Much has now been written about Ray Harryhausen, the singular puppet animation technician, who died this week at the age of 92. Over the years, there have been a mountain of articles, interviews, books, documentaries and museum exhibits which have illuminated his lauded career achievements, spanning over 40 professional years and igniting the imaginations... »

From the earliest silent shorts, using primitive paints, putties and other primal physical materials, makeup has been essential to the appearance of actors on film. As the decades progressed, so did makeup techniques, as better quality materials became available to artists, eventually including prosthetics, which when applied, would more definitively change an actor’s screen... »

With an Oscar for best cinematography on Life of Pi, Claudio Miranda’s career elevated to the heights of a select group of directors of photography highly in-demand on the biggest new film projects. Right on the heels of Life of Pi, Miranda faced another challenge with the futuristic sci-fi film Oblivion, which places Tom... »

The digital dinosaurs were a significant part of the appeal of Jurassic Park. That level of realism had never before been reached in cinema, and many of the shots to feature dinosaurs were actually full-scale practical robotic creations, conceived and produced at Stan Winston Studio. Two key artists at Stan Winston’s side from the... »

Following in the footsteps of Willis O’Brien on King Kong and Ray Harryhausen on numerous films thereafter, including Mighty Joe Young, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, Phil Tippett created the stop-motion character animation in films ranging from Star Wars to Dragonslayer to Robocop. But it was a 1993 film... »

By any account, the making of Sam Raimi’s Oz The Great and Powerful was a staggering endeavor. The new Disney film serves as a prequel to the beloved 1939 MGM classic The Wizard of Oz and delves into the origins of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s wizard character. James Franco plays circus magician Oscar... »

After the jaw-dropping critical successes of his feature films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep, observers of director Michel Gondry’s work expected no less than stellar works from the French filmmaker. After Be Kind Rewind and a studio diversion with The Green Hornet, Gondry is back with... »

Yesterday, in the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one of the Academy’s makeup branch governors Leonard Engelman, presented the three films nominated for best makeup artistry and hairstyling for tonight’s Oscar awards to a sold-out audience of fans, students and numerous cinema artists. »

At the 40th annual Annies, the awards given by animation craftspeople to their own kind, one reality was clearer than it has ever been before: animation is no longer, as one presenter stated, the little brother in the entertainment industry. Amusingly now, the first animated feature film in the U.S., 1937’s Snow White... »

Cinema makeup and hairstyling artistry is so evidently crucial to a film’s success, it remains a wonder that it received almost no attention whatsoever from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from its establishment in 1927 until films that were released in 1981, over half of a century onward. Indeed, in... »