Epic is not only Blue Sky’s best movie but also director Chris Wedge’s most personal, too: a swashbuckling, samurai action/adventure that takes place in a lush, microscopic forest world. It beautifully translates N.C. Wyeth for Alice in Wonderland meets The Adventures of Robin Hood. Throw in Seven Samurai and Gladiator for good measure with just a sprinkling of Avatar for seasoning. It’s familiar and new; naturalistic and fantastical. And it’s about looking beneath the surface and discovering hidden truths about life and nature.

It all started 15 years ago with a dinner conversation between Wedge and his old pal, Bill Joyce, who had just visited the Frick Museum in New York, where he was enchanted by an exhibit on Victorian fairy paintings. They went into real woods and imagined an adventure about heroic Leafmen: Joyce helped lay the foundation and wound up writing the children’s book, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, and Wedge took inspiration and went in his own direction for Epic.

“My philosophy is always to make an excuse for the way computer animation looks and to try and make it as natural as I can,” Wedge explains.”The look I was after on Epic was something definitely inspired by the masterful N.C. Wyeth. That’s a look that I was after and that Greg Couch, who was the primary production designer, applied with is own twist. If you look at those great old paintings, there’s a continuity of style in the brush strokes themselves and in the application of detail and color. For us, it’s trying to apply the same level of reality on faces and veins in leaves.”

It was a process of reverse engineering: define and build the world, figure out a story, and populate it with characters who become more refined and understandable over time. Yet it was an organic evolution. For Wedge, the theme was about connection: “Many leaves, one tree.” And the forest is protected by samurai-like Leafmen riding hummingbirds and picking off Boggans with arrows. They are the barbarian force of decay.

Read the rest at Animation Scoop/Indiewire.

There’s bonding between cars and planes before Dusty the wily crop duster (Dane Cook) soars high above and far away from Radiator Springs for his own adventure.  The look is pretty exquisite for this DisneyToon Studios production assisted by Prana Studios (the new owner of Rhythm & Hues).

The voice cast also includes Stacy Keach (the reclusive old Navy Corsair, Skipper), Brad Garrett (fuel truck Chug, Dusty’s buddy and coach), Teri Hatcher (mechanic Dottie), Cedric the Entertainer (old biplane, Leadbottom), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (racer Rochelle), John Cleese, Carlos Alazraqui, Priyanka Chopra, Gabriel Iglesias, Roger Craig Smith, Colin Cowherd, Sinbad, Oliver Kalkofe, Brent Musburger, and fighter jets voiced by Top Gun’s Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer.

Planes opens Aug. 9.

Following the exciting WonderCon footage comes a new Pacific Rim trailer that delves further into Guillermo del Toro’s mother of all CG monster movies (opening July 12).

Summer box office prospects look strong and the Oscar-contending VFX by ILM (going well beyond Iron Man and Transformers with character animation, lighting, digital environments, and advanced fluid simulation) will also be on display at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim.

“To fight monsters we created monsters.”

When legions of monstrous creatures, known as Kaiju, start rising from the sea, a war begins that takes millions of lives and consumes humanity’s resources for years. To combat the giant Kaiju, a special type of weapon was devised: massive robots, called Jaegers, which are controlled simultaneously by two pilots whose minds are locked in a neural bridge.  However, they’re forced to turn to two unlikely heroes — a washed up former pilot (Charlie Hunnam) and an untested trainee (Rinko Kikuchi) — who are teamed to drive a legendary but seemingly obsolete Jaeger from the past.

Scanline first embarked on Iron Man animation studies with The Third Floor previs and storyboarding well under way.  That was followed by proof of concepts focusing on the Point Dume environment. Chris Townsend, the production VFX supervisor,  was very specific about the need for photorealism, pointing to Scanline’s own Bank of Hong Kong destruction in Battleship as good reference.

“Based solely on hi-res stills and photogrammetry, with no survey data, we proved we could build the
environment at a very high resolution, to fly cameras anywhere along the hillside,” noted Scanline VFX
supervisor Bryan Grill. “It is always very difficult to make something that is entirely synthetic
look as if you just went out and photographed it.”

The same held true for the mansion itself. Three major set pieces were constructed on set in North Carolina: Tony Stark’s partial driveway set, the mansion living room set, which was built on a tilting gimbaled set, and the underground garage set. The sets required extensive digital extensions rigged for destruction, including the ceiling, which almost crushes Tony at one point, as well as the floor, which gradually gives way underfoot. Plenty of added CG debris and dust helped complete the look, sometimes interacting heavily with actors.

