Step by Step: Penelope 

By Ellen Wolff

It's been nearly a decade since the Academy Award for visual effects was bestowed upon What Dreams May Come, which featured a memorable CG tree that appeared...

HD Banditos 

By Craig Erpelding

Three years ago, after the completion of the film Dust to Glory, a few of the participating content producers for the project found themselves so like-minded about technology, production, postproduction, and distribution, that they decided—on the idea of director Mike "Mouse" McCoy—to start not so much a production company, but an identity....

Aerial HD 

By Michael Goldman

Earlier this year, filmmaker Brian J. Terwilliger earned attention for his independent HD feature called “One Six Right: The Romance of Flying”—a tribute to the Van Nuys, Calif., municipal airport and the art of small plane aviation. ...

Field Testing the Panasonic AG-HPX500 

By Craig Erpelding

As previously reported and discussed by Panasonic at its NAB presentation this year, the company has been aggressively promoting the use of its P2 solid state memory cards and camcorders...

Sony Pictures Imageworks Selects Mental Images’ Mental Ray 

Mental Images announced a multi-year software license and custom support agreement that will provide Sony Pictures Imageworks with Mental Ray rendering software...

True Colors  

By Michael Goldman

The principal architects for three prominent summer CG animated movies— Ratatouille, Shrek the Third, and Surf's Up—talk with millimeter about the