Visual FX supervisor Thomas J. Smith has overseen digital effects on pictures where you know you’ll be watching a lot of digital sleight-of-hand, like The League of Extraordinary Gentleman and The Chronicles of Riddick, and also films you wouldn’t immediately expect to be FX heavy, like all three Ocean’s films with George Clooney. He... »

Long time readers of this column (and hey, if that’s you—thanks!), will recall I have written occasionally, (well, at least once), of my annual treks out to Austin where I wear my “book author” hat and pal around with other storytellers of genre fiction. I have a good friend there who, with his wife,... »

“It always starts with the script,” maintains production designer Jess Gonchor, and he’s had some good ones to start with, including the one for No Country For Old Men, which netted him an Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design. Its follow up, Burn After Reading, gained him a nomination in the... »

“It’s difficult to get funding for stop motion,” says director Henry Selick, of trying to finance his projects. That he was previously the director of modern holiday staple The Nightmare Before Christmas tells just how over-cautious—or non-available—production capital must really be. Selick was talking about raising money for Coraline, his adaptation of the Neil Gaiman... »

“The Writers Guilds of America, West and East mark the passing of Nick Counter, longtime president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and convey their deepest sympathy to his family,” came the mid-November statement. That was it, pretty much in its entirety, from the WGA. Brevity can be its own statement,... »

At the recent Production Summit thrown by the Visual Effects Society in Marina del Rey, collectively attempting to suss out the future of Hollywood filmmaking in a world both all-digital, and all-outsourced, director Roland Emmerich’s visual effects cohorts, Volker Engel and Marc Weigert—the former supervising VFX on most of his pictures, the latter in... »

Because of our own release schedule for this annual fall “voters’ guide” to the upcoming awards—just call us “Secretaries of the State of the Crew!”—we go to press just as this year’s two 800-pound gorillas of visual effects are hitting screens. The symbolically simian pair is succinctly referred to by VFX supervisor Wojciech Zielinski,... »

It’s a good year for production designer Mark Ricker to suss out award finalists in that category (and it’s kissin’ cousin, art direction), since he may find himself in the thick of the awards hunt—on the Academy and guild sides—for his own work channeling both ’60’s-era Paris and the present-day US in Julie &... »

The Walker is the most recent film from veteran director and screenwriter Paul Schrader — the third part of what’s referred to as his “lonely man” trilogy, which began with American Gigolo (1980) and continued with Light Sleeper (1992). The Walker is a dark satire about a man on the margins whose importance lies in... »

Grafting two pieces of venerable camera gear together with a surety that would make Dr. Moreau proud, the brand new Cineped made its recent debut at the Cine Gear Expo, just in time for a (hopefully) revived feature film shooting season. The 42-inch R2D2-sized piece of equipment combines the utility of both tripod and dolly;... »