An open letter to Variety’s David Cohen, who has suggested VFX today are boring.

What is the future of creativity in advertising? It may well be walking away from the 30 sec ad format and starting over with a whole new approach focusing instead on behavioral change. At the forefront of this is Naked Communications. Mike spoke in Sydney to co-founder Adam Ferrier.

The Foundry today formally announced Hiero 1.5, Hieroplayer and Nuke 7.

NVIDIA announced today that it will be releasing a new Kepler Quadro K5000 card for Mac later this year. Running up to two times faster than the current gen Quadro 4000, it’s good to see a higher level card make it to the Mac platform.

Recently sold to private backers, Cinesite has moved sans-Kodak into a difficult visual effects climate. So where is the company at the moment, and what does the future hold? We sat down with Cinesite VFX supe Simon Stanley-Clamp to find out.

A quick look at the tech behind LAIKA’s latest 3D stop-motion animated film ParaNorman and a timelapse video of the animators at work.

Autodesk effectively bought the heart and soul of Exotic Matter (EM) but not the company. It purchased the rights to the technology, leaving the product Naiad completely dead. It will not be developed, supported or individually developed past the current version.

Blackmagic Design has released the public beta version of their popular color grading tool DaVinci Resolve 9, with an entirely redesigned user interface, and further camera and file type support.

Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD) is celebrating its 50th Anniversary. We visited the campus and spoke with Jonathan Burke, President of the University as well as with Catharin Eure, chair of Design.

Blackmagic Design has acquired the intellectual property and all aspects of Cintel’s entire portfolio of film scanning products. This includes all of the IP, name and brand ownership and product development rights…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released the names of those invited to become voting members. The 2012 invitees for Visual Effects are…

Check out the Cannes Lions 2012 advertising winners in the Film Craft category, and read fxguide coverage of the visual effects work.

Shotgun Software was founded in 2006 by a group of vfx professionals to build production tracking and pipeline solutions. Shotgun today has more than 350 animation, visual effects and game development clients including Digital Domain, Double Negative, Reliance, Framestore, Pixomondo, Playstation, Blizzard and Zoic Studios. The newest addition to this line up is Prime Focus.

A look at Pixar’s new website for RenderMan ahead of the RPS17 release. Also, RenderMan for Maya is to be combined with RenderMan Studio.

This weekend, Saturday, June 16, 2012, in Los Angeles, New York and London there is the second annual VES Career Fair & Tech Expo. fxguide has spoken to many of the VFX studios attending – here’s a quick guide to the Fair and Expo.

fxguide will be covering Prometheus in-depth, with articles, an fxpodcast and fxguidetv all this week. To get an idea of what to expect, check out this excerpt including a breakdown of Fuel’s star map orrery sequence.

We preview Achtel’s Deep X underwater RED Epic camera rig, which will be launched at this weekend’s Cine Gear Expo in LA.

We take a look at Mikros Image’s CG and compositing VFX for Ghost Recon Alpha, a short promo for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Includes a breakdown video and bts images.

We speak with the 3D and 2D artists behind a fully CG Ribena spot created by MPC, and feature behind the scenes videos from the TVC.

We take a look at Baselight’s new Filmlight and FLIP products for on-set through to post color management and grading.

Robot vfx has just made a funny short film, FUGU & TAKO, that follows the story of two Japanese salary men whose lives radically change when one of them eats a puffer fish in a sushi bar. The film was written and directed by Ben West who we caught up with to discuss the work.