It's a sad state of affairs that, even with all the work effects company Uncharted Territory put into the three-minute sequence that PM traces from storyboard to finished shot, the part that amused us the most was what Emmerich had to do with the real life actors:

As animators molded the virtual city, Emmerich was filming his actors in front of a blue screen. He put the actors on a "shaky floor," an 8000-square-foot steel platform on airbags. Special-effects coordinators jiggled the bags with pneumatic pumps to inspire authentic reactions from the actors. "It was the most complicated scene we created," Emmerich says. "And it's one of my favorites."

"Shaky floor"? Oh, John Cusack, what has become of your career?

The Anatomy of a Disaster Scene in the Movie 2012 [Popular Mechanics]

Production designer Rick Carter told Variety what was involved in creating the look of Cameron's CGI-filled SF fantasy:

It was literally as if Jim had been to this place. He was coming back with fragments and glimpses he could express to us, but then we had to try to figure out how to make that come alive for him and something we felt an audience could relate to.

Part of how they managed that involved recontextualizing Earthly elements in new ways:

[We created a] lush homegrown forest that's way overscale for anything we've ever experienced, but also has enough alien qualities that you realize what you're seeing is not just a few flowers poked into the midst of an otherwise normal environment. The essence of it is very different... The whole idea of (that) bioluminescent world at night is something he'd actually witnessed when he was down at the bottom of the ocean during his 'Titanic' time. That bioluminescence is almost like a nervous system of the planet, and that's what's at stake in the movie, as you start to get past the initial foray into the Na'vi culture and seeing the drama start to emerge between the military-industrial complex that wants to exploit the world.

The key, according to Carter, remains in the emotional connection the viewer feels to what they're watching:

The real challenge is whether you feel the emotion coming through from the characters, especially the Neytiri character and ultimately [Sam Worthington's character] Jake's avatar. When you look into those eyes, do you feel the connection's real? And then, can you give yourself over to it and not look at it at arm's distance and think, 'Yes, that's wonderful technically, but I don't really feel anything.'

Avatar is released in December.

Early peek at 'Avatar' production design [Variety]

Ah, memories . . .

via Darth Mojo

Segundo's 1908 film, Excursión a la luna, is actually a remake of Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 and often credited as the first science fiction film. Segundo was one of the great special effects masters of the time, working largely in the fantasy genre, and he decided to try his hand at depicting space travel on screen:

His more magical realist space travel film, Voyage à la planète Jupiter, is also just over a century old, having made its US debut one hundred years ago today:

[via Fanboy]

One of the most interesting aspects of their conversation comes when Jardin talks to Gaeta about what he calls "hybrid entertainment," or a complete merger between film and videogame artistry. Gaeta says:

I'm curious about possible destinations where there's crossover with regard to simulation cinema, "sim cinema," ways of creating elaborate trapdoors and portals between different mediums. Also, over the years, there are strange subgroups from the visual world like Douglas Trumbull — I used to work for him many years ago — their passion went beyond cinema to immersive content. Virtual reality, perhaps games, are a step toward that — so are other methods of surrounding people with an experience. There are a lot of interesting progressions going on with immersive cinema, immersive entertainment, hybridizing the two.

via BoingBoing (Thanks, Xeni!)

Engber writes:

Vision researchers have spent many years studying the discomfort associated with watching stereoscopic movies. Similar problems plague flight simulators, head-mounted virtual-reality displays, and many other applications of 3-D technology . . .

One potential explanation for the discomfort lies with the unnatural eye movements stereoscopy elicits from viewers. Outside of the 3-D movie theater, our eyes move in two distinct ways when we see something move toward us: First, our eyeballs rotate inward towards the nose (the closer the target comes, the more cross-eyed we get); second, we squeeze the lenses in our eyes to change their shape and keep the target in focus (as you would with a camera). Those two eye movements-called "vergence" and "accommodation"-are automatic in everyday life, and they go hand-in-hand.

