CINEFEX Magazine

CINEFEX Magazine is a bimonthly magazine devoted to motion Picture Visual Effects, and it is awesome! If you ever wanted to know how they make those amazing visual effects in motion pictures, this is the place to stop by. This Magazine is a beautiful rendition of who did what, and how it's made. It happens to be in the library (Thanks to Arturo's convincing words), and I have been drooling over the pages.

The Magazine covers almost any major film. Films like Oblivion, Elysium, Man of Steel, Gravity, Carrie, Maleficent, Godzilla, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and Ant-Man are talked about in depth is some of the more recent issues. Overall, the articles go to great length to describe the process and what the team learned along the way.

This magazine is a great investment for all of those motion graphics lovers who find themselves asking "how did they do that?" Their Subscription cost is a bit steep, but for $50 a year, you can get all the access to specific and exact information to how they did specific things in some of your favorite films.

*Another added bonus for those looking to get in to the Visual Effects Industry:*
*Studios looking for interns or other help advertise in this magazine too!!*

I Would definitely recommend taking a look through next time your in the library!

Pixar Supercut

Color theory is a big part of filmmaking. It allows the filmmaker to subtly convey a tone or feeling to the audience. Color theory is most commonly known for giving Hollywood blockbuster movies their dramatic undertones. Teal and orange is one of, if not the most, common color combinations that filmmakers utilize.

However, color theory is not reserved for live action films. Color plays a huge role in animated features. More often than not, it is an animator's job to give an inanimate object human-like expressions and emotions. It can be quite difficult to make, let's say, a robot look as though it is experiencing wonder. I recently stumbled upon this fantastic video that takes the most colorful scenes from Pixar movies and organizes them according to ROYGBIV, that is, the colors of the rainbow. 

Here's the video I'm referencing: Pixar Supercut

If you know anything about color theory you'll be able to tell how each color affects each scene in the movie. For the still frames below, the emotion or state that the color represents is listed:

Red is danger, yellow is happiness, green is growth, blue is tranquility, and pink is friendship.

Sticking To What I Know... Again...

So clearly I was going to another thing on CGI stuff and rendering. However, the problem with this post is that there isn't enough info online about the rendering side of things. But anyway, here we go!

The new Amazing Spider Man movie that is coming out. Clearly not all of it is live action, especially the scenes of Spider Man flying through the air swinging on his web. This is clearly computer generated. Now, to make something this crisp would obviously take a lot of computing power to create and render to its finished product. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere how long or how much computing that would take, but I can tell you that it would be a fair amount of both.

Not only will the swinging scenes be needing a lot of the computing power, the fighting sequences will need it as well. These parts of the movie not only have super intense actions happening, a lot of it isn't actually real life and is either being used with green screen or completely animated. For example, the part where Jamie Fox is going after Spider Man and he is sort of "immersed" into the electricity field, that is clearly not real because no human can be absorbed into electricity. Kind of going off of that, the Green Goblin isn't real either because, well, we haven't exactly come up with that technology yet.

So needless to say, without getting too repetitive, a lot of these scenes are going to require a lot of time to render because of the quality of the image and how many frames are being used to capture all of the action. If you want to see the extended trailer, it's just down below.