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Sparkles and Wine - Teaser. 1964 Henri-Georges Clouzot - "L'enfer" (lighting effect) World-building: making the TV series Defiance. Syfy’s new television series Defiance was developed in conjunction with game company Trion Worlds, which recently released Defiance as a MMO third-person shooter. The TV side of this ‘transmedia’ project was filmed mostly in Toronto with an in-house visual effects team overseen by Gary Hutzel fleshing out the worlds and creatures of Defiance. We go behind the scenes and showcase before and afters images from the show. - Above: watch the trailer for Syfy’s Defiance. The series is set in the not distant future, when ‘Votans’ and humans have clashed on Earth.

The result of fierce fighting has led to terraforming events and a new mix of native and alien animal species. Hutzel had most recently been the visual effects supervisor on Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, a series that relied heavily on virtual sets (see fxguide’s coverage here). Original plate. Final shot. The final shot count was close to 1100 shots for 13 hours of television, with half of those being full virtual environments. 2011′s Best VFX TV Spots. From epic environments to subtle surroundings, 2011 was a great year for visual effects in commercials. fxguide takes a look back at some of the year’s best VFX work with our top ten spots of 2011. Rather than show you just the final spots, we’ve tried to include breakdowns and behind the scenes featurettes on how the ads were made. 1.

Canal+, Bear: vfx by Mikros Image Easily our favorite spot in 2011 was ‘Bear’ for Canal+, which saw Mikros Image incorporating a CG bear into a faux look behind the scenes of a film set. We covered the spot here in an interview with VFX supervisors Laurent Creusot and Guillaume Ho. 2. In terms of pure epic-ness, these two next spots with visual effects by Animal Logic and Framestore are clear winners. 3. 4. Next up is MPC LA’s work on the DIRECTV frozen moments ‘Don’t Just Watch TV’ campaign. 5. With a rich combination of 2D animation and crazy 3D animated characters – and fruit and unicorns – this yoghurt spot is just plain fun. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. How VFX saved Washington: Olympus Has Fallen. Olympus Has Fallen tells the story of a terrorist attack on the White House in Washington, D.C. However, the Antoine Fuqua film was shot in Louisiana, necessitating a major visual effects effort in order to create the capital, airplanes, helicopters and a fair amount of movie mayhem. fxguide breaks down four of the major sequences in the action flick, which garnered a $30+ million opening in the U.S. this past weekend.

Final shot. Original plate – the extent of the White House build. Sequence #1: Motorcade accident What happens The film opens with the President (Aaron Eckart), First Lady (Ashley Judd) and his security detail, headed by Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), driving from Camp David during a blizzard. Watch a breakdown of Ghost’s visual effects for the motorcade accident. How they did it Filming took place in Shreveport, Louisiana in mid-Summer, which meant the majority of snowy backgrounds had to be completed digitally.

Original plate. Cockpit plates being filmed. Kia Optima 2011 Funny Car Commercial "One Epic Ride" - Carjam Radio. NAB 2013. VFX roll call for The Avengers (updated) Having supervised the visual effects on Iron Man 2, Janek Sirrs was well suited to return for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. Along with producer Susan Pickett, the visual effects supervisor oversaw the creation of approximately 2,200 shots completed by several vendors. These included ILM, Weta Digital, Scanline VFX, Hydraulx, Fuel VFX, Evil Eye Pictures, Luma Pictures, Cantina Creative, Trixter, Modus FX, Whiskytree, Digital Domain, New Deal Studios, The Third Floor (previs and postvis), with titles by Method Design. Cast and crew on set. The film was an enormous effort in bringing together existing elements of the Marvel universe seen in various incarnations of recent superhero films. “In terms of the characters,” says Sirrs, “most of the R&D work had already been done for us, and we could see what we liked or disliked, based upon the previous Marvel pictures.

Previs’ing The Avengers In this Third Floor previs image, Thor and Captain America battle it out. Leading the charge – ILM (podcast)