Vfx

We already have a pretty good idea how big the ships of Star Wars would have been if they actually existed. But Corridor decided to give us a bit more context, superimposing life-size CGI models ships over locations on Earth. The Death Star is way smaller than we thought.

After showcasing the prosthetics, stunts, and camerawork of Game of Thrones, HBO goes behind the scenes with the VFX artists who put the icing on the cake -transforming all of those building blocks into the most spectacular sequences ever seen on television.

“Oh, will I find a love? Or a power plug?” Louie Zong wanted to test a program that synthesized a singing voice out of text. He ended up making an adorable bossa nova song about a digital computer filled with existential thoughts.

Wired spoke with Danny Dimian, Visual Effects Supervisor, and Josh Beveridge, Head of Character Animation for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse about the movie’s art style, how the animation and effects reflect the characters and scenes, and more.

5MadMovieMakers used some fun video tricks to keep the steel marble in this clip perfectly centered as it makes its way through a twisty, turny Quercetti Skyrail roller coaster track. Try playing the video a second time with your finger on the ball.

While WhatCulture sometimes mistakes compositing and rotoscoping for CGI, the video is still worth a watch, as they show off a dozen times that VFX artists managed to create illusions that were so seamlessly integrated that you’d never know they weren’t real.

YouTuber Misozi-Salaryman put together this great compilation of his swordplay and other martial arts action, and worked with editor Vasco to embellish the clip with appropriate video game style visual effects. We like to think there was some guy off camera mashing buttons.

Macro Room calls this video “Everyday Objects From Inside”, but it’s more of a continuation of their Everyday Objects in Macro. Except this time, all of the shots are zooming out from impossibly tight angles. We’d really love to know how they did it.

A computer keyboard and mouse pointer take turns manipulating real-world objects, clothespins take flight, and nothing else is quite what it seems in animator Tomin’s playful, cgi-augmented short film.

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.

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.

By now, just about everyone on the internet has seen the video of the Plinko-like machine that appears to magically sort thousands of colored marbles neatly into a rainbow. We always figured it was fake, and now Captain Disillusion explains how he thinks it was done.

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.

Whether or not you’re an Apple fan, you’ve got to appreciate the amazing creativity in director Spike Jonze’s “Welcome Home” promo spot for the tech giant’s new HomePod speaker. We’re dying to see a BTS of how they pulled off all the stretchy practical effects.

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.