CGI Eroes
The creation of Hulk was complex: the green superhero was made totally with CGI techology, starting from the study of original comics. The visual effects were made by Rhythm & Hues. The Visual Effects Supervisor was Kurt Williams (Fantastic Four, X Men: the Last Stand). They concentrated the work in particular on the skin veining and the skin colour. With the Motion Capture the body moviments were digitally recorded and transfered to a digital creature. The mo-cap was used for the Hulk and also for Abomination character and it made the movements more natural during the tranformations of the muscles and the vascular structure. The trasformation of Hulk begins with change of the eyes colour, as in the tv series, played by Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, that made Hulk popular in the Eighties. The Motion Capture today has evolved to the point where rendered times are very short and you can target a performance and see immediately if it’s the right dynamic.

Here the official website

Featurettes of the production

The TV Show
Interview to Lou Ferrigno

The Marvel website
Here the movie trailer of The Hulk (2003)

And here the game

Feature Films: Future Film Festival 2009 - Lancia Platinum Grand Prize

Tv series: Future Film Festival 2009 - Future of Toons

Short Films: Future Film Festival 2009 - Future Film Shorts

Produced by George Lucas and directed, as the previous episodes, by Steven Spielberg, the movie tells the story of a new Indiana Jones adventure that begins in the desert Southwest in 1957, the height of the Cold War. Indiana escapes from nefarious Soviet agents and then from the CIA agents and he begins a new adventure with many personal implications and “alien presences” too.

One of the new characters are the young Shia LeBeouf, while Karen Allen is once again Marion Ravenwood, as in the Raiders of the lost Ark.
Adventures in digital forests
The movie opened the last Cannes festival (May 14th-15th) with a great success. As for the previous episodes, the movie has been realized more with traditional special effects with stuntmen for the dangerous scenes. Besides there are CGI special effects too by ILM (the production company by George Lucas), Asylum FX, Kerner Optical. The blue screen has been used for the backgrounds and the CGI effects removed some details as stuntmen ropes. The ILM new technologies created virtual sets: from the shots of a wood, they created a huge forest.
Find in the official website the trailer and the making of.

Find at the contest site, www.youbluecontest.it, other info and join the contest!

Break up the common sense and win!
You can win one of the following prizes:

Prizes from the Off-line Jury

- First Prize for the Best Spot: 5.000 euros

- Second Prize for the Best Spot: 2.500 euros

Prizes from the On-line Jury

- Fist Prize: 3.000 euros

- Second Prize: 1.500 euros

The film is a vfx-movie, and it was an opportunity to work to a new effects, new textures, new virtual avatars. For the movie a lot of production companies were been involved: Industrial Light & Magic, The Orphanage, The Embassy VFX, Stan Winston Studio and others: the best of technology to be faithful to the Iron Man’s comics. The Motion Camputer technique has been used to make the Iron Man’s movements.

The movie is directed by Jon Favreau (Made, Zathura, Elf). In his previous movies, Favreau has made use of traditional special effects and CGI. Zathura has been realized with traditional practical effects with some background CGI effects. With Elf he used stop motion and CGI effects. In Iron Man, Favreau looks to use CGI in a subtle way that does not take you out of the movie. Favreau thinks that by exclusively using CGI filmmakers “run the risk of making it look like you are watching somebody else play a video game.” Favreau wants to keep the audience focused on the story and not become disengaged or distracted by the effects.

The Iron Man character will make a cameo in The Incredible Hulk By Louise Leterrier based on the Marvel comics: an homage to the typical “cross over“ of the Marverl comics.

LG was the sponsor of the movie and it created a website where you find videos about the movie

Here the tour on the set with John Favreau

Here the “behind the scenes” with interviews and videos

Other infos:

http://www.craveonline.com/articles/comics/04646881/jon_favreau_on_iron_man.html
http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com/

In the occasion of the Future Film Festival last edition (Bologna, January 15th-20th, 2008), the first images of the movie has been shown as preview. The FFF audience met the characters, the style, the sets and the making of the movie thanks to Chirs Wedge and Mike Thurmeier that attended the FFF. Chris Wedge is the director of the fist digital animated movies by Blue Sky, Ice Age (2002) and Robots (2005) and he is also producted and co-founder of the Studios. Wedge has made Blue Sky one of the most important company that produces digital animation. He was also executive producer of Ice Age – the Meltdown and executive producer of Horton.

Mike Thurmeier is the animation supervisor of Horton. He started to work with Blue Sky on 1997, after the college. He worked as animator and story artist at Ice Ace and then he was animation supervisor of Robots and Ice Age – the Meltdown. In 2007 he obtained an Accademy Award nomination for the animated short No Time for Nuts.
The style of the movie and the modelling of the characters are faithful to the original pictures of the book even though we can notice the Blue Sky style in the definited colours and rund shapes. The biggest challenge was to create the world in minuature discover by Horton.
For the making of the there was the need to master “squash-and-stretch” techniques that transcended the boundaries of animation physics and character performance and believability.

The crew largely relied upon Maya, along with various plugs-ins to speed up workflow, as well as Linux boxes. An old tool called Follow Through was plied for tails, hair and anything that would flap in the wind.
The modelers used Maya, Pixologic’s ZBrush and Autodesk’s Mudbox to rough out models, which helped with the editing process. Maya’s ubiquitous presence also could be found in the VFX department, which used Shake and Next Limit Technologies’ Real Flow 4.0 to export the data and proprietary tools, including CGI Studio where shots are rendered and processed, to massage and manipulate the data.