“We took extensive photos of the interior house sets and used that, together with LiDAR, to
build a digital interior. If we didn’t have plates or tiles, we were able rebuild the set fully in CG
if needed,” adds Grill. Such was the case with the underground garage, and many of these shots
became 100% digital, including cars and various props. Stark’s mansion exterior was almost
entirely digital in all shots.

“Creating the mansion collapse sequence involved multiple tiers of interdependent computer
simulations,” adds CG supervisor Justin Mitchell, who shared duties with Paul Ghezzo. “In order to achieve realistic rigid body simulations that maintained a sense of structural integrity during the collapse, we modeled the mansion in high detail, including i beams, re-bar, air ducts, furniture and electrical conduit. Each room of the mansion was modeled independently so that artists could load sections of the digital asset based on the required detail and damage progression. One of the challenges was building a ‘destruction road map’ to maintain a sense of continuity throughout the sequence.”

Once modeled and UV-ed, the models were fractured by hand to allow for art direction of the
behavior and timing of the collapse. Those fractured sections were jointed together and the joints
could bend or break based on rules established in Scanline’s procedural simulation software.

The rigid body simulations involved several stages. Initially driven by hand animation to solidify
the overall shot layout, the sims would get progressively more refined until the desired level of
detail was achieved. Often that involved tiny elements such as gravel and leaves. Much of the
flora on the mansion cliff-side had to be dynamic so that it would tear up as the mansion slid
down the hill.

“Once the rigid body simulations were approved we would turn our attention to the many layers
of high resolution fluid simulations required for the sequence,” adds Mitchell. “Fire, smoke,
explosions, bullet hits, dust, water and repulsor fire were some of the elements we created.”

A significant aspect of Scanline’s work also involved animating Iron Man, both as a fully digital
character, and at times based on stunt performers in half suits, which required tracking and
animating the suit to fill in the gaps. Signature shots also required the “suit connect” assembly
around both Pepper and Tony, including super slow-mo shots with interactive debris and dust.
Animation was spearheaded by animation supervisor Bernd Angerer.

Once underwater, Stark finds himself trapped, as a mountain of debris buries him alive. He
deploys the Mark 42 suit arm, which disconnects and pulls Tony safely from the rubble, then
assembles around him quickly. Tony proceeds to launch himself out of the water, into the sky
above. The underwater work, with its pyroclastic silt, bubbles and volumes of debris raining
down from above were all simulated with a heavy emphasis on real world physics, in keeping
with Townsend’s insistence on realism throughout.

For the many shots involving the mansion debris tumbling into the water and sinking to the
ocean floor below, Scanline ran bubble, spray, foam and silt simulations, all driven by, and
interacting with rbd simulations involving cars, props, debris, and Iron Man himself. “The
amount of simulation data was immense, but the resulting detail is what makes it such an epic
sequence worthy of the beloved franchise,” says Mitchell.

The simple Angry Birds mobile app involving birds going after green pigs for their eggs is one of the biggest franchises around and now Sony hopes to work with Rovio to extend it together. Rovio has already launched the weekly Angry Birds Toons animated series through its apps as well as on select video-on-demand channel providers, Smart TVs, connected devices, and on select TV networks around the world.

“The production sessions at SIGGRAPH 2013 are your only opportunity to experience the world’s best talent in one place during one week,” says Jerome Solomon, SIGGRAPH 2013 Production Sessions Chair from Cogswell College. “Major studios share their latest creative work, allowing attendees to experience the newest and most significant achievements. In many instances this is the first time these particular topics are discussed with the public. Nowhere else but at SIGGRAPH is this type of cutting-edge content available. There are ‘must see’ sessions every day at SIGGRAPH. It’s very exciting for our attendees. And, this preliminary line-up is just the beginning of what we have in plan.”

The Computer Animation Festival, chaired this year by Jason R.M. Smith, is recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival. Since 1999, several works originally presented in the Computer Animation Festival have been nominated for or have received a “Best Animated Short” Academy Award. This year’s selections will be featured during the Computer Animation Festival through a series of daily Festival Screenings and the iconic Electronic Theater, allowing attendees to get a glimpse behind the making of computer generated effects, visualizations, and animations.

