What better way to get through a Monday than to talk about all the cool stuff that happened over the weekend? Well that’s what this new weekly series is for.

And we’re going to start it off with a bang! By talking about the fifth season of LOST getting Nuked, and the CG Churches of ‘Angels & Demons’.

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This week we’re starting off with a link to a great article over at VFXWorld about all the fantastic VFX work done for the fifth season of one of my favorite shows, LOST.

Eden FX really did a fantastic job this season. They did some of the best scene extensions I’ve seen all year. And also introduced a new tool to their tool box, Nuke!

The Lost vfx crew benefited from some hardware and software improvements this season as well. Workstations were upgraded to dual processor machines with 8 Gigabytes of RAM; the creation and rendering of the crash landing scene in Episode 9 would not have been possible on last year’s equipment. “[The upgrade] gave us the edge we needed to try some new things,” Suskin says. Another key addition was adding Nuke to the arsenal. The crew is increasingly using Nuke for compositing, along with Fusion, Combustion and After Effects.

Isn’t that just awesome? I knew that they did a lot of shots like these, but I really had the wool pulled over my eyes with this shot. It was just so perfectly executed, and really shows all the talent that works on this show both in front of and behind the camera. Especially when you take into account just how short of a turn around there is for these VFX shots.

The vfx in these sorts of scenes may be invisible, but they are just as labor-intensive as the more showy work. An example was at the Lamppost Station, introduced in Episode 6, where the camera pans over a completely digital sign, something like a European train board, that shows longitude and latitude and ended up being seen only briefly. “For a single shot, more went into that than anything else we’ve done,” reports Suskin. “We’re hoping it comes back.”

Read more about the work done this season by follow the link below.

LINK: Getting Lost in Season 5

Mitch Suskin and his vfx team brought a greater sense of reality to the fantasy world of Lost this past season.

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The work done for ‘Angels & Demons’ I thought was very good, though I was very aware of the Pantheon being digital. I think ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had the advantage of recreating not so well known environments, so they could get away with a lot more. That was not the case this time however, with the show asking for arguably the MOST recognizable cathedrals. Including St. Peter’s, the entirety of the Vatican, and the Pantheon as mentioned above.

Overall I thought the work done was very well executed…but there was just something lacking. What did you guys think?

LINK: Rome churches built in Vancouver

Local effects company back for Da Vinci Code sequelWhen the Vatican wouldn’t let the makers of the religious conspiracy thriller Angels & Demons film on location, director Ron Howard and his crew simply went to Los Angeles — with a side trip to a Vancouver digital effects studio. Visual effects supervisor Mark Breakspear headed a team of as many as 50 digital artists at CIS Vancouver, who recreated the interiors of three Rome churches, including St. Peter’s Basilica.