Rodeo FX has won a Visual Effects Society Award for its work on season five of Game of Thrones. The award for Outstanding Created Environment in an Episode honored the studio’s creation of the city of Volantis. Rodeo FX received the award last night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles and can add it to the VES Award it won last year for its work on Birdman.
Character FX artists from MastersFX have created the featured creepy doll Brahms, the title character starring in Lakeshore Entertainment and STX Entertainment’s horror film, The Boy. For The Boy, which opened January 22, MastersFX’s Vancouver Studio created the title character – a four-foot tall doll that seems to rule the household of a remote manor. In the film, a young American woman, Greta, (Lauren Cohan of AMC’s The Walking Dead), takes a job as a live-in nanny in rural England. She comes to find out that the child she was hired to care for is not an actual eight-year-old boy, but instead, a life-sized porcelain doll named Brahms.
Every winter visual effects practitioners around the world compile best-of reels showcasing impressive feats of animation, compositing and VFX in hopes of a nomination for the industry's coveted VES Award. The Visual Effects Society goes to great lengths to ensure that hundreds of entries are qualified and vetted as part of a submission process with seemingly countless moving parts. This process, run by an awards committee made up of VFX professionals around the world, is connected and managed via Shotgun, the scalable software platform for production tracking, review and asset management.
Aspiring visual effects artists will have a unique opportunity to have their show reels critiqued by industry experts in an open Battle of the Reels session held as part of next month’s digital technology festival in Melbourne, PauseFest
The young adults on the autism spectrum who worked on visual effects for Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, now in theatres, could have easily been pigeonholed into jobs that were either rote technical jobs or routine jobs, like stocking shelves at a grocery store. Instead, they went on to develop visual effects skills at Exceptional Minds vocational school – and surprised an industry that is known for its creativity: Hollywood.
Since 1992, Cutting Edge has built a string of studios that employs over 150 artists and reaches from Brisbane to Sydney. Like most professional shops they can do it all: films (Predestination, The Age of Adaline); commercials and TV series, including Powers, PlayStation Network’s first scripted show that’s based on Marvel’s beloved graphic novel series. What they couldn’t do was run all render requests off a single dispatcher, and the minutes kept adding up.
Oblique FX created 123 visual effects shots for Sicario, the latest film from director Denis Villeneuve. Sicario tells the story of a young FBI agent (Emily Blunt) thrown into the violent and lawless world of the drug trade across the U.S.-Mexico border. A gritty, realistic drama, the story required subtle effects work to blend seamlessly with the cinematography of Roger Deakins.
LipSync Post has provided more than 145 visual effects shots for Peter & Wendy, a TV film based on J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan directed by Diarmuid Lawrence and written by Adrian Hodges. Made in connection with Great Ormond Street Hospital, the TV movie is scheduled for broadcast on ITV over Christmas.
Rising Sun Pictures and the University of South Australia have forged a strategic partnership designed to keep the Australian visual effects industry growing strong.
San Francisco-based motion design studio Swordfish is using Quantum’s StorNext Pro Foundation shared storage system to take on projects involving massive high-resolution media files.
