January 2009 Archives

Interesting read over on the Huffington Post about the work we did on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it! It's also on FXGuide. Oscar contender? We'll see!

From the Huffington Post:

The Holy Grail of computer animation has long been to create a computer generated human character that fools the viewer into thinking they are watching a real person. I've been an animation and visual effects professional for about twenty years, I've seen David Fincher's film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and I'll tell you this; the effects team at Digital Domain did it.

Audiences are reeling in amazement at the artistry & technical polish of David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But even those with an appreciation of the power of vfx will be stunned to learn that for the first 52 minutes of this epic motion picture, the head of Brad Pitt's character is a CGI creation. Bill Dawes speaks to DD VFX Supervisor Eric Barba about the process Barba dubbed "emotion capture".

Ahhh.. It's been a long couple of weeks since I last wrote, but all that's the norm for the holiday season. I took some much needed down time from pretty much everything! It's all good though, I'm back with a vengeance for this year. There are lots of exciting things on the horizon, and I can't wait to share them with you all! The most public right now is the nomination list for the 2008 Visual Effects Oscar. The top seven are:

• Australia


• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


• The Dark Knight


• Hellboy II: The Golden Army


• Iron Man


• Journey to the Center of the Earth


• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Here is more information from the Academy site itself. Digital Domain worked on two out of the seven this year. Out of all of them, I haven't seen Australia or Journey. I think the Academy will pick the following for the final three for the possible Oscar.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


• The Dark Knight


• Iron Man

Why The Dark Knight? There has to be a popularity contest with these nominations, and TDK was a very popular movie, even though it didn't have overwhelming visual effects like some of the other films. I personally think Hellboy II should replace it, simply because of the environments and characters that were created. We'll find out in a couple of weeks what the VFX branch chooses!

Over the twelve days that I was not missing work, I popped in Fallout 3. I hadn't played it yet until the beginning of my holidays, and over the break I have put 120+ hours into that silly game. I really enjoyed it. Now that I'm back in the saddle of finishing up my next show here, the game playing will be put on the backburner again. There are a lot of priorities that I need to hit this month!



I've also received a bunch of Academy screeners this year. VES has been pretty good for that during the winter season. I don't anticipate getting any more, but we've still got a month left before the Oscars, so there might be a few stragglers.



VFXWages is getting on its way a bit more. There's a HUGE list of things we've to accomplish for our public release later this month. I just hope we can get to everything that we want to before we give public access! Ah, the perils of not having enough time in the day.