Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1593
N o question, it's been a great year for visual eff ects in fi lms. Cutting-edge eff ects provided a number of superheroes with extraordinary powers. It brought unusual creatures to life. It transported us back in time to prehistoric days. It took us on exciting adventures. It helped spawn hellish char- acters. It awakened a centuries-old emperor. It enabled realistic-looking animals to act alongside real actors. " e technology and the artistry has come such a long way," says VFX supervisor Mike Chambers. "What strikes me this year is how much good work is out there. Popular movies like e Dark Knight and Iron Man have big budgets and vision, and they're fantastic." ese crowd-pleasers also have been exemplars of a trend: digital eff ects that are highly collaborative with practical eff ects. "People go out of their way to describe these as invisible eff ects, and that strikes me as an elaborate way of describing how it should always be," says e Orphanage's Stu Maschwitz. "Visual eff ects are becoming so important to all movies. e less you think of it as postproduction and the more you see it as a fi lmmaking technique, the better." Animation has had an interesting year as well, with the fi rst Walt Disney Animation collaboration with Pixar, and two stellar entries from DreamWorks Animation and Pixar. We witnessed a panda realize his dream. Zoo animals survive in the wild. A robot act human. A dog whose life imitates fi ction. From fantasy to crime story, from science fi ction to the prehistoric, many of this year's visual eff ects and animated fi lms were a perfect marriage of storytelling and technology, vision, and artistry. December 2008 32 ■ ■ ■ ■ VFX/Animation Angling for the Oscar