Getting More Immersed with Indiewire
Immersed in Blu-ray: Hitchcock and Bogart
Immersed in Books: Farber on Film
Caught up with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 directors Cody Cameron & Kris Pearn. The storyboard artists from the first film wanted to take it from a horror riff to a monster mash. Their frame of reference were such ’80s movies as The Goonies, Teen Wolf, and Return of the Jedi. In fact, there was early fantasizing about having strawberry Ewoks. Read more
It looks like Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (Oct. 4) could be this year’s Life of Pi, a thrilling roller-coaster ride in space and a mystical meditation on the cosmos and rebirth. (It opens the Venice Film Festival this August and plays the Toronto Festival in September.) Read more
Frozen (Nov. 27) wowed the tech crowd at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim on Tuesday, revealing a more stunning and sophisticated 2D/CG blend than was previously displayed on Disney’s Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and the Oscar- winning Paperman short. Judging from the brief footage and the “Craft of Character & Cold” presentation, this hipper fairy tale from Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee will be a major Oscar contender. Read more
One of the highlights of Comic-Con for me was chatting with Dean DeBlois and legendary artist Drew Struzan about his exclusive How to Train Your Dragon 2 teaser poster. It’s pure Struzan with Hiccup and Toothless ascending to the top of the world. There will be more posters to come, perhaps a triptych for the trilogy, which continues June 20, 2014 with Dragon 2. Read more
I chatted with Weta Digital’s Keith Miller about his Man of Steel presentation at SIGGRAPH. He explained the biomech world of Krypton that Weta created, working with director Zack Snyder and production designer Alex McDowell. Read more
View the complete SIGGRAPH keynote from Monday night in Anaheim (in conjunction with the Academy’s Marc Davis series). Read more
Lightstorm’s Jon Landau discussed the second-gen virtual production process being assembled for Avatar 2 at Autodesk’s User’s Group meeting Tuesday night in Anaheim as part of SIGGRAPH 2013. Read more
Shotgun Software offers Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit (previously code-named “Tank”), providing studios with a set of out-of-the-box pipeline tools tailor-made for visual effects, animation and game development workflows. Fully integrated into the Shotgun production tracking platform, the Pipeline Toolkit allows studios to rapidly connect their artist applications to the important production information and files that artists need to do their work. It is available now to all clients at no extra charge. Additional information about the Pipeline Toolkit is available at www.shotgunsoftware.com/
LightWave 11.6 complements features introduced in LightWave 11.5, including the Genoma character rigging system with modular presets, predator and prey Flocking capabilities, per-object Instancing control, and soft-body Bullet Dynamics with support for FiberFX. With the new features and enhancements in LightWave 11.6, artists and designers have the ability to: Read more
Here’s a sneak peek of the SIGGRAPH 2013 Computer Animation Festival lineup chaired by Jason RM Smith. Read more
