You know what I learned today? That Jim Henson’s amazing creatures from “Where The Wild Things Are” got a little help from CG. Now don’t worry, they didn’t go all Jar Jar and just use these incredible suits for eye line and then replace everything else. Actually they used computer graphics for what it’s really good for. Digital augmentation. Which is a fancy way of saying 3D warping. This was done to match the lip sync of the voice actors, and get a wider range of expression than what could be achieved with just animatronics. A great lesson for future filmmakers on how to use the tried and true old analogue techniques and marry them with the new fangled digital world.

I hope you’re surprised by this too, because honestly I had no idea that Framestore had done this work! If you read this blog often you’ll know that this is the types of VFX I love. That ones where you’re completely unaware of the computer’s presence because A. the artist used the tool intelligently, and B. it was expertly done.

Read more by following the link below. And if you’ve seen this film already, let me know what you thought in the comments below! I’m hopefully going to check it out this weekend and would love to hear what you all thought of it.

LINK: Getting Wild About Facial Animation

They tried a lot of techniques before realizing that the best approach would be limited facial animation enhancement whenever they needed lip-synch. In other words, strictly for the movement of the face, they only animated the eyes, lips, teeth and tongue.

And the faces in Wild Things were brought to life at London-based Framestore primarily using a new twist on an old technique known as “sequence projection” or “projection mapping,” often used to create talking animals. For Wild Things, however, it had to be taken to a new technical and artistic level. Character suit performances were filmed with static faces. The faces or heads were tracked in 3D and a CG articulated head was animated on top to achieve the appropriate performance to match suit and dialogue.

Rising Sun Pictures put together two really nice breakdowns for the work they did on ‘Harry Potter 6′ and ‘Terminator 4′. Both reels feature really stunning VFX work. Some of it the obvious stuff like robots, dragons…and magic. But some of it much more hidden. For example, I had no idea that Dumbledore’s blackened hand done in CG. Did you miss that too? Most seemed to not catch that one. Which just goes to show how good the work done by RSP was for this film. Though I did just have to think…wouldn’t it have been easier/cheaper to just break out some shoe polish and call it a day? I guess not.

Anyways, crack yourselves a Fosters and follow the links below to check out some pretty stellar VFX work down by this studio down under.

LINK: Harry Potter 6

LINK: Terminator 4

More ‘District 9′ coverage over at VFXWorld, and nope I still haven’t seen it. Starting to feel like I need to turn in my VFX geek card or something! Hopefully next weekend though, because I haven’t heard anything but great things about this film.

LINK: District 9: Bringing Back ’80s Sci-Fi

When it came time for Neill Blomkamp to assemble the visual effects team for his first feature, District 9, his distinctive mash up of ’80s militaristic sci-fi (adapted from his short, Alive in Joburg), he was counting on Weta Digital. But with Avatar consuming Peter Jackson’s CG arm, the Vancouver resident turned to newcomer Image Engine to tackle the aliens and The Embassy (his former company) to create the exo-suit worn by the beleaguered protagonist (Sharlto Copley), who transforms into a “prawn” and must learn to embrace his new identity. Even so, Weta Digital found time to help out in the end, and Zoic contributed some minor yet explosive shots as well.”We had never done realistic digital characters on screen, let alone with a scope of 300 tough shots,” explains Image Engine’s Peter Muyzers, on-set visual effects supervisor & digital production manager. “So at the outset, Neill didn’t know very much about Image Engine. But Neill is such a supporter of Vancouver. When Weta Digital couldn’t do the whole movie, he saw it as an opportunity for a Vancouver company to step in. We started talking about the project with Neill and his assistants and by taking advantage of the BC tax incentives, they had a larger budget — that was key. We worked at keeping the look of the aliens as simple as possible. There’s not a lot of fur on them, there’s little physical interaction. There’s no water or major steam effects. Neill knows what he wants. He used Weta Workshop to design the aliens. We made use of hundreds of illustrations.”