Something different happens when you're viewing three-dimensional motion projected onto a flat surface. When a helicopter flies off the screen in Monsters vs. Aliens, our eyeballs rotate inward to follow it, as they would in the real world. Reflexively, our eyes want to make a corresponding change in shape, to shift their plane of focus. If that happened, though, we'd be focusing our eyes somewhere in front of the screen, and the movie itself (which is, after all, projected on the screen) would go a little blurry. So we end up making one eye movement but not the other; the illusion forces our eyes to converge without accommodating.

This is just one part of a fascinating article about the ways 3-D affects our vision - and how all the new 3-D technologies won't be able to fix the basic problems that cause nausea, dizziness, and (potentially) damage our ability to focus our eyes.

via Slate

Image by Souris Hong Poretta

After I saw Watchmen, which was a bumpy but intriguing ride, I realized what the movie was missing that might have saved it. It needed the visual pyrotechnics of the Wachowskis, whose movies always make you feel like your eyeballs just got an upgrade. Watchmen may have been gorgeous, but it wasn't visually arresting the way The Matrix was. Remember when you first saw bullet time? Or any of the fight scenes in any of the Matrix flicks (even the sequels)? They were insane in the best possible way.

If only Zack Snyder could have brought in the Wachowskis to do the visual effects and fight staging for Watchmen, the movie might genuinely have changed the way we see comic book movies - the same way the Matrix Trilogy changed scifi. Arguably, Snyder's 300 could never have existed without Matrix - all those slo-mo, hyperstylized fights were straight out of Wachowskitown.

The problem with the Wachowskis is that they seem to have a hard time hitting on stories that make audiences flock to the theater. Certainly the first Matrix flick was popular, but that may have been a lucky accident. The second two films were talky and slow, driving away fans. And for various reasons that I must confess I don't entirely understand, Speed Racer was critically panned and sent audiences away in droves. I actually loved Speed Racer, and thought the Matrix sequels had a lot of interesting stuff in them, but they were not hits (though the Matrix sequels made decent box office).

Still, I think that audiences respond to the Wachowskis visual stylings, even if they don't like the movies the duo hang them on. And that's why I think the Wachowskis' next move should be to open a visual effects studio like George Lucas' LucasArts and ILM, or like Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop. We need to get the amazing visual creativity of the Wachowskis harnessed to a Hollywood story that will pull in audiences. I know they want to get more into writing - they worked on the V for Vendetta screenplay - but I think visual effects are their true calling.

Imagine, for example, that the Wachowskis had been hired to do the visual effects on, say, World War Z. This is a post-apocalyptic war flick currently in production, which will require droves of CGI zombies as well as lots of concept design on the cities ravaged by the war between disease-ridden "zombies" and the uninfected humans. Based on a bestselling novel, this movie cries out for a team that can totally reimagine the way CGI might be used to show hordes of rampaging zombies. Imagine the scene where Trinity and Neo gun their way into that building in the Matrix, but with zombies. Or how about a zombie whose body moves with the same cyberorganic grace as the Machines? Or a Battle of Yonkers whose pyrotechnic madness is an echo of the light chaos in Speed Racer? Freaky, awesome, and surprising.

And if the Wachowskis had done the concept design and visual effects for the upcoming Terminator 4 movie? Well, I would have total faith in its awesomeness. Not that I think McG's flick won't rock - but I'm also not expecting to see anything new. A Wachowski-created Terminator, however, would probably blow the eyes right out of my sockets.

I'm not saying I don't want to see another Wachowski movie, because I do. But I also don't want to see the Wachowskis' considerable talents squandered. I want to see their visual audaciousness working its way into many more movies, transforming the way we look at Hollywood flicks from the inside out.

What influences you when you approach designing these monsters and aliens?

