Happy Sunday everyone! How has your weekend been so far? Mine has been spent cutting together a new 2007 demo reel, and seeing ‘Be Kind Rewind‘. Which wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, but still a really great film. Needless to say I’m a huge Michael Gondry fan though, so he really could just have film paint drying for an hour and I probably would have liked it. And with BUF once again doing the visual effects for him, how could I really not?

Alright, now onto business. Head on over to VFXWorld for an article talking to Visual Effects Supervisors Scott Farrar, Mike Fink and John Knoll.

LINK: VFX Oscar Nominees 2008 – Conversations with Farrar, Fink and Knoll

I knew we were going to be dealing with heavy amounts of CG water, and partly because I previously tried to minimize it, I had little experience with CG water. And going into the Maelstrom I had naïve ideas of what it would require. My perception was that, given all the development work that went into Poseidon, which looked great, I should be able to take those tools and just use them. But as we really started getting serious about making an image, I discovered that there were all sorts of limitations with the tools and that there were things we needed to do that were unique to Pirates.

Then after you’re done then check out PopularScience’s article on the real star of the 2008 Oscars…Fluid Simulation Algorithms.

LINK: And the Oscar Goes To: Fluid Simulation Algorithms!

Faking fluids on a large scale is a fairly new development. Until the late 1990s, effects like the water tentacle in The Abyss were drawn into the computer one frame at a time by hand, as with traditional cell animation, or by laying liquid-looking skins over solid, computer-generated frames.

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Alright, that’s it for me today. But before I go a little Oscar prediction seems appropriate.

The Best Visual Effects in a Motion Picture winner will be…Pirate of the Caribbean 3. Sorry ‘Golden Compass‘…but even if I’m wrong and ‘Transformers‘ gets it, ILM still wins since they did both shows. After all, they are the proverbial 6ft tall kid in 4th grade always killing you at kick ball.

Oh and ‘Juno‘ will win best Screenplay, ha.

See you all tomorrow!