VizWorld.com

MPC made the VFX of 5 important creatures in the new “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” movie, and VFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron discusses the technology and difficulties of the work.

Hades was very challenging as fire was a major component of the character and had to be both extremely detailled and very controllable according to his performance. Our FX team pushed the fire simulations to a much higher resolution than we’ve done previously to ensure details were contributing to the motion and not only added as a post-process. The simulations were computed at a voxel size of under 1mm and then plugged into MPC’s rendering system to generate accurate illumination onto the character. The team used the same methodology to create the Lost Souls, producing super natural fire, shaped and timed specifically for every shot.

In addition to the fire simulations of Hades, they discuss the hair simulation used for the Minotaur and the Hellhounds.

via Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning Thief.

Graphics movie, mpc, percyjackson, vfx

French media technology company “Thomson” has just filed for “Safeguard”, which is the French equivalent of Chapter 11, to provide time to vote on and implement a debt restructing plan.

Chief executive Frederic Rose said: “After 10 months of constructive discussions with a majority of our creditors, I am satisfied that we have now a clear timetable for closing our debt restructuring. [Safeguard] allows us to provide clarity and certainty to our employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders.”

Apparently they have been in discussions throughout most of 2009 with their creditors, and have a plan that will be voted on on December 21st.  Why might you care?  Thomson owns Technicolor, the parent company of MPC.

via Thomson gains protection from creditors | News | Broadcast.

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MPC’s Evian Spot “Skating Babies” just received the honor of being inducted into the Guinness Book of Records for  Most Viewed Online Advertisement.

Adding up views for various versions of the ad across video sharing websites, the Guinness Book of Records has bestowed the honour on the ad for having 45,166,109 views as of 9 November 2009.

It’s a great commercial if you haven’t seen it, and deserving of the honor.

via Evian roller babies makes Guinness Book of Records with 45 million online views – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic.

Graphics commercial, evian, mpc, vfx

The popular “Skating Babies” commercial for Evian was done by MPC, and their latest podcast shows how they did the commercial and interviews some of the Visual Effects wizards behind the magic.

Promo – MPC Podcast.

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MPC has updated their website with some behind-the-scenes VFX breakdowns of what you can see in the upcoming film Dorian Gray.

Promo – VFX Breakdowns.

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In Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox slowly transforms from a beautiful high-school girl into an evil man-slaying succubus demon.  The transformation takes progress over the entire movie and involved a lot of fancy camera work and visual effects magic from MPC. (…)

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G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra was one of the summer’s biggest VFX hits and fxguide has a great collection of interviews with some of the VFX studios involved.  Some tidbits:
Digital Domain:
Practical accelerator suits, constructed by Stan Winston Studio, were made available on set for reference and scanning. (…)

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A new press release has quotes and information from the six VFX studios that made the magic behind G.I.Joe.  The studios include Digital Domain, CIS, MPC, Prime Focus (formerly Frantic Films), CafeFX, and Framestore.  Not only is each studios contribution impressive, but the whole project is a testament to Autodesk’s new focus on interoperability between tools:
“Enabling creative collaboration is central to our software development strategy,” said Stig Gruman vice president of digital entertainment, Autodesk Media & Entertainment. (…)

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MPC provided the VFX work for a pair of commercials for Wrigley’s 5 Gum, and has posted some behind-the-scenes information on their website. (…)

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MPC helped Evian make their latest commercial where a group of choreographed roller-skating babies dance to The Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. (…)

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A new video from MPC shows creation of a cluster dedicated to processing a data stream of 56 RED cameras.

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MPC Vancouver will be presenting their work in a Q&A Session at SIGGRAPH2009 in New Orleans.

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MPC has updated their website with movies showing breakdown of their various VFX shots for the recent “Angels and Demons” movie.

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Dan Brown & Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons” opened this weekend, (Not a bad movie, if you haven’t seen it yet) and one of the focuses of the movie is the creation of “Antimatter” from the CERN Large Hadron Collider.  At the beginning of the movie there’s an impressive sequence where the LHC is activated, and it turns out most of that scene was created by folks at MPC. (…)

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MPC has updated their website with a movie showing the breakdown of several VFX scenes from the movie Watchmen.
Film – Watchmen.

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MPC has updated their website with information on their new Toyota commercial that uses some extensive cloth and fabric simulations produced by Ciaran Bennet and CHI and Annabel Ridley at RSA. (…)

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