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Articles on Visual effects

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Seventy real horses mixed with the fake to create the chaos of battle. Iloura

How Game of Thrones’ Emmy-award-winning battle scene was made

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

Oscars for animals? Andy Serkis should be beating his chest

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

Humans beat computers at ‘sensing numbers’ without counting – for now

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.

Let there be light: behind the trend of illuminating cities for art

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

Drawing inspiration from DreamWorks animation

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

Visual effects are changing cinema – but can the industry keep up?

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

The truth of an illusion - Tom Cruise in Oblivion

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…

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