In all there will be more than 15 sessions. Following are a sneak peek:

Industrial Light & Magic Presents:  “Cancel the Apocalypse” – The Visual Effects of Pacific Rim
Panelists: John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Lindy De Quattro and Eddie Pasquarello

From aliens that threaten Earth’s very existence to massive human-piloted robots, this panel will discuss the wide-ranging scope of Industrial Light & Magic’s effects work on Guillermo del Toro’s science fiction epic Pacific Rim. The artists will cover creative and technical challenges overcome in the areas of asset development, character animation, lighting, digital environments, advanced fluid simulation work, and more.

Walt Disney Animation and Pixar Animation Presents: Scare School 101: The Making of Monsters University

The filmmaking team will guide attendees through the production process of Disney/Pixar’s Monsters University (June 21).  Twelve years after the original film, see how creators rebuilt the Monster world; updated familiar characters into college-age versions of themselves; designed, built and lit a campus fit for a monster with a new lighting system that features global illumination; and populated the university with a student body of diverse, unique and terrifying monster types.

Walt Disney Animation Studios Presents Frozen: The Craft of Character and Cold

The team from Walt Disney Animation Studios gives a first-time, behind-the-scenes look at their Frozen (Nov. 27). Attendees will learn how the team of artists and technologists created the film’s characters through visual development, rigging, animation and advanced rendering tools and discover how the elements of cold – ice, snow and frost – were brought to life through new simulation techniques.

Sony Pictures Imageworks Presents: Take a Journey Down the Yellow Brick Road
Presenters: Scott Stokdyk, Senior VFX Supervisor; Troy Saliba, Animation Supervisor and Francisco De Jesus, Digital Effects Supervisor

Sony Pictures Imageworks, under the direction of VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk, created the majority of the visual effects for Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful.

As a cinematic prequel to L. Frank Baum’s first book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” the film explores the backstory of the wizard character. The goal of the film was to create a beautiful stylized environment for the land of Oz and bring to life computer graphics characters that accompany Oz on his journey, including Finley the monkey, the porcelain China Girl, and various creatures that surprise them along the way.

Rhythm & Hues Studios Presents: How to bake a Pi

Learn first-hand about the story behind the Oscar-winning visuals of Life of Pi as Rhythm & Hues takes you on a journey from script to screen through a world of vast oceans, carnivorous islands, flying fish, bioluminescent jellyfish, whales and tigers. Leaders from the visual effects team will discuss in detail how they attempted to tackle the project, share the hard lessons learned along the way and explain the complex process used to seamlessly combine live-action with extensive digital environments and hand-crafted character animation in a fully-stereo pipeline that required a total rethink of much of the traditional vfx process.

OLM Digital Presents the Anime Spirit: From Pokémon, Pac-Man to live action films
Panelists: Koichiro Sato, CGI director OLM Digital, Masashi Kobayashi, CGI Producer OLM Digital, Moto Sakakibara, CEO and creative director Sprite Animation Studios and Ken Anjyo, R&D supervisor OLM Digital

Anime has gained great popularity in the world for its unique expressiveness in contrast to western animation. OLM Digital, a digital production company in Tokyo, keeps trying new anime styles, making the Pokémon movies over 15 years. This session presents the company’s various works in 2D anime, 3DCG and live action films. The showcase focuses on how the anime spirit of OLM Digital is put into various visual forms. The brand-new Pac-Man animated TV series, which is a collaborative work with Sprite Animation Studios, is also one of the highlights of this session

LAIKA Presents: The Seamless Fusion of Stop-Motion and Visual Effects Technologies in LAIKA’s Feature Films
Speakers: Georgina Hayns, Creative Supervisor, Puppet Fabrication and Brian McLean, Director of Rapid Prototype.

The presentation will address the following:

• The use of Maya and Zbrush to enhance practical sculpts;
• 3D Printed material and subsurface scattering to allow puppet builders to break free of previous design limitations;
• The advancements in color 3D printing and the enabling of puppet builders to evolve beyond prior design limitations;
• The use of in-house developed silicones, which enable character performance previously unseen in stop-motion animation;
• The utilization of 3D Printers to previs puppet construction issues and control how practical materials perform;
• The use of laser cutting fabrics to enhance the design and functionality of the puppets costumes;
• Production puppets will be displayed during the presentation.

