Toy Story 4

I know I'm pretty late to this, but I recently discovered that they are making a fourth Toy Story movie. It is slated to come out on June 16, 2017 and still retain Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz Lightyear. The first Toy Story movie is probably my favorite childhood movie of all time, which brings back crazy feelings of nostalgia whenever it happens to be on TV. As a child, one of my favorite things about the movie was the animation and graphics. For whatever reason I always loved the way the characters interacted with each other. It seemed so seamless and realistic; most of the time it felt like I was watching a live-action movie. Anyway, I'm super pumped for this next iteration in the Toy Story franchise. Pixar films will always hold a special place in my heart, as I grew up watching many of the classics.

Cinderella

Over this weekend, I went and saw Disney's new live adaption of the classic tale of Cinderella. I wasn't expecting a lot going in, and I ended up leaving the theatre extremely surprised and very pleased. The story was adapted fairly well, but the thing that struck me most was the production design and the visual effects. The attention to detail was remarkable, and managed to make the film pop more than practically any film I've seen before. I was so impressed, in fact, that after I left the theatre I looked up the previous work of the production designer, Dante Ferretti. Here's a great article about his attention to detail in the film from Hollywood Reporter.

Hollywood Reporter Article

'Unbroken' VFX & Rotoscoping with Hybride

In the Angelina Jolie film, Hybride, a division of Ubisoft, takes the concept of VFX and rotoscoping to a whole new level. Given the complexity of recreation the Berlin Olympic Stadium as a virtual replica, Hybride needed to match the accurracy of the crowd in each of the 50 actions shot. But unlike the average CG crowd, Hybride needed to construct a tool that would allow the added flexibility required for the film's completion.

Considering the stadium’s size and numerous camera movements showcased throughout the film, the technique for creating the magnanimous CG crowd varied according to each camera point of view. On top of the varying camera movements, the size of the environment made it impossible to use a green-screen for most of the live actions scenes. As a result, the foreground plates had to be rotoscoped and integrated over the CG backgrounds. Hybride's technique allowed for greater freedom and speed for the camera operators when shooting action scenes from the foreground camera perspective. According to the director of photography, Roger Deakins, the main goal was to to always have the effects shows fit perfectly into pristine composted and lit shows to make up the live-motion portion of the film. The greatest amount of accuracy was required in the tracking and layout work in order to actively blend the CG elements to the rest of the camera shots. As a result of the crew's strong production ability, the production was produced with the highest quality possible.

I was recently thinking about how a lot of memorable characters in some of the best films are animated. Characters like Yoda from Star Wars, Dobby from Harry Potter and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings are all known and loved around the world. These characters all work opposite of live-action actors, and yet oftentimes, they are the ones that steal the scene. Animators create the look of the character, but also the emotions behind the character. It's fascinating to me that animators are able to create the emotions that make us fall in love with these characters.

I was curious as to how they go about creating entire characters from scratch and found an interesting article on how Gollum was created. This article describes the extremely detailed process of creating Gollum and all that went into it. Gollum is a very detailed character and the animators started by making a life-size sculpture of what they wanted him to look like. Then they scanned the sculpture and this data gave them the exact measurements for the computer model. One thing I found particularly interesting in the making of Gollum is that they did not use motion capture to animate Gollum's face, but rather recorded the actor playing him doing hundreds of different facial expressions. Then they recreated these expressions using key-frame techniques. The amount of time and work that goes into this is amazing.

I also came across an article on the 10 best CGI characters of all time that was very interesting.