak to Erik Rogers at Company 3 in LA.

There wasn’t a huge gimongous public announcment at IBC, but Autodesk has revamped their hardware for the system products line. The company is switching from IBM to HP workstations, as well as changing their video I/O hardware for flame and smoke systems. We cover what we know about the new hardware and provide an overview of the new features in the “2007” effects and editing releases….

Greeetings from Amsterdam. We only had a bit of time at the show on the first day, after landing from the states around midday, but we did find some stuff that’ll be of interest to flame and smoke users. After years of the discreet file system being closed to outisde access, At IBC we saw several announcements regarding new WireTap-based apps. These applications allow users to access the stonefs via mount points on PC’s or view stonefs material metadata in

What would you get if you crossed a toxik with a lustre and made it look like a flame? We asked Dan Tatut, the CEO of CHROME Imaging whoe are makers of the insanely interesting “Matrix compositor”. While initially speced to be a compositing system, the product is really aimed at the TVC DI market. The product is a major standalone turn-key system in the mold of Quantel, Discreet, 5D and the Sony Socratto. It was the shake up in that pack that lead to th

This week we look behind Oliver Stone’s newest masterpiece, World Trade Center. Double Negative was responsible for recreating possibly some of the most iconic footage of the modern age. It is one thing to recreate or create mythical worlds or fantasy environments, it is something else to reproduce images that are still extremely vivid in the popular culture, and obviously very sensitive.

PFTrack, already established as a great 3D tracker, moved to provide a new level of functionality when it provided added object tracking in version 3.0. Now with version 3.5 this is refined even further. With Version 3.5 is due out soon, fxguide sat down with Richard Spöhrer Managing Director of PixelFarm to discuss the product in this week’s podcast.

We are proud to discuss the latest work from the ICT in LA. If you loved our Art of HDR story – this shows the latest research which will be shown in Siggraph 30th July. We speak to Per Einarsson and Sebastian Sylwan who worked with Paul Debevec and the rest of the team at ICT to take the HDR Lightprobe / light stage to the next level. Jeff Heusser and Mike Seymour from fxguide were lucky enough to tour LS6 just after it was first operational.

Vue software gives you the chance to create worlds and play god. Still, even good digital matte paintings, are not enough to meet the challenges of modern visual effects. Increasingly, rather than making matte still paintings, artists are required to create digital environments. This can be done a number of ways, with a range of tools. One of the more interesting and targeted tools is Vue from e-on software. The current release is Vue 5, but Vue 6 Infinite

Superman Returns thanks to director Bryan Singer, Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Stetson, and a large number of visual effects artists around the globe who worked to make the man of steel fly, see through walls, repel bullets and save the world. We cover this summer blockbuster in our one-year anniversary fxpodcast as well as in detail with our online story.

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.