VizWorld.com

Gravity FX has just opened  a new West Coast office in Santa Monica, lead by Karin Levinson, to work on some of their new contracts like ‘Arthur’ and ‘Crazy, Stupid Love’.  In particular, I find this comment about the recent VFX house failures a bit blunt.

Levinson told Daily Variety that Gravity will expand gradually, depending on its L.A. workflow, and said Gravity wants to avoid the fate of Asylum and CafeFX, California-based mid-sized vfx studios that folded recently.

“Our expansion plans are to evolve methodically and strategically so we remain fiscally responsible while growing our company,” she said.

I’m not sure rapid expansion was what killed those houses, rather I always thought it was incredibly slim margins and bad contracts.

via Effects house opens L.A. outpost – Entertainment News, Technology News, Media – Variety.

Update: I got a response from Gravity’s PR department mentioning a few “inaccuracies” in my coverage.

1. “Arthur” was awarded through Gravity’s NY office, not its Santa Monica office.
2. Karin Levinson wasn’t discussing failures re: Aslyum or CafeFX, but rather commenting on the economic climate and Gravity’s HAVING to be fiscally responsible in this decision to expand into the West Coast.  Gravity had an extremely high opinion of both CafeFX and Aslyum’s work, and it was sobering to see that those two houses could shutter their doors (given the caliber of what they produced) due to the economic climate –they had to make the tough decision.
3. Gravity’s expansion into LA has not been RAPID by any means. Karin did not imply, on any level, that Aslyum and/or CafeFX closed their operations due to any expansionary plans.

My only response is that if he didn’t imply it, then Variety sure wanted it to look like he did. Just look at what they wrote:

Levinson told Daily Variety that Gravity will expand gradually … wants to avoid the fate of Asylum and CafeFX, California-based mid-sized vfx studios that folded recently.

I wouldn’t put it past a clever reporter to start implying things that weren’t said, but I have to imagine that it was rolling around Levinson’s head, even if he didn’t say it out loud.

Graphics gravity

Recently I’ve been watching lots of Nickelodeon with my daughter (it’s the holidays, right?) and seeing frequent commercials for an upcoming CG movie called ‘Rango’, starring Johnny Depp.  The commercials show an unusual blend of live action and CG, not the usual actor in a voice-recording booth but not quite full motion capture of Avatar either.  Over at the LATimes, they have an article about how this new breed of CG films is emerging that still using full CG animation with a heavy live-action influence under the expertise of traditional filmmakers.

The team spent hours watching spaghetti westerns such as “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” to absorb director Sergio Leone’s style, including how he filmed campfire and desert scenes. Verbinski revisited the town in Mexico, Real de Catorce, where he filmed “The Mexican” for ideas on how the fictional town of Dirt should look.

Knoll and his team then created a three-dimensional computer model of Dirt  and used a motion-capture stage at ILM that was equipped with a monitor called a virtual camera that allowed Verbinski to view the town from different angles and then frame the best shots and angles to guide the animators. “We were using a lot of the same visual shorthand that we developed during the ‘Pirates’ pictures,” Knoll said.

My big question is still “Why is it CG?”  If all of the scenes were physically acted by Depp et. al, then why do it in CG instead of making a Live Action movie?  I guess we’ll have to wait until March to find out.

via Lines blurring between animated, live action films – latimes.com.

Graphics movie, vfx

And here we are, ready for another great year! Hope everyone had a great Christmas an New Year Eve, and may 2011 be the best year EVER! And, of course, this time of the year was filled with infographic recaps, about pretty much everything. So, you’ll see a lot of those in this first week of the Daily Viz from Visual Loop.Today, we bring the year’s retrospective from GOOD, the year of Social Media, by MindJumpers, Forkparty‘s look back on how 2010 changed our lives, and to close, two interactive goodies: The Guardian‘s day-by-day review, and Online School‘s awesome chart.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations