Vfx

It is the distant future… the year 2000… the robots have taken our jobs… and are dancing about it. The music video for The Chemical Brothers’ track Free Yourself, from directors DOM&NIC and effects house The Mill will take you on quite the ride. Boogie! Roboboogie!

These days, we’re accustomed to such seamless and realistic visual effects on the big screen and even some TV series that we’ve become pretty jaded by CGI. But one look at Diane Bullock’s reel of 1990’s movie VFX should serve as a reminder of just how good we’ve got it today.

Kaptainkristian looks at how director Guillermo del Toro designs and presents monsters in his films. Using quotes from the director himself, the film essayist identifies the key elements of a del Toro monster, including transformation and the use of prosthetics and motion actors.

Corridor Crew wanted to give us a better way to visualize the scale of the size of the universe. So they shrunk Earth down to the size of a tennis ball (1:190,000,000) and compared it to the planets in our Solar System, as well as some of the biggest stars in our galaxy.

Deepfake is a term for artificial intelligence and computer graphics tech used to convincingly superimpose an image or a video into another. Derpfakes used it to edit a youthful Harrison Ford’s face into the starring role of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Getting from place to place in video game worlds can be a drag. Hence the inclusion of overview maps and teleportation to zip your character over long distances quickly. Nukazooka envisions same tech applied to the real world. We’d just use it to skip traffic jams.

For his latest “Quick D” clip, Captain Disillusion looks at why we enjoy watching people walk on walls in video and cinema. He goes on to present a few very different ways to replicate the effect on screen, some significantly more costly and complex than others.

In RocketJump’s short film, Freddie Wong contacts his best super agent to retrieve his movie tickets, leading to an absolutely and undeniably “one shot” fight scene that parodies action movie moves. It’s technically true though.

3D artist Vladimir Tomin imagined what it would be like if we could edit and manipulate real world objects as if they were 3D models. Watch as an omnipotent cursor stretches, bends, generates, multiplies and generally messes with stuff.

(Gore) It’s not the first time we’ve had such a history lesson on visual effects in movies, but we really enjoyed Danielle Del Plato’s take on the subject, along with her great taste in music to accompany this 120+ year retrospective.

There are real-world treatments for acne sufferers, but if you’re looking for a virtual solution, check out this demo from Rousselos Aravantinos, who shows us how he dramatically improved a model’s skin using visual effects, preserving all the proper shadows and light.

The guys from Corridor have a bit of fun with their VFX skills, creating a “working” lightsaber which quickly gets out of hand when they start playing with the length of its plasma beam. You know it’s not the size of your saber, but the way you use it, kids.

Most of the footage of SpaceX’s rockets are shot from far away, with little to no context to their size. Corridor Crew thought it would be nice to stack them up next to buildings so we can appreciate just how amazing it is that these babies can land and be reused.

Armand Dijcks took still photos of water taken by fellow photographer Ray Collins and then animated and looped each one of them. The results are mesmerizing cinemagraphs that are at once crisp and fluid. Check out Armand’s site for more cinemagraphs.

Wired spoke with Method Studios’ Visual Effects Supervisor Daryl Sawchuk for a glimpse at how the company made the visual effects for Black Panther‘s suits as well as the climactic battle. It never ceases to amaze us how much of movies these days are CGI.

While the early buzz is that Alden Ehrenreich does a solid job playing young Han Solo, Harrison Ford’s shoes will certainly be hard ones to fill. Thanks to video wiz Nick Acosta, we’ve got a little taste of what that Solo spin-off movie might look like.

Animator Alessandro Bavari assaults our eyes, ears, and brains with this headbanging short film starring a disembodied digital head that gets pounded repeatedly by bass rhythms for nearly 7 minutes, distorting its form to the driving beat.

Captain Disillusion takes on another seemingly impossible viral video, though it takes him at least 37 seconds before he’s able to figure out how motion artist Kiyan Forootan pulled off the illusion of a see-through dancing character. Basically, Kiyan is a computer graphics master.

Caravane, Camille Boyer, and Nik Mirus created Club Palace – a mindbender of a video which toys with our perceptions, and will make you wonder if it was created with computer graphics, miniatures, or some combination of the two. Your answer can be found here.

Marcin Nowrotek’s abstract experimental short film was created with a Kinect sensor and volumetric digital effects to transform a scene of jazz musicians into the most beautiful music visualizer we’ve ever seen – as the sounds from the instruments influence the imagery.

There’s a lot of talk about the performances in Craig Gillespie’s dark comedy I, Tonya, but the film wouldn’t be what it was without the skating scenes. Here’s an inside look at the effects work from Eight VFX, who helped make it look like Margot Robbie was an olympic athlete.

We’ve seen how they made some of the eye candy in Blade Runner 2049, but this 10-minute clip from VFX house Framstore offers a plethora of effects breakdowns from Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction spectacular, from close-up character work to giant CGI set pieces.

Nukazooka pokes fun at the wonky ragdoll physics of games like Goat Simulator with this live-action VFX clip about a young man whose body behaves just like the characters in those video games. Fortunately, he’s got the power of invincibility too.

VFX artist and LEGO fanatic Nicholas “Nixolas” King envisions how a zombie uprising might go if all of the undead were minifigs, along the way proving that World War Z would have been so much better as a LEGO movie.

Remember that video of the cheerleader who looked like she stepped over a non-existent box? There’s nothing to debunk here according to Captain Disillusion, so instead, he shows those of us without the strength and balance how to fake it with VFX anyway.

(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.