About daemons, metalloids and small golden statuettes
Aah.. the big hoopla over giving the oscar to one when u rightly expected the other to win it. That’s what happened behind the closed doors of the author’s club a few weeks back as the oscars were announced. Apart from ranklings on the best picture and best actor categories, the big argument was over why they gave the oscar to Golden Compass when Transformer’s metalloids had strutted their stuff so slickly on screen last year.
The 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony was good to a cute, little rat, a big, bad wolf and some powerful polar bears as Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille, Suzie Templeton’s Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and New Line Cinema’s The Golden Compass walked off with gold statuettes.
Frankly speaking, this shouldn’t have been a 2 pronged argument when the Pirates were also there in the list.
(oh well, we gave it to them last year would have been the academy’s argument)
- Image Courtesy CG Society
But, WB was on the transformer side of things and i was frankly bemused. One thing the academy rarely does is mess up the technical categories and i hadn’t seen the Golden Compass yet. So there, curious DPac took the bait and headed to his notorious bookmark list of download sites. And saw it i did, the Compass packs more into its boring 3 hours, almost every trick in the book and does it well. In vfx talk any fx if its subtle and taken for granted as live action is pretty goddamn good.
Check these out
Up against the blockbusters Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, The Golden Compass was a bit of an underdog going into the competition for Best Visual Effects. Still, the team of Michael Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris, Trevor Wood managed to pull out a win. After its stellar performance at the VES Awards, Transformers was the odds-on favorite, especially considering the Pirates saga has earned its share of vfx Oscars. The Compass team was quite enthusiastic as they took the stage. Fink hooted “Thank you!” before quoting Walt Disney in saying “It’s quite fun to do the impossible.”
Transformers had their party too at the VES awards
Transformers from DreamWorks and Paramount snagged a total of four awards, including Best Single Visual Effect of the Year (desert Highway sequence) and the top honor of the evening, Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Motion Picture. Looking on proudly was the film’s exec producer, Steven Spielberg, who received the Lifetime Acheivement award at the ceremony, held Sunday night at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
but take nothing away from transformers, this is the best metal and light show i have ever seen. Some even go to say that ” ILM took the next step after Jurassic Park with Transformers”
well that’s not the point here, to get the works done in Compass and get it done so effectively is in itself a great tech achievement. in the vfx artist checklist , natural material and creatures are far more difficult to make believable than metal. However good it may be.And that’s probably where Transformer burned itself. it was already running with a handicap.
But in the midst of all this, the fluid affects of Pirates (another boring film – I slept thru it ) took a beating as well. Why? cuz we saw a teaser of such stuff last year in dead man’s chest.
Daemon characters created by the studio include a chameleon, owl, raccoon, rat, raven, spaniel, panther, praying mantis, and several dogs. All were created using Cinesite’s in-house character animation pipeline. Specially written fur, feather and muscle systems were also called on. The spectacular battle sequence at the Bolvanger detention center was created using digital matte paintings and environments.
so there u go wb..
nothing against transformers…
but when u already have a metal handicap and Micheal Bay scything through ur debris and details like a mad man…
u hardly have a chance against daemons and polar bears done well.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
And Rhythm and Hues, India also worked on The Golden Compass. So quite a huge thing for them I guess. Haha, Michael Bay gets snubbed :d But he can create his own Oscar’s ceremony now:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/cgi_team_creates_realistic_oscar