No, there is another: Other vfx companies and general discussion thread

Dang I never listed my 7, although I would've picked Shutter Island over Scott Pilgrim. I guess my final 5 would also be: Tron, Inception, Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and HP7.

 

In regards to smaller shops closing down....THIS was in the LA Times.

 

There might be two different things here: the economic downturn pushing vfx contracts elsewhere and globalization, which would have happened anyway but the recession has accelerated. I think these overseas ops are here to stay and would exist regardless. But in downtimes, the focus is placed on those shops as "stealing stateside business".

The real question is: why is the film industry leaving California for just about anywhere else, including other states?

 

Today I watched some extras of Star Wars Episode III and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And i was wondering about some things:

1. WETA models supervisor Matt Aitken said about Treebeard: "We did a full facial animation rig using the same sort of approach as Gollum. I think Treebeards head is the most complex thing we rendered on film two. Gollum would take I don't know typically 8 minutes a frame, Treebeard could easily take 48 hours to render a single frame."

I can't believe that a Gollum frame took typically 8 MINUTES (!!!). Or did he make an mistake, and he menat 8 hours instead of 8 minutes? Does anyone know something about this?

2. Jim Rygiel said that a typicall big blockbuster had about 200 VFX shots then, whereas Fellowship had 540 shots, Two Towers 799 and Return of the King 1488.
On the Phantom Menace Making of, they say that a typicall big movie has 400-500 VFX shots.
So I know these statements are mainly for public realtions reasons. But which figure is closer to reality? I don't think someone knows the average vfx shot number per year, the same like average production costs?

3. Is Revenge of the Sith still the film with the most vfx shots to date? Rob Coleman mentions 2164 vfx shots, 1269 of which are animated. So how many vfx shots does Avatar have
Considering that Avatar is 22 to 38 minutes (depending on the cut) longer than ROTS, is ROTS still the king concerning the vfx shots (if you extrapolate to the same length)?

Sorry for these questions if they have alread been answered, but I could not find anything to this.

Thanks in Advance

Kaero

 

1. Yeah I think it's a mistake, I'm pretty sure I remember mentions of hour long renders for Gollum on the second film. He pronanly had a brain fart.

2. Jim Rygiel would be underestimating, unless he's talking of the overall average (say including summer comedies that do tend to have some VFX work) or talking about the New Zealand film industry. In 2001 500 shots for blockbusters would be typical and even 1000 VFX shots wouldn't be unheard of, though rare. Just from ILM side that year you had AI and Pearl Harbor to begin with, also there was the first Harry Potter film. Also there was Cats and Dogs, Evolution, Driven, Jurassic Park 3, Monkeybone, Lara Croft, The Mummy 2, Spy Kids and Waking Life if you consider that VFX). I guess it depends what "typical" is in his context. maybe cross reference with old Cinefexes?

3. Avatar probably is LOTR 3 is the other candidate. Don't have the Cinefex handy but there were something like 1700 shots with animated characters in Avatar. Add something like 200 more from ILM and you get close, plus the other vendors comps (Framestore's landing pad sequence, comps of windows, monitors, etc done by others) and you probably have a couple hundred other shots.

 

LOTR 3 has according to Jim Rygiel 1488 vfx shots.
So my question is: If Episode III would be 20 minutes longer and would have the same running time than Avatar, would it not have more vfx shots than Avatar?

 

yeah sorry, brain fart late at night.

I rechked with Cinefex, it mentions that for Avatar all vendors delivered a total 2500 VFX shots. Though it doesn't mention if that includes shots cut from the final film (like BUFs future Earth sequence which can be seen on the BD). Still even excluding those I think it's pretty safe to assume Avatar has the highest FX count yet.

 

In this video: http://www.fuenf-filmfreunde.de/2011/03/18/a-short-story-about-cg-characters/#comments

they mention that King Kong has 2500 VFX shots.

Can#t really belive that. Although I have to admit that I've seen King Kong only once, and that was 2005. So maybe I remember it not correctly.