Die gute alte MultiPlane Camera. Was wären wir nur ohne sie geworden?!

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The Variety article is behind their paywall, but The Playlist gets the gist of it, which is that Warner Bros. was forced to shell out an additional $9 million to pay for extra FX companies to help complete the effects for "Green Lantern," which comes out June 17. But the people Variety talked to at Warner Bros. insist it's not to fix any effects -- just to get them all done in time:

"There is no problem on 'Green Lantern,'" Chris de Faria, Warner's exec VP of digital production, animation and visual effects told the trade. "We try to add things to make the movie better until the 11th hour. That doesn't mean we're risking the movie up to the 11th hour."

This is something studios always want to emphasize when news gets out that a tentpole is rushing to make it to the finish line: "Everything is fine, nothing is wrong, we all know what we're doing, the shareholders have no reason to panic, would you like more cupcakes?" Besides, Warner Bros. are hardly the only ones rushing to hit a deadline: Variety says that one effects house working on Paramount's "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" "has gone to seven-day weeks, 12 hours a day, and canceled the Easter Sunday holiday for its [special-effects] artists."

The Variety article blames all this on the way studios now set up their big movies, valuing the release date over considerations for whether or not it's all that feasible. "So you are always chasing your tail," said Marvel exec VP of visual effects Victoria Alonso, who has "Captain America" to worry about. "You work backwards from that release date, then you add production not being ready to shoot or location complications and you shave the weeks you push from post."

We have friends who work in post-production, and we know that when they get assigned to a big movie that we won't see them for a few months before its release: Their lives are absolutely hellish as they kill themselves getting the movie done. Of late, no tentpole has missed its release, as long as you don't count the last-minute decision not to put out "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" in 3D as was initially planned. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that big-budget summer movies often aren't very good: The studios are probably just thrilled they got the damn thing out in time.

via blog.movies.yahoo.com

via a.f2.am

Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them.

Editor’s Note: The Big Think Series attempts to step back from our frame-to-frame existence and look at the bigger picture. This post is from Austin Shaw, a designer and director currently serving as a Professor of Motion Media Design at the Savannah College of Art & Design.

This is a question that many Motion Media Designers struggle to answer. Is it Motion Graphics? Is it Animation? Is it Branding? The Theory presented in the fractal diagram above seeks to answer some of these questions.

I havent seen them all, but I wanted to share it with you.
Pictured: My Name is Maria

-via Cartoon Brew

Nerdy stuff! A catchy song for all animators, compositors, rotoscopers etc. out there!