Mark Fry

Friday afternoon: the stars are VFX

Huffington Post: The Real Wizards of Oz Deserve Better Treatment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-roth/the-real-wizards-of-oz-de_b_1166422.html

“Visual effects are the true “movie stars” of big studio pictures — they turn today’s movies into box office hits the same way big name actors ensured the success of classic films. In fact, 46 of the 50 top worldwide Box Office films of all time were visual effects-driven. And movies and broadcast programs you wouldn’t think of as visual effects driven routinely utilize “invisible” effects to make changes to hair color, the sky, or to the background of a scene — even creating the entire backlot and sets.”

TV Technology (Scott Ross interview): Just Who Are the Real Hollywood Stars?
http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/127006

“Who are the real Hollywood stars?” Scott Ross asked the packed crowd filling Salon 1 of the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel during October’s annual SMPTE Technical Conference.

Then he put a list of the top 20 highest-grossing box office films of all time on the screen in front of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers audience.

“Notice that, in this whole list, only one franchise featured an established star,” Ross said. “But all of them, without exception, were powered either by massive digital visual effects or computer-generated animation.”

Thursday morning: FXGuide covers Hugo and Arthur Christmas

FXPodcast: Rob Legato - Hugo
http://www.fxguide.com/fxpodcasts/fxpodcast-rob-legato-hugo/

“Rob Legato joins us for a discussion of the visual effects in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.” 

FXGuide Article: Hugo: a study of modern inventive visual effects
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/hugo-a-study-of-modern-inventive-visual-effects/ 

“Martin Scorsese’s Hugo tells the story of an orphan living in a 1930s Paris train station. But it is also a story of the birth of cinema and the film itself used a wide range of inventive solutions to both tell its tale and pay homage to the earliest masters of cinema. To help bring Hugo to life, Scorsese called on long-time collaborator Rob Legato as the film’s visual effects supervisor. “The whole film really is celebrating persistence of vision,” says Legato, “and what it meant to early filmmakers, and the film is so rich with homage and appreciate of that.”“

FXGuideTV 127: Arthur Christmas
http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-127-arthur-christmas/ 

“Mike Seymour recently visited Sony Pictures Imageworks to discuss the making of Arthur Christmas with key members of the visual effects and animation team. We talk to Doug Ikeler (vfx supervisor), Rob Bredow (C.T.O), Alan Hawkins (supervising animator) and Thomas Hollier (lighting supervisor).”