The work done by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop doesn’t only just show up on Sesame Street and in the latest batch of Muppet movies. Any time you see a convincing looking creature in a commercial that wasn’t brought to life through CG, odds are the Creature Shop had a hand in its creation.
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In 2013, Rhythm ‘N Hues Studios won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi just 11 days after declaring bankruptcy. This is the story of where they—and nearly two dozen other studios that have closed in the last decade—went wrong.
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Gravity was a stunning piece of cinema
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There’s a lot of CGI deployed in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and you’d be forgiven for assuming that most of the dino-action was cooked up by a computer. Not so the tiny little compsognathus, a carnivorous chicken-like beast that was cooked up with plastic molds and fishing line.
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Probably the most insane fight sequence of Pacific Rim was when a Jaeger fought a Kaiju in the streets of Hong Kong. The entire city was destroyed, glass shards flew everywhere, neon lights were exploding, streets were being crushed, shipping containers somehow were involved and the whole battle was just beyond epic. Here’s how ILM made it happen. It involves a lot of computers, yes, but also a miniature scale set filled with 3D printed goodies.
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Thor? CGI all over the place
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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan hit theaters way back in 1982, and the film’s tense space battles were realized by Industrial Light and Magic using models and old-school film effect techniques. So it was only fitting that ILM was called upon again to bring J.J. Abrams’ take on the clash between James T. Kirk and Khan Noonien Singh to life—but this time using modern computer graphics and digital compositing techniques.
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Just because a blockbuster tanked at the box office, doesn’t mean the talented folks who worked on the film didn’t pour their hearts and souls into every frame. Especially those responsible for a film’s visual effects, whose work often goes unnoticed when they’ve done their job right.
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The on-screen adaptation of Ender’s Game is already filled with enough gorgeous cinematography to get space nuts drooling, but no scene hits that space envy button quite as hard Ender’s Zero-G stint in the battle school war room. Design FX for Wired talked to the film’s graphic team to see what it took to make those near-operatic sequences match up to the physical constraints of space.
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