November 13 Igor Klimovsky (Lead VFX Producer POSTMODERN) held a seminar on visual effects in movies within Skill Bill Start programme. There were lot of terms, but most of them we finally understood and memorized. And here are bullet points:
SFX (special effects) - can be divided into mechanical (rain, snow, fireworks) and visual (computer graphics). Perhaps the most precise definition of computer graphics is Digital Visual Effects.
specialists in computer graphics do a lot of things: digital retouching, three-dimensional locations, digital extras, etc., but most of all they like creating CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). This is also called Full CG. Warthunder is a good example
For 8 months 15 people worked on Inseparable. The work was nominated for VES Awards ("Oscar" in the world of visual effects), and lost to "Games of Thrones". The creators were not very upset.
In "Life of Pi" water and the tiger were created using computer graphics.
The pioneer of special effects in the movie is Georges Melies, who shot "The Haunted Castle" in 1896, and then his famous "Flight to the Moon.
"Oscar" for special effects is awarded since 1929, but the real breakthrough came, of course in the 60s.
An important event happened in 1975. George Lucas created Industrial Light & Magic company. The studio was organized specifically to work on the "Star Wars".
Since the mid 80s CG starts to progress very quickly - "Tron", "The Terminator", "Young Sherlock Holmes", "The Abyss", "The Mask", "Toy Story", "Titanic", "The Matrix" and others.
If you want to see how visual effects of the films you like were created you can find this information by googling "making of" or "VFX breakdown" and film title.
Visual effects creation involves people of many professions, including Concept Artist, Rigger, Animator, Render Artist and others. VFX Suprevisor and VFX Producer lead the process and work in tandem. Common name for visual effects artists is VFX artists.
Work on visual effects starts immediately after the approval of the script.
Work on visual effects is called pipeline. It's supported by software chosen at the discretion of the studio.
One of the most "advanced" movies are "Planet of the Apes" and "Gravity".
Ukraine already has the technologies to create visual effects as in Hollywood. The only problem is budgets.
What may lie ahead? Probably, digital actors, markerless mocap (motion capture), game engines with real-time render.