OLM Digital Presents the Anime Spirit: From Pokémon, Pac-Man to live action films
Panelists: Koichiro Sato, CGI director OLM Digital, Masashi Kobayashi, CGI Producer OLM Digital, Moto Sakakibara, CEO and creative director Sprite Animation Studios and Ken Anjyo, R&D supervisor OLM Digital

Only here Folman explores the nature of existence with Robin Wright playing a fictional version of herself. The aging actress makes a Faustian bargain with Hollywood to digitize and control her likeness. She then goes on a surreal animated journey (in homage to the Fleischers) to regain her soul.

Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress and co-starring Harvey Keitel, Danny Huston, Paul Giamatti, and Jon Hamm, the movie opens the Directors Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. I suspect it will get snapped up immediately for North American distribution.

Amid scenes of destruction on Krypton and Earth, drawing parallels between the two planets, and solemn voice over by father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) as inspiration, Superman becomes a spiritual, Christ-like figure as Earth’s extra-terrestrial savior. Look closely and you can glimpse more of Krypton’s organic shapes.

Like him or not, there’s no denying that Baz Lurhmann is a talented showman who knows how to dazzle and get under our skin. With The Great Gatsby, he’s captured the poetic spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald like no other prior movie adaptation. And the secret is 3-D. Like Avatar, Hugo, and Life of Pi, Gatsby is a movie about 3-D, yet it pushes stereo further as dramatic spectacle.

Gliding through the glam artifice of Jazz Age conspicuous consumption is impressive enough, but the way the 3-D exposes the arrested development of Fitzgerald’s tragic characters is even more powerful. According to production and costume designer Catherine Martin, it was all about using 3-D to enhance the performances in conveying Gatsby’s crazy circus.

“Baz has always directed in 3-D, because he always thinks about all the planes of the picture: the foreground, mid-ground, and background,” explains Martin, the two-time Oscar winner for Moulin Rouge! “And one of the things that he wanted me to think about were all the cues you need to find the actor in space.”

Talk about multi-plane mise en scene: When Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) awkwardly stumbles upon cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), they dynamically recreate the description in the book of curtains and dresses blowing around the room and how Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) disturbs that reverie. “It’s about the seven veils and Nick’s initiation into this sophisticated and rarefied world,” Martin adds.

As Nick observes, it’s like being “within and without” Gatsby’s world, and that’s the remarkable 3-D effect that Luhrmann achieves. However, there’s an oppressive quality as well (photographed by Simon Duggan using the Red Epic and 3eality stereoscopic rig), even during the dizzying party that introduces us to Jay Gatsby, who’s portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio as though he’s channeling Orson Welles from Citizen Kane, a spiritual cinematic cousin. Martin admits they were never quite sure if the Welles influence was intentional or subliminal.

Read the rest at TOH/Indiewire.

It’s no surprise, given tax breaks and tradition, that production of Star Wars: Episode VII will take place in the UK. This is also in keeping with an earlier report about ILM considering doing the VFX in London. The installation of fiber optic cable in a London office would also allow the work to still be overseen at the Presidio headquarters in San Francisco.

All of the six previous live-action Star Wars movies have included UK production in such famed studios as Elstree, Shepperton, Leavesden, Ealing, and Pinewood Studios.

“We’ve devoted serious time and attention to revisiting the origins of Star Wars as inspiration for our process on the new movie, and I’m thrilled that returning to the UK for production and utilizing the incredible talent there can be a part of that,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “Speaking from my own longstanding connection to the UK with films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire of the Sun and recently War Horse, it’s very exciting to be heading back.”

Earlier this year, representatives from Lucasfilm met with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, in London to establish an agreement to produce Star Wars in the UK. “I am delighted that Star Wars is coming back to Britain. Today’s announcement that the next Star Wars film will be shot and produced in the UK is great news for fans and our creative industries,” Osborne said today.

Judging by recent remarks from Kim Libreri, Lucasfilm’s chief strategic officer, who showed a real-time demo reel of a mocapped C-3P0, R2-D2, and stormtroopers that dazzled the FMX 2013 crowd, the Unreal Engine will benefit the new Star Wars movies immensely, allowing the perfection of near real-time feedback for helping actors perform better CG characters; the advancement of real-time tools for virtual world building at the script stage and further experimentation before principal photography. What’s more the preeminence of image-based lighting and global illumination will provide more accurate and efficient photo-realism than we’ve ever seen on the franchise.

Star Wars: Episode VII will be directed by J.J. Abrams from a screenplay by Michael Arndt and is scheduled for a 2015 release. Episodes VIII and IX are expected to be released in 2016 and 2017.