Category: Visual Effects

Sony's SPIDER-MAN 2 shattered the opening day record yesterday by snaring a stunning $40,442,604M in its web. That's better than SPIDER-MAN's $39.4M debut two years ago, which went on to earn $403.7M as the fifth highest grossing movie of all time. SPIDER-MAN 2 also tagged the best Wednesday opening ever, besting THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING's $34.5M.

Director Tim Burton is busy indeed. Simultaneous to production commencing in London on the stop-motion CORPSE BRIDE, he has also started production in the same city on CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Based on the classic Roald Dahl novel and filmed once before in 1971 as WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, CHARLIE is a Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures production.

NVIDIA Corp. broadened its already expansive graphics line with the introduction of four new NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions based on PCI Express. Leveraging this next-generation bus architecture, NVIDIA doubles the bandwidth of its AGP 8X-based products to more than 4GB per second in both upstream and downstream data transfers.

Mercedes' latest commercial, CLOUDS, a follow-up to last year's award-winning MOVEMENT, broke across the U.K. on June 22, 2004. The HD ad (created by CDD's Walter Campbell and directed by MJZ's Nicolai Fugslig) boasts The Mill's most demanding vfx job, resulting in the London-based studio applying new working practices across the 3D department as a result of the project.

VES 2004, held last weekend in beautiful San Rafael, California, was a sheer delight. The sixth annual festival of the Visual Effects Society, in which the baton was symbolically passed from founder Tom Atkin to new executive director Eric Roth, offered the latest in vfx creativity and technology (Mars and MYTHBUSTERS were two favorites). But the buzz was all about how games are catching up to movies in vfx quality, which is now being stressed in schools, the inevitable acceptance of outsourcing and the need to unionize.

The buzz at VES 2004 may have been mostly about jobs, outsourcing and the need to unionize the industry, but the seminars were still about creativity at the sixth annual VES Festival of visual effects, held in the bucolic community of San Rafael, California, June 18-20. VES 2004 also introduced new executive director Eric Roth, who recently succeeded founder Tom Atkin.

Ryan Church, concept design supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic (STAR WARS EPISODES I, II and III) is the Grand Master award winner for EXPOSÉ 2, the latest in the series of digital art books from Ballistic Publishing that will begin shipping in July. The Grand Master is awarded to an artist exhibiting outstanding skill and contribution to the advancement of digital art. A graduate of Art Center, Church began his career at Walt Disney Imagineering (blue-sky concepts for future theme parks) before freelancing at Universal and hiring on at ILM in digital feature production.

Whodoo EFX recently completed vfx for THE STEPFORD WIVES. Led by president/digital effects artist Helena Packer and exec producer Mark Ritcheson, the Whodoo EFX team collaborated closely with famed comedy director Frank Oz, Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund and Award-winning art director Terry Windell.