What is VFX?

While there were plenty of old-school SFX techniques on display, there was one process that made this one of the very best moments in VFX history: the introduction of Gollum and the process of Motion Capture or Performance Capture.

The world of entertainment is on the cusp of something pretty amazing. The idea of immersive cinema has been around for many decades. In fact, VFX legend Douglas Trumbull has been working on ways to make this a reality for many years. But the next game-changing technological leap might very well be virtual reality.

After his fateful collaboration with Marcel Delgado, Ray Harryahusen would go on to develop many stop-motion animation sequences for film. But none of them had the impact that a certain 1963 film had. Just five years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, Harryhausen created magical animation sequences for the fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts. Regarded by Harryhausen as his greatest work, Jason and the Argonauts stunned audiences across the country with one of the most famous VFX scenes of all time as Jason and his Argonauts battled a host of skeleton warriors.

In 1975, George Lucas began developing his latest film, The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. In order to fulfill the visual effects needs for production, Lucas reached out to VFX artist Douglas Trumbull. However, Trumbull declined the opportunity, as he had already committed himself to creating the VFX for a Steven Spielberg film called Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To help Lucas out, Trumbull suggested his assistant, John Dykstra. From this moment on, Lucas and Dykstra would form a visual effects company known as Industrial Light & Magic. Their first project? Star Wars.

In 1985, a young artist named John Lasseter (who worked with Industrial Light & Magic’s Graphics Group, later to be known as Pixar) developed the first fully functional computer-animated character for the big screen. This character was the “Stained Glass Man” from Young Sherlock Holmes. At the time of its creation, it truly was a remarkable feat. No one had seen a fully rendered character like that before. From this moment on, the world of VFX changed forever — but it didn’t just happen over night.

In order to prove that his team could pull off such a feat, Dennis Muren and his team at ILM collaborated with Stan Winston’s creature shop to bring 1993’s Jurassic Park to life on the big screen. This is where things really turned for the world of CG and visual effects. Now the industry had concrete evidence that the VFX industry could indeed create computer-animated imagery that looked real.

Six years after Jurassic Park, the game changed once again as Neo twisted and leaned and ducked to avoid Agent Smith’s bullets on an urban rooftop. It wasn’t the choreography and gunplay that shocked people… It was the way the sequence was filmed, in 180 degrees of motion.

Just a short few years after The Matrix, director Peter Jackson and VFX supervisor Richard Taylor collaborated to bring the world of Middle Earth to the big screen when they developed The Lord of the Rings trilogy. While there were plenty of old-school SFX techniques on display, there was one process that made this one of the very best moments in VFX history: the introduction of Gollum and the process of Motion Capture or Performance Capture.

Director James Cameron has always been one to really push the limits of his film production. So it was no surprise when he released Avatar. While there were plenty of flesh-and-blood characters in the film, the majority of what is seen was accomplished through Performance Capture.

The world of entertainment is on the cusp of something pretty amazing. The idea of immersive cinema has been around for many decades. In fact, VFX legend Douglas Trumbull has been working on ways to make this a reality for many years. But the next game-changing technological leap might very well be virtual reality.

What are the different types of VFX?

Today you can’t imagine a single Hollywood or Bollywood movie, without the use of visual effects. The whole vfx categorized into 5 different categories.

1.Simulation FX
2.Animation
3.Modelling
4.Matte painting
5.Compositing

What does VFX artist do?

A VFX professional is responsible for creating special effects, and cleanup of advertisements and movies.
The typical workday of VFX artist is 10 hours, the deadlines based work of visual effects needs high level of creativity. The only benefit of having a career in VFX is that if they work on a payroll they can get health care and insurance facilities.

VFX are the effects are done in post-production stage, like changing the simple background into a ship and ocean. By using VFX we can create the live scene that is not practically possible in films and video.

According to “Wikipedia” SFX is a abbreviation of special effects that used in movies/films, television, video games and simulator to create illusions/visual tricks that generated using computer. Trick and illusion means that seeing something to a human eye that isn’t really exist. Mainly it creates 3D view to create illusion.

It is the never-ending industry, in India VFX has very optimistic future because the Bollywood(film industry), game companies & cartoon making companies are always looking for young talented VFX experts.

India has it own huge film industry, not one there are many. Bollywood, Tamil(tollywood) and other regional film industries like punjabi, Bhojpuri etc. In future, there will be more demand for animators & VFX artists. VFX has a very lucrative career ahead.

CGI

CGI, in other hands, is computers generate imagery or a computer graphics which is used in creating an image, video games, television programs, characters.

Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage and generated imagery to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly, or simply impossible to capture on film.

Visual effects using computer generated imagery  has recently become accessible to the Independent filmmaker with the introduction of affordable animation and compositing software.