Well the biggest influence, I think myself and what I try to project to the shop, is to look at the natural kingdom for ideas. I hear so many people – other creature designers, other shop owners, things of that nature – say everything’s been done before. But meanwhile, I turn on the Discovery Channel and I see mammals, amphibians, crustaceans – stuff that I’ve never seen before, and I’ve always been a big fan of nature shows and stuff like that. And I think, I’m 40 years old and I’m still seeing new creatures on Earth. And that’s where we should be looking for designs as opposed to looking for old movies or other artists’ interpretations of what monsters should look like.

So mammals, crustaceans, is there any particular slice of the animal kingdom you prefer to use?

No, I think it’s basically based on what comes out of the script. You know, you try to relate things that are basically along the lines of what’s in the script. A good case in point is how the whole True Blood fang designs came about. Way back before we even did the pilot, Alan Ball called a meeting with Todd [Masters] and myself to come in and talk about vampire teeth. They wanted something new; they wanted something no one’s seen before, and they still want it to be sexy and cool. And the first thing I thought of, and the design that Alan really liked, is modeling the teeth more mechanically off of the way snakes teeth work, the way they unfold from the back of the palate of the mouth as opposed to disappear from, like, a stiletto-type action from the gums. And Alan really liked that idea, and, again, it was based on basically the way the anatomy of a snake’s inner mouth works. Obviously we didn’t make it needle-thin like a snake’s would be, but we basically mixed what was already there on a snake with what’s already there on a human, and even down to the detail of the fang – which I doubt we’ll ever see in the show – but there is little holes where they would suck the blood up, up through the fang.

Wow. I had read about the snake’s teeth, but I didn’t realize it was so detailed.

Well yeah, the other thing on that is, again, we started out with doing some Photoshops, and that was the one Alan liked the best. But then it also came down to this is in terms of – what we thought out on this – we were talking to the visual effects, who were actually doing the fang emergence from the palate. That was always decided: that was going to be a visual effect. But everyone had a different idea about how that would look. So what we did to make it so everyone was on the same page – all the animators, all our guys making the actual prosthetic fangs – is we made a mechanical mock-up that actually shows this. It was the upper and lower palate and the tongue and the teeth of one of the actual performers. It had a little mechanism on the top that you pulled the levers. And the really cool thing about these teeth – which isn’t really like a snake – but the eye teeth that you see in front are actually false little fronts, and they fold back into the gums as the vampire/snake teeth come out.

So, when you see something like “fangs,” you think snakes or bats. Is that typical, that you see something in a script like that and you’re inspired? Like, was there something in the Slither script that jumped out at you?

Actually that’s another good point of what we did on that. Once again, where we started out first with Slither is that right after we read the script and we started designing prototypes on it, the first thing I recommended is all of us go to Sea World and take a look at invertebrates and things like that – jellyfish. And that’s where a lot of one of the big concepts came from with Slither of everything having a clear membrane over the top of it. When you look at a lot of undersea creatures, they don’t look like painted sculptures; they don’t look like painted silicone. It looks like there’s an understructure and there’s like a clear membrane that’s soft on top of it. And that was one of the things we actually went through a lot of trouble to achieve on Slither was having that double-membrane skin. But again, that’s where we started.

And again, a lot of our earlier designs were probably a lot more grounded in what you would see in the animal kingdom. But James [Gunn’s] vision was he wanted everything to look real and to have very real textures to it, but he also wanted a little bit of a cartoony look to it. And I remember not agreeing with that when we were making the movie. But then after seeing it, completely realizing James’ vision, if we would have made it so ultra-realistic and so nasty, I think people would have been vomiting in the aisles as opposed to being scared and then laughing.

Now with Slither, we see the man turn into this monster over the course of the movie. Did you develop that design gradually, or did you come up with the end monster and work backwards?

Well, that’s actually a really good question, because, as I said, there were a lot of designs on Slither of all different stages. And basically what we started with was the design that Todd did on the Henenlotter’s Ranch monster, which was actually kind of a middle stage, and we kind of worked backwards and forwards from there. Again, it was always decided that, just like the yellow organism at the beginning of the show, the detailing on it would have that really gelatinous, double-clear-skinned look to it.

