Apologies, but I have migrated the documentation of the VFX coverage to a blog better suited for it and away from my personal site... thx.

http://vfxtippingpoint.blogspot.com/

We will be completing work that will become the final glimpses of our wolves in the Twilight Saga later this fall... This is the final chapter to the Stephanie Meyer series and the end is nigh. Status? so far so good cranking away on the large battle sequence, some of which you briefly see in the trailer above. ~enjoy

Apologies for the great distance between updates, although I know not who I'm apologizing to... if no one else, it's for a future me going back to read all this crap before I'm dead. Or maybe it's just so my co-workers can laugh at me, either way I win.

Mirror Mirror has long since wrapped as a painful memory in my VFX career, I'm currently knee deep in Breaking Dawn part 2, the last film containing Tippett's Twilight wolves... this will be my 4th movie now... dear Stephanie Meyer, thank you writing these, and yet, thank you for not having written any more.  Any plans on writing more Twilight lore? Please don't.

I saw  Prometheus last night... and I loved it, such a stunning movie on most all levels equating a magnificent movie going experience.  Hi-Five Mr. Scott, Gieger, Michael Fassbender, and the VFX Houses involved.

One of these days I'll be going back in time and shoveling dirt loads of updates making up for lost time, it will all come at once, BAM!

Only 6 days to go... Phil Tippett's "Mad God" Kickstarter, Get It!

visit Breaking Dawn @ imdb.com

While it wasn't quite able to reach the series high mark, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1's outstanding $138.1 million opening indicated that the sexy teen vampires are as popular as ever. What does appear to have lost some of its appeal, however, is dancing penguins: Happy Feet Two struggled to even open to half as much as its popular 2006 predecessor. Overall box office was up around 14 percent to over $221 million, and the weekend currently ranks as the sixth-highest on record.

Breaking Dawn's $138.1 million opening is second-best among Twilight movies behind 2009's New Moon ($142.7 million). That's a small gap, though, and Breaking Dawn still managed to claim fifth place on the all-time opening weekend chart behind Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3 and New Moon. As is typical for the Twilight movies, its weekend was incredibly front-loaded with 51.9 percent of the gross coming from Friday showings (including its $30.25 midnight tally).

A stand-out sequence in Tarsem Singh's Immortals takes place near the climax of the film, when King Hyperion frees a group of entombed Titans from their cell using the powerful and magical Epirus Bow. But before the released Titans can escape, the Gods descend from Mount Olympus and work to dispatch them. A bloody close-quarters fight ensues, with Tippett Studio combining live action footage, motion captured performances and CG Titans and effects to create the final shots.

In particular, the battle is punctuated by something known as 'God Speed' to emphasize the otherworldly powers of the Gods and Titans. "When the Titans died," explains Tippett Studio visual effects supervisor Matt Jacobs, "they wanted them to take on a slow motion effect. So when you see them get chopped in two or a head chopped off or smashed by Zeus' chain they wanted it to feel more photosonic - around 500 frames per second - so there was a speed ramp as the Titan dies and then goes into slow motion."

We talk to key members of the Tippett team about how they realized the animation, effects, lighting and compositing for the Gods versus Titans fight.

Compositing

Although the fight combined live action, motion capture, CG Titans and effects, the compositing, according to compositing supervisor David Schnee, remained within reason. "We had your typical re-times, plate clean-up and times when we had to make some of the action a little snappier to emphasize certain moves and strikes," he says.

Tiles were shot all around the set to enable room to move the camera and re-compose certain scenes if needed. Tippett's Christopher Paizis was the matchmove lead. The scenes were all comp'd in 2D in Nuke, and elements later broken out to allow for the stereo conversion. An initial effort to give the Titans and Gods a vibrating look in order to sell their speed was undertaken, but the approach changed to the photosonic feel. Additional comp fixes included adding some more transparency and sub-surface feel to the blood where needed and matching some of the live action Titans with their CG counterparts, occasionally fine-tuning markings on helmets or skirt and sandal trims.

"Our biggest challenge though," says Schnee, "was dealing the projections that we needed to help pad all the wounds that would occur when the Titans were severed and heads lobbed off. They built some nice wound artwork on all the caps for that stuff but there wasn't enough time to go in and do a lot of interesting dressing of paintwork that would have blood splattered onto skin and dripping down the contours of their body and on clothing. So we came up with a pretty cool projection set-up gizmo in Nuke to handle that."

The projection technique began with a key pose of a Titan, fully dressed and mocked up, with a camera target and locator to project onto. "We could then easily place our splatter or drips onto him," says Schnee. "That would get un-UV'd and applied to the animated GTOs for the shot."