More info: http://www.hortonmovie.com/site/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who!_(film)

http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4463

By: Giulietta Fara

The making of

There are a lot of special effects in the movie made by the most important company in the world in the field of sfx, from Industrial Light&Magic to Tippett Studio. In a interview, Sheila Roberts and the director Mark Waters speak about the relationships between the making of and the sfx.

D: How are you dealing with all the special effects?

R: You know I’m loving it. Plus it’s kind of fun because being kind of a control freak like I am, you kind of never let go of the movie because now that you’re working with animators and so you’re kind of directing them and so we have kind of an eye chat hook up every day with the people from ILM and (SP?) Tipit and we get there and they’re like ‘okay, well, here’s what the goblin’s doing’ and I’m like ‘no, no, the goblin has to go like this! And he has to yell at this point.’ And I kind of get up and act it out and the animators are like, ‘okay, okay, we get it.’ And then they kind of are taking my direction and we’re kind of having the

creatures behave. And plus by this point we’ve recorded Seth Rogen plays Hog Squeal, Martin Short plays Thimbletack, which are kind of the more comedic characters so you already have all of their audio and now we’re adding physicality and making them into these photo realistic creatures. But I’m loving it right now. And also because it’s a long post production and post production’s actually one of the most fun parts of making a movie. I mean Bob Zemeckis only wants to do post production now.

D: You say you’re a control freak but at the same time you’re in the hands of the special effects guys. If the effects aren’t good, your film doesn’t look good.

R: That’s true. But every step of the way, I had like the A-Team on this movie. I mean I had Caleb Deschanel shooting it. Michael Kahn was my editor. Jim Bissell’s the production designer. You got Phil

Tippett and Pablo Helman at ILM and so every step of the way I was kind of learning from the masters saying ‘here’s what I would like to see’ and then they would show it to me and I would like ‘yeah, that looks better than I imagined it.’ You know and so in general it’s not a struggle, it’s actually just kind of like joyful to take them and feel like you’re actually already collaborating on a pretty high plane.
(source: http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_12561.html)

Other info about the movie:

http://www.nick.com/shows/movies/spiderwick/

http://www.spiderwickchronicles.com/?utm_source=contests&utm_medium=email&utm_content=htmlofficialsite1&utm_campaign=spiderwick

Set in an era populated with prehistoric creatures, the movie tells the story of the young hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait) who embarks on a journey through uncharted territory to save his lover, Evolet.

The making of

Throughout his career, Emmerich has pushed the envelope on what was possible with visual effects, creating such memorable big-screen images as the White House explosion in Independence Day and the giant wave in The Day After Tomorrow.

The production has spend a lot of time to study and develop the digital creation of the prehistoric creatures. A lot of companies realized the special effects and the digital animals: 2e Effects, Double Negative, Gentle Giant Studios, Senate Visual Effects and, in particular, Moving Picture Company with the visual effects supervisor Nicolas Aithadi, who was guest of the Future Film Festival 2006 to present the special effects of the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The most extensive work involved the creation of the film’s menagerie of mighty, ancient creatures – mammoths, the saber-tooth tigers and terror birds. The production wanted lifelike movement for these creatures and so looked to their modern-day relatives.
The most challenging aspect of re-creating prehistoric animals was their hair: long and matted in the case of the mammoths, feathered for the terror birds, and, in the case of the saber-tooth tiger, interacting with water. The shootings has been set in New Zealand and Africa. Jean-Vincent Puzos, production design of the movie, made an extensive research, primarily in archaeological reference books to recreate the mammuths look.
Using wood as a substitute for actual bone, Puzos’s team of sculptors took a month to make the skeletons while another team created the mammoth furs and hides from local animal skins. The finished bones and hides has been assembled for the model.
The final section of the film was shot on the sprawling deserts of southwest Namibia, including the pristine and historic Spitzkoppe, the place where Stanley Kubrick shot the background plates for the ape sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Official website
The trailer

The Ratatouille cowriter, Jim Capobianco, was one of the guests at the last Future Film Festival edition (Jan 15th-20th 2008) and he presented at the audience the short Your Friend the Rat, now on DVD of Ratatouille, an educational film about little rodents that it was used to study and elaborate the characters of Ratatouille.
Here the FFF special about Ratatouille.

Peter & the Wolf by Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman won the Oscar as best short animated movie. The short, winner of the last edition of Annecy Festival, has been realized in stop-motion with puppets and it tells the story of a young boy and his animal friends that face a hungry wolf in Prokofiev’s classic musical piece.
Here more info and the trailer of Peter & the Wolf.

Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris e Trevor Wood won the prize for the best visual effects for the movie The Golden Compass, a fantasy movie directed by Chris Weitz, adaptation of the novel by Philip Pullman. The other movies in competitions in this category were: Tranformers by Michael Bay and Pirates of the Caribbean: at World’s End. The movie sets are digital and the special effects are made by a lot of companies: not only Rythm&Hues but also Framestore CFC, Cinesite, Digital Domain and Tippett Studio.

The movie site

The Italians Dante Ferretti e Francesca Lo Schiavo won the Oscar for the best Art Direction for the last movie by Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd.

To know more about the Sweeney Todd’s sets, read the FFF special.

By: Giulietta Fara