Now on a weekly show like Stargate Atlantis – I know that different houses have different approaches to weekly alien shows. What would you say your goal is on a weekly alien show like Stargate Atlantis?

A lot of what I look at – and again, keep in mind, too, that the shop that I run down here in LA – we have a shop in Vancouver, too, and the Vancouver shop does the majority of the prosthetic work for it. The LA shop, we mainly get involved when it’s puppets or full body suits or a prosthetic that is very complex. So the shop down here, we’re more set up for larger creations.

But this shop down here did the initial construction of the Wraiths, and we actually just did something that I was real proud of for Atlantis. I think it was last year or the year before, but it was an episode called “Vengeance” that was basically an homage to the Alien movies. And it was a pretty good episode, but one of the things – we had a bunch of different designers doing monster designs for it. But when I read the script it was like, “This is obviously an homage to the Alien movies.” So what I did then in terms of a design was something that was very reminiscent of that alien. And so a lot of times in reading those scripts – the Stargate shows kind of are a celebration of science fiction and a lot of times they kind of nod to other shows that have been done before – and a lot of times, when I see that in a script that obviously they have for the shows, obviously we don’t want to want to directly copy off of anything, but I think that’s the best approach for them is really read the script, find out what they had in mind when they were writing it, what maybe they were thinking of, and give it an original design based on those directions. The way I did it with the Vengeance monster, a lot of the front of the face was very similar to the alien – I knew they would like that – but in terms of the rest of the body, I actually modeled it after a flea. [Laughs.] Well, they’re pretty terrifying-looking when you see them up close. And I actually told them that when they were up there and they were very happy with the monster. And it was like, “Yeah, this was what we wanted.” And I was like, “Yeah, I modeled it off a flea.” And they were like, “A flea?” Well, you know, you take what works.

What kinds of materials do you use in your designs?

The materials are actually one of things this shop really specializes in. We use a lot of a material called thermal plastic, which is basically, you can cast it crystal clear, it’s super stretchy – it elongates over 400 percent of its actual size – and it basically is completely non-toxic after we cast it. So with Slither, we couldn’t have done that show without the thermal plastic. A lot of the tentacle sheaths I had talked about were made out of that, the yellow organism at the beginning of the movie was, and the famous stretching tendrils that you see dressing the house monster and the inside of the meteor were all constructed with this thermal plastic.

Another material we use a lot is silicone, and we have the silicone that basically, with adding mineral oil to it, you can replicate all the different flesh consistencies of the human body. And we do a lot of dummy bodies here. And we, basically, if we’re doing a body, we’ll do the skin will be soft and then we’ll have a more denser muscle structure on the inside, and then it goes back to basically a steel armature.

And it’s a pretty involved process, but the great thing about that is, if you build a body like that, it’s not just a prop any more. When you pick it up, it has weight. When you lay it down on a table, you don’t have to position it. It just kind of falls into place and looks completely natural. That’s one of things that I learned on the first episode of Six Feet Under, ‘cause we always made our bodies out of silicone, but we used a silicone that looked great, but was very stiff. And if you touched it, it didn’t really feel very real. But I noticed for the first season, we always seemed to be tweaking the body to look good every time they moved the camera. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I want a body that is not a prop, that is actually going to feel and move and articulate like a real human body.

Did you have consultants on any of the science fiction shows, or was that mostly on the other shows?

Not so much on the Stargates and stuff like that, but there usually is a medical consultant on most of the medical procedure shows we do. Like, we did a show a long time ago, Kingdom Hospital, and there was a medical consultant that was very involved in the brain surgeries and things of that nature. I’m trying to think if we didn’t have any consultants on True Blood. I can’t think of any off-hand. They don’t really have too many vampire specialists. I think that was Alan’s job because Alan came up with the whole mythology of the vampires. I had an interview for HBO and I was explaining to them how vampire blood is very thick and syrupy and human blood is more runny and brighter red, and they asked me, “Well, how do you know what vampire blood looks like?” And I said, “Alan Ball told me!” Well, he’s the boss.