In one hero shot, a chain goes through the chest and impales a Titan. "For that there was a little bit of dressing on the Titan for the wound," notes Schnee. "But then he also ends up dropping and stepping towards the chain towards camera. The CG blood that is blasted off from the impact bursts out in front of him and then he steps into it. So the artist on the shot animated certain timings of the projection to time with the CG blood, which we had as a number of effects passes."

The final shot

Tippett's overall shot count on Immortals came to 96, made up also of a CG hyena-like 'mongrel' that replaced a live action German Shepherd for a couple of shots, and CG Titans added to the film's final complicated 'Sistine Chapel' pull-out, which was shared with RedFX in Montreal.

"That shot had been done originally for a teaser trailer," says Matt Jacobs. "It was filmed in photosonic stereo for everything in the foreground and then in the background the characters were on a multi-planes and multi-directions - all these Gods and Titans fighting at the same time. It was literally hundreds of takes on greenscreen that went into the shot. Tarsem wanted to gore it up so we added CG Titans, blood simulations and parts flying in slow motion, taking some cues from the death effects we had done already. We also inherited a massive Nuke script from RedFX and there was a lot of co-ordination with them to get all the assets. Then we integrated our work into it, and passed it back to them to do some finishing."

All images and clips copyright © 2011 Relativity Media.

Immortals ~ 11-11-11

"Fight for honor! Fight for you future!" If you haven't already seen enough to whet your appetite for Tarsem Singh's fantasy epic Immortals, Relativity recently released an extended 60-second TV spot for the movie over on Fandango. There's a lot of the footage we've seen the second and third trailers for Immortals, and some new stuff, but most just lots of awesome action, badass music, lots to get you hyped up to see this. Henry Cavill stars as Theseus, Mickey Rourke as the evil King Hyperion, as well as Luke Evans, John Hurt, Kellan Lutz, Stephen Dorff and Freida Pinto. I can't wait to watch this, only a few months left. Enjoy! (firstshowing.net)

"I definitely have a happily ever after thing going on!" No she doesn't. Relativity let loose the first official trailer for Tarsem's Mirror Mirror, his "sickeningly kiddie" take on Snow White, and you need to see it just to see how bad it is. In this one, Lily Collins stars as Snow White, Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen, and Armie Hammer as the Prince, but it looks as far in the opposite direction of Huntsman as anything could be. It seems like an animated movie come to life, complete with Nathan Lane and silly dwarfs. Even Julia Roberts looks like she's phoning it in, enough to make me want to stay far, far away from this. Enjoy!

Watch the first full trailer for Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror, via Yahoo, below:

You can also download the official Mirror Mirror trailer in High Def on Yahoo

An exiled princess enlists the help of seven resourceful rebels to win back her birthright, and an evil Queen steals control of a kingdom, in a magical adventure comedy filled with jealousy, romance, and betrayal.

Mirror Mirror is directed by visionary Indian filmmaker Tarsem Singh, of The Cell, The Fall and Immortals previously, which just opened. The screenplay was written by Melissa Wallack & Jason Keller (Machine Gun Preacher) based on the original story by the Brothers Grimm. Relativity Media is bringing Mirror Mirror to theaters starting on March 16, 2012 next year, well before Snow White and the Huntsman arrives in June.

We are into our final week on Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1, and wrapping it up pretty smoothly, I was anticipating a much more crazy final few weeks on this one, it's good to be ending on a less stressful note...  Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 begins sometime early next year for us.

A first in the saga, that Summit has decided to plaster in our ponies into a Twilight poster, which usually are medium close shots of characters, so same deal, just left some room for our wolves to creep.  Click on that sexy image of shark boy to view our wolves big like.

There were actually 2 new posters released, the one to the left, and the other is of newlyweds Edward and Bella, but nothing cool to see there.

...

4) The Wolf Pack, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The wolves each had to have human eyes but wolf features, and six separate distinct personalities -- not to mention fur that moved realistically. The animators at Tippett Studio went to a wolf sanctuary and spent time with the endangered wolves, getting to know them. They even created their own "Frankenwolf" out of pelts from already-dead wolves. The result was a set of digital creatures which arguably had more personality than any of the humans on the screen.

io9.com ran a piece yesterday that covers the top 10 Computer-Animated or Motion-Captured Characters Who Actually Look Cool.  And what do you know?  Our Twilight wolves ranked in at #4 on that list, we'll take it.  The rest of that list is below:

10) The Owl, Labyrinth

9) Bit, Tron

8) The Dinosaurs, Jurassic Park

7) Dobby from the Harry Potter movies

6) General Grievous, Star Wars

5) Dragons, Game of Thrones

4) The Wolf Pack, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

3) Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3:

2) Gollum, Lord of the Rings

1) Queen Moat, Avatar