Awesome Vfx

(Spoilers) A look at some of the visual effects used in Guillermo Del Toro’s wonderful film, and how VFX artists used green screen, CGI, and other techniques to not only create the amphibian man, but to magically transport viewers in place and time.

MPC VFX presents a look at the work that went into recreating Sean Young’s replicant Rachel in Blade Runner 2049. The incredible illusion was created using reference images from the now 58 year-old actress, combined with a younger performer, and state-of-the-art CGI.

The movie Downsizing might have come up a little short in both its reviews and box office take, but it did succeed in the VFX department. Here, the film’s effects supervisor Jamie Price walks us through the history of shrinking people down on the big screen.

As a tribute to Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan, designer Thomas Vanz made a beautiful short film visualizing the death of a star. None of the visuals are computer generated; instead he edited together clips of ink dissolving in water to depict a supernova.

As overplayed as Animojis have already become, we’ve gotta hand it to the guys at Corridor for their latest video, in which they used their VFX skills to apply Apple’s latest gimmick to some appropriate scenes from TV shows and movies.

Directed by Christian Rivers, the visual effects artist behind King Kong, and produced by Peter Jackson, comes a post-apocalyptic Earth in which humanity turns to living inside of moving vehicular cities, attacking and gobbling up smaller towns to steal resources for survival.

A group of friends finds out that the old “the floor is lava” saying has actually come true in their apartment, and they must navigate the fiery floor to try and escape from certain doom. A fun and well-executed VFX romp from our old pals at RocketJump. Making of here.

(PG-13: Lyrics) The first thing you’ll notice about MGMT’s music video is that it stars Alex Karpovsky, best known for his role as Ray on Girls. But that’s not the only highlight of the clip. It’s the trippy “style transfer” VFX, which have been empowered by machine learning tech.

Before the characters we know and love first emerged on movie screens, there were other conceptual incarnations created by George Lucas and artist Ralph McQuarrie. The DAVE School envisions what the first movie might have looked like had those early ideas stuck.

POV video master Buttered Side Down decided to work on changing his dad bod into a rad bod. His workout routine includes some sick moves, and even allows him to consume donuts. His circuit looks about as challenging as the one we shared earlier today.

Two foes beat each other senseless with every trope in the books in Alaska’s amusing short film packed with action, vibrant visual effects, and references to a wide variety of sci-fi, action, and fantasy films and TV shows. The only thing it’s missing is a post-credits sequence.

Buttered Side Down has been really wishing he had super powers, so he decided to try and give himself some abilities using ordinary kitchen appliances, a fax machine, and stuff he had lying around the house. It’s clear that his VFX skills far exceed his superhero skills.

In-camera effects trickster Eran Amir did his best to make it look like everything in this video was shot in slow motion, when in fact it was all recorded and plays back in real time. It’s not perfect, but it’s still a solid effort.

The computer animation scene has enough technology and talent that realism is no longer the ultimate goal. Animator Alan Warburton breaks down some of the ways that commercial, scientific and artistic animators have gone beyond expressing reality.

Among the imaging technologies shown off at Adobe MAX 2017 was this tool which works kind of like Content-Aware Fill, but for video. It’s designed to easily remove unwanted objects from moving images. We’re hoping to see this feature in Premiere or After Effects soon.

Alternative band The Academic used the slight delay in Facebook Live’s video streaming to record and remix their song Bear Claws on the spot. By showing their stream on a screen while they were streaming, they were able to play along with their past selves.

Neill Blomkamp’s Oats Studios picks up where last year’s ADAM left off – as a group of humanoids who find themselves freed from oppression, and searching for meaning after they meet two mysterious strangers. Like Chapter 1, it was created using the Unity engine.

Filmmaker KOJER painstakingly rotoscoped characters and objects from Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and other Studio Ghibli films, then composited the animation over live footage. The scale is off at times, but we still want to live in that world.

We were really wondering how director Max Ksjonda created the mindblowing visuals in his clip Samoliot for the group 5’Nizza. Well, now we have the answer – it was mostly done in camera, with amazing prop work and rigging which was later cleaned up in post-production.

(Spoilers) VFX house El Ranchito shares some sweet behind-the-scenes footage and effects shot breakdowns for Game of Thrones’ Season 7 penultimate episode, Beyond the Wall. That shot with the bony walker from behind is one of our favorite visuals of the entire series.

The always educational Captain Disillusion takes a break from debunking viral videos and questionable crowdfunding to kick off a new series about the masters of visual effects. The first episode looks at the ahead-of-their-time visuals in the Back to the Future trilogy.

Since we don’t speak Russian, we can’t vouch for the lyrics of 5’Nizza’s track, but we can stand up and applaud the frozen-in-time visual effects in this incredible music video from director Max Ksjonda. We’re dying to see a behind the scenes of how they shot this.

Cats get into all kinds of mischief when we’re away from home, so VFX artist Aaron Benitez decided to strap a GoPro Session action camera onto his cat Prince Michael to see what he does as soon as the boss man leaves for work.