From Superman to Jurassic Park, green screen technology is what makes the jaw-dropping effects you see in blockbuster movies possible. But how does it work?
An Australian VFX company has won an Emmy for its work on season six of Game of Thrones. Over eight months a team of 120 pulled out every trick in the book to create the visceral ‘Battle of the Bastards’.
Caesar (Andy Serkis) is the leader of the ape nation in a scene from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Weta/20th Century Fox
The notion that a chimpanzee could win an Academy Award for acting (or anything else) seems farcical at first glance but, of course, it’s not an actual chimpanzee being discussed in the case of the latest…
How many beans are in those jars?
Flickr/jsrcyclist
When faced with choosing the shortest queue at a supermarket, what do you do? Nobody starts counting – what our brain does is “number sensing”. The ability to gauge numbers occurs without knowing how to…
Bright lights, big city - in the 1950s lighting for productivity and security was overtaken by lighting for spectacle, mood and advertising.
Lighting the Sails - 59 Productions Vivid LIVE 2014.
If you’re in Melbourne or Sydney over the next couple of weeks, you can enjoy the nightly transformation of some familiar urban landmarks. How should we understand this growing global enthusiasm for spectacular…
Character drawings are encoded with cues to help animators understand how the character should move.
Courtesy DreamWorks Animation SKG
When I first started working as an animator on the South Park (1999) feature film in California, I found it remarkable that every Tuesday evening the studio would hold life-drawing classes. It seemed odd…
Oscar contender Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock, relied heavily on visual effects – but the industry itself is struggling.
AAP Image/ Warner Bros Pictures
It’s the season to be making predictions about 2014 Oscar wins, and although Australian audiences are yet to see Best Picture favourites from the likes of Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street), David…
Tom Cruise at the Austrian premiere of Oblivion (2013).
EPA/HERBERT NEUBAUER
Take a very ordinary blockbuster of the summer of 2013. Joseph Kosinski, hot from rebooting the Tron franchise, directs Tom Cruise as a clone seeking some lost vestige of humanity (so nothing difficult…