Digital destruction is Bottleship VFX’s sweet spot. From fiery explosions to churning waterfalls, the Bulgarian studio excels at crafting data-heavy VFX, including particle work and fluid simulations – feats accomplished in part through Thinkbox Software tools.
X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest entrant in Twentieth Century Fox’s popular superhero franchise, features more time-bending magic from Australia’s Rising Sun Pictures. The visual effects studio contributed to several key sequences in the film, most notably an electrifying scene where Quicksilver (Evan Peters) uses his hyper-speed ability to rescue students from an exploding mansion. Quicksilver’s Rescue builds on a notable scene from the preceding X-Men: Days of Future Past where the character races around a Pentagon cafeteria to prevent security guards from shooting a trio of X-Men. RSP’s impeccable work in making pots, pans, bullets and water drops freeze in mid-air helped the film earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects.
In a project for 20th Century Fox spanning nine months, Roundabout Entertainment restored and remastered the first eight seasons of the classic procedural police drama NYPD Blue. More than 170 one-hour episodes were scanned and finished in 2K, restoring the show to pristine quality for a new domestic release.
Design-driven production company Sarofsky delivered the 3D elements in the main-on-end title sequence in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War. Under the direction of company principal and executive creative director Erin Sarofsky, together with executive producer Steven Anderson, creative director and designer John Filipkowski, and other Sarofsky artists, the Chicago-based creative team worked directly with Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War VFX supervisor Dan DeLeeuw and VFX producer Jen Underdahl to create a fully composited and rendered two minute MOE title sequence that blends CG-based and photo-real elements.
Post-production finishing for the second season of MTV’s hit show Scream: The TV Series is currently in high gear at Chainsaw in Hollywood. The facility is handling editorial finishing, color grading and deliverables. It is also supplying editing suites and gear used by series editors.
Continuing to add depth and experience to its team in Vancouver, FuseFX has hired VFX supervisor and producer James Tichenor.
Kanye West was honored at last week’s 20th Annual Webbys with the Artist Of The Year award, in recognition of the social media phenomenon’s pioneering use of the internet and his impact on the music landscape. The ceremony’s rules limit the winners’ acceptance speeches to five words, presenting West, who’s known for his lengthy orations, with a challenge. Houses in Motion, the Brooklyn-based animation and production studio, crafted an animation-driven retrospective of the artist’s year, with a video montage that includes abstract design elements, graphics, skewed images, and samplings of the artist’s tweets.
Following on the heels of their 2014 hit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directors Anthony and Joe Russo have done it again with the Marvel-Disney franchise blockbuster Captain America: Civil War. From a script written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, which blends dramatic spectacle with legit emotion and humor, the filmmakers once again turned to cinematographer Trent Opaloch, who shot The Winter Soldier. The Technicolor color finishing team led by senior supervising finishing colorist Steve Scott, worked with Opaloch, the Marvel team (producer Kevin Feige, and executive producer Victoria Alonso), and the Russos to provide final color-grading, digital intermediate services, mastering for a wide array of HDR theatrical deliverables, and HDR home masters.
Veteran visual effects producer Chad Hudson, whose credits include The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, has joined FuseFX. Based at the company’s Los Angeles facility, Hudson becomes part of a diverse production team that is creating effects for Fox’s Sleepy Hollow and pilots for CBS and Amazon, as well as other upcoming television projects.
Thinkbox Software is providing free licensing hours of Deadline and Krakatoa as well as free hours of The Foundry’s Nuke and Katana, and Chaos Group’s V-Ray for the month of May. Deadline 8, now available, introduces on-demand, per-minute licensing for Thinkbox tools and third-party applications. Users will receive the complimentary time in 10,000-hour increments.
