It was a good night for Digital Domain at the 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” took home four awards and a commercial for Bacardi made it five. The HBO series “John Adams”, “The Changeling”, “WALL E”, and “The Dark Knight” all took home multiple awards and New […]

The 7th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards were held tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. In addition to the award categories a VES Lifetime Achievement award was presented to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall and the George Méliès Award for Pioneering was presented to Phil Tippett. The winners in individual categories […]

One of the more interesting products in development over the last year has been Gridiron Software’s Flow — an asset, versioning, and time tracking package for artists. It works behind the scenes to track what you’re working on and what files were used to create the end result. Just drag a render to the Flow […]

Late yesterday we got word that The Orphanage in San Francisco was suspending operations. The confirmation came quickly on Orphanage co-founder Stu Maschwitz’s ProLost blog. The company was founded in 1999 by Stu and co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart and according to The Orphanage website had a staff of more than 160 artists with […]

The first ever Nuke master class in London was held in Soho today and over 200 artists from all around Europe attended the event. The session was definitely geared towards artist-types and started with the Foundry’s Jon Waddleton covering python scripting for artists. There were also a ton of cool tips and tricks shown by […]

The three films nominated for the Visual Effects category for the 2008 Academy Awards are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron The Dark Knight Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin Iron Man John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mahan The Academy […]

The Visual Effects Society (VES) today announced the nominees for the 7th Annual VES Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding visual effects in over a dozen categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games.  Nominees were chosen Saturday, January 17, 2009, by numerous panels of VES members who viewed submissions at the FotoKem screening facilities in […]

The new year brings a new episode of fxguidetv and it’s a milestone for us: our 50th episode. We decided to have some fun at take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the past year and a half. What an 18 months it was! We also take a look ahead at […]

As foreshadowed in the rumor mill yesterday, Autodesk today announced 3 new OS X versions of their products: Toxik, Mudbox, and ImageModeler. The most interesting development is probably the release of Toxik, which brings a new high end compositing package to the Apple platform. The rumor of on OS X Toxik version has existed for […]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 81st Academy Awards®. The films are listed below in alphabetical order: “Australia” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” “The Dark Knight” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” “Iron Man” “Journey to the […]

This week we start by interviewing Industry legend Harrison Ellenshaw. Harrision is a Oscar Nominated matte painter who went on to run Buena Vista Visual Effects (BVVE). He has worked on films from Star Wars to Tron. BBVE credits include Dave, Honey I Blew Up the Kid, The Santa Clause, James and the Giant Peach, The Phantom,  Escape […]

This week’s fxpodcast we speak to Stu Maschwitz, director, author, accidental technologist and vfx supervisor of the Spirit. Stu supervised over 1900 shots, many done at the Orphanage in San Fran. The film follows in a similar, but not identical vein to the blockbusters 300 and Sin City. It is first feature directed solo by Frank Miller. We speak […]