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.

Recorded on a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles at our traditional tradeshow Barcamp. We are joined by fxphd members to discuss what they have seen so far at Siggraph.

We speak with stereo colorist Jeff Olm about grading and post considerations for Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D.

In part one of a new series on Labor issues we talk with Dave Rand who has taken on the role as spokeperson for about 100 artists who worked on a film in Canada at Meteor Studios who were not paid for the last few months of work as the company filed bankruptcy. This is an important story and a great conversation about the state of visual effects as a business.

We chat with Double Negative vfx supervisor Paul Franklin about their work on the latest Batman flick, including special considerations for the IMAX release.

We speak with Chris Edwards, CEO of Los Angeles-based Third Floor, about the pre-visualization work they do for films, commercials, and games.

We speak with Chris Sage of Luma Pictures about their work, their facility pipeline, and their tools.

We talk to Michael Rubin about his book: DroidMAKER: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution.

A conversation with ILM visual effects supervisor Ben Snow about the work behind creating Ironman’s suit.

We speak with Dav Rauch from The Orphanage. Rauch is a director, designer and visual effects supervisor who led the team that conceptualized and designed Ironman’s Heads Up Display.

Our last podcast from Las Vegas, covering finds from the show floor.

Our annual roundtable from fxphd barcamp. We cover the announcements from RED, Eyeon, and more.

Coverage of the Autodesk Usergroup Meeting. Recorded Sunday evening before the start of NAB.

We talk with organizers Chris Brown, Rochelle Winters, and Ben Kozuch about the off-the-showfloor highlights of the 2008 NAB Conference in Las Vegas.

New directions for the crew at fxguide. Mike Seymour, Jeff Heusser and John Montgomery discuss life beyond fxguide.

Owner Leandro Marini discusses the approach Local Hero has taken in providing a DI solution for the indie filmmaker, offering high quality at prices in line with their budgets.

We speak with Imagineer founder and CEO Allan Jaenicke about their new mogul vfx product line, to be introduced at NAB and rolled out over the next 18 months.

Mike Seymour chats with Tim Baier, a vfx supervisor and 3D researcher who now specializes in 3D stereo productions, about the history, technology and trends in the field.

Mike Seymour talks with artist Jason Walker, who created the effects in the animated film Madame Tutlie Putli.

A conversation with Gareth Edwards, director of Attila the Hun, about how he completed over 250 visual effects shots for the film using a combination of After Effects, Premiere, MochaAE, 3dsMax, and more.

Richard Frances-Moore on Weta Digital’s work on creating and animating the hero CGI character of “The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep”.

Greg and Colin Strause (The Brothers Strause) discuss their feature film directorial debut, Aliens vs. Predator Requiem. Also a preview of the new fxphd term.

With the writer’s strike entering its fifth week, a grass roots rally took place on December 9th in Los Angeles to encourage both sides to come to a quick resolution. In our online story and fxpodcast we discuss the rally, the strike, and how it impacts not simply the writers but the entire production/post-production pipeline and the community and families at large.

Tin Man, the modern twist on Wizard of Oz, required 1500 shots for 3 x 2hour miniseries. We talk to Anthem FX founder Lee Wilson the issues involved. It is also our 100th fxpodcast.

Post production clearly follows production, so what happens when production has no scripts to shoot?
In this week’s podcast we talk with David S. Cohen of Variety to get a post production perspective on the effect of the Writers Guild strike.

In our continuing and popular “Art of…” series, we tackle wire and rig removal. Far from being the most glamourous of visual effects, in reality wire removal is extremely challenging. We audit the current approaches and techniques of the craft. In this week’s podcast, we speak with Aaron Rhode from The Orphanage about the complex 2D and 3D solutions for scenes with wires.

This week, we speak with longtime Kerner Optical DOP Marty Rosenberg about the company’s past history and plans for the future.