5 Great Movies and Maya

This week, I was completely blown away and excited by Autodesk's program Maya. I have watched several different "behind-the-scenes" documentaries on several different films, and was able to watch as they created environments and creatures. For example, I loved watching how they made the creatures of the Lord of the Rings, and it is only now that I realized that they used the program Maya! I was so excited, and still am, to learn different aspects of Maya, even though there is so much depth and jobs involved in it. As I was researching I came across this article about 5 other movies that used Autodesk programs and the one thing they all had in common?: Maya.

The first was Inception, where they folded over the streets of Paris and had amazing settings.

Then there was Avatar, which was truly amazing with it's ability to combine live action 3D and CG effects. The actors of Avatar were so talented to be able to be on a virtually empty set and still perform as if they were in that actual environment.

Third on the list was Alice In Wonderland, which ties in my previous blog! Not only did they green screen most of the movie, but to find out that they used Maya as well really brought both concepts together in a way I never expected.

Fourth, was Iron Man 2. This was really cool to read because they not only used Autodesk 3D programs, but also made parts of the suits in actual life around the actors. Then they molded the suits later in computer graphics.

 Finally, and least expected, was Black Swan, when Natalie Portman turned into the swan.

Reading this article was eye-opening. There were a few that I suspected used Autodesk programs like Maya, but there were others that I never expected to find. After my brief experience, I can't imagine the amount of time it would take to do the things they accomplished in these films. It is truly incredible to continue to learn how "movie magic" is done.

By Amber Capogrossi

The Evolution of Visual Effects, Good and Bad

The lines get a little blurry when discussing what constitutes as a good visual effect in movies and what constitutes as a bad one. Often times, people dislike a particular movie and then have a bias towards most of the effects used in the film. Other times however, due to a limited budget or not enough time and/or resources, an effect truly comes out as terrible as people make it out to be and unfortunately the movie suffers because of it.

Some poor special effects as noted in the article 'Top 24 Worst Special Effects of All Time' include: the light speed effect in The Shape of Things to Come, the wolf-out effect in Van Helsing, when the shark breaks through the deck of the ship in Jaws, the hyena attack in Exorcist: The Beginning, the head split in Total Recall, and many more interesting, but unfortunately unbelievable (literally) effects.

Some of the best special effects must also be noted, simply because the strides we have made in what can be achieved via visual effects is truly amazing. As noted in the article, 'Best Sci-Fi Effects of All Time', some notable effects are: the aliens in Men in Black, the 1954 original Godzilla, the bullet-time rig in The Matrix, the two faces of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, the Dumbledore vs. Voldermort battle in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the upside down fight scene in Inception, all the destruction in Independence Day, the aging effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the character of Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, almost all of the visuals in Pan's Labyrinth, most of the CG effects in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the monster in Cloverfield, and many more.

Though many of these selections are from movies of the past ten years, not all of them are. Which means that visual effects evolve into the amazing creations we see in movies today without some equally amazing older effects of the past to fall back on. Below is a video documenting how effects have evolved and changed over the past 100 years: