Hasta La Motion!

Some of the most visually startling moments in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 are the distinctively orange and hazy Las Vegas scenes. The look for these was said to be inspired by a rare Sydney sandstorm (one that I remember living through).

Academy Award nominee Richard R. Hoover was Framestore’s visual effects supervisor on Blade Runner 2049. The other nominees for the film in the visual effects category are John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer and Paul Lambert. Here, Hoover discusses how getting that orange tinge proved more difficult than first thought, and how making the city look realistic proved even harder.

In War for the Planet of the Apes, Weta Digital proved once again its status as a leading creature house, and one of the most accomplished at taking motion captured human performances and using that as a basis to further realize photoreal digital characters with meticulous attention to detail.

Academy Award nominee Daniel Barrett was Weta Digital’s animation supervisor on War for the Planet of the Apes. The other nominees in the visual effects category for the film are Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon and Joel Whist. Here Barrett breaks down a few of the main challenges in translating human motion captured performance into digital apes, including dealing with, of all things, smiles.

There are a number of fierce fight scenes in Kong: Skull Island – one of the most intense is the final battle between Kong and a giant Skullcrawler. ILM handled the complex sequence, which included not only extensive character animation, but also a photoreal jungle and water environment and plenty of effects simulations.

Academy Award nominee Scott Benza was ILM’s animation supervisor on Kong: Skull Island. The other Oscar nominees for this film in the VFX category are Stephen Rosenbaum, Jeff White and Michael Meinardus. Here Benza details how that final fight came together.

Nintendo Entertainment is all set to take the Super Mario experience to the next level, as the gaming studio today announced a feature film on the popular video game.

Partnering with Illumination Films, the movie will be co-produced by the original creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination founder Chris Meledandri.

Chatters of a film on the pudgy plumber from the Mushroom Kingdom had been doing the rounds for almost ten weeks, before Nintendo’s official Twitter handle finally reaffirmed the long standing speculations.

Even though the studios haven’t divulged anything else, it is thought to be an animation movie, though Nintendo also threw a curveball by quoting “a movie starring Mario” in its revelation, rather than explicitly stating a film on him. That leaves the door ajar for a handful of possibilities, such as a spin-off from the normal Mario franchise, or even a live-action movie.

A live-action treatment, if it were to be, wouldn’t be new as an attempt to transcend the adventures onto the big-screen has already met with an unmitigated disaster upon its release in 1993. Titled Super Mario Bros., the Bob Hoskins-starrer movie saw Mario and his pal Luigi going great lengths to stall the sinister machinations of a ruthless dictator King Koopa. Back then, it failed to resonate with the audience.

The tweet is apparently the only information about the Mario movie that one can binge on, although subsequent developments are expected in the coming weeks.

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