After years of waiting for signs of life in the Autodesk package of Sapphire sparks, GenArts has resoundingly delivered with a new release. The new version includes over 45 new effects and enhancements to previous sparks. We speak with GenArts founder Karl Sims and several beta testers about the new release.

Two recent spots from Sony really caught our eye at the fxguide tech bunker. The simplicity of the ideas and the faultless execution of these commercials has become a hallmark of Sony’s advertising internationally in the last couple of years. We caught up with Dave Morley, one of the founders of FUEL international, about their work on the spots.

Picture Mill is a leading design and effects house doing title design for films such as War of the Worlds, Panic Room and logo film titles for studios such as SPYGLASS and Universal. In this podcast Mike sits down for a discussion on design issues, the role of titles and the nature of branding design with Creative Director William Lebeda.

In a global community TVC spots are now often being made ‘overseas’. This inventive spot was for the chinese market, shot in Shanghai, made in Australia for a Japanese car company.

Motion capture has forced actors to don blue lycra to provide animators with artistic interpretation of characters. But the race is on to make this process easier, faster, cheaper and less awkward for the actor. One such advance is the recent showing of markerless motion capture from Organic Motion.

With a weekend opening of over $120US million, Shrek the Third continues the box office success of the franchise. In this fxpodcast, we speak with Larry Cutler and Matt Baer from PDI/Dreamworks including their insights into how working on a series of films changes the workflow. Our online story also contains a large gallery of images.

Hatchfx is a specialist matte painting company, although as we discovered when talking to the founders, a “matte painting” is now a hard term to define. As the line between matte painting and visual effects blurs, we explored some of their work on the film and the methodology they use to tackle shots.