Yeah, I guess that’s a whole plot point of that show.

It is. I mean the show’s called True Blood. You better make sure you know what your blood looks like. [Laughs.]

On that note, too, I will say that out of all the TV shows that we’re currently working on, and maybe have ever worked on, I probably feel the strongest about True Blood. I just loved getting those scripts every week. They were always really exciting in terms of where the plot was going. They had a lot more special effects than I was expecting after reading the book. And what really, really turned me on the most about True Blood – I was excited about it from the beginning, working with Alan again was going to be great and doing a vampire show with him was going to be great – but what I didn’t realize about True Blood of how much of a fantasy story it is. It’s not just vampires. There’s a whole host of magical creatures that come up through the season, and the depth of the mythology for a TV show really is what amazed me about the show and the concept. It’s not just a vampire show. It’s much more.

Though Virgin Galactic is the best-known of the commercial space ships, many other companies like XCOR are getting in on the action. And Orbital Outfitters is banking on the idea that they'll want nifty-looking spacesuits for their passengers — not just to keep them safe, but also as souvenirs of their trip. Unlike the spacesuits that other astronauts wear, these suits won't be designed to help somebody walk on the moon. They just have to remain pressurized in the event of an accident. And as the Gilman knows, they also have to look cool. I don't know if I'd trust one of these suits in space, but I'd definitely wear it on the ground.

Hollywood Monster Maker Designs Suits for Travel in Space [via Bloomberg]

Follow the links to awesome galleries.

Stan Winston Studio

Robots

Scary Monsters

Friendly Creatures

Gooftastic

Here's a side-by-side comparison between the source material and the Demetrius, the industrial garbage ship that Starbuck and her away team used to try to find Earth earlier this season. Mojo writes:

Landing lights are generally blue, so I used that scheme to surround the Viper platform. See the small ladder leading up to the platform on the bottom right? People need to see where they’re going, so it was a natural area to illuminate.

You can see that he's borrowed the shape of the sea-going ship, as well as the way its lights are positioned. It's always cool to see how much real-world objects inspire fantastical images.

Check out a whole bunch of concept art for spaceships and the images that inspired them in Mojo's blog.

BSG VFX: A Thousand Points Of Light [Darth Mojo]

Unfortunately, one of the most exciting parts got cut, for time reasons. When the humans running the captured cylon Base Ship jump into the fleet, they find themselves stranded and alone, at the mercy of a human fleet that doesn't realize the ship is no longer an enemy. In this cut scene, you can see the intensity of the Base Ship arrival, smack dab in the middle of the fleet, with dozens of ships on a collision course with it. Really shows the chaos of their arrival, and shows off a bunch of spaceships, which is always cool. Hopefully this clip will make it onto the DVD extras. You can find out a lot more about the making of the scene on Mojo's blog. [Guess What's Not Coming to Dinner via Darth Mojo]

Says a summary of the research from UC San Diego:

Much of the richness in images created with photon mapping algorithms comes from precise accounting for the amount of light is in a scene and where that light is. Photon mapping algorithms provide a way to follow the light around the scene, as it bounces off various objects and lands on other objects. Photon mapping can also determine how light will interact with fog, smoke or other "participating media" that absorb, reflect and scatter some portion of the light - a task that has been traditionally quite computationally costly to perform because it requires sampling the light at many locations in order to make sure that nearly all the light is accounted for.

"Instead of computing the light at thousands of discrete points along the ray between the camera and the object, which is the conventional approach, we compute the lighting along the whole length of the ray all at once," said [computer science researcher Wojciech] Jarosz.

Computer Science Fog Machine [UC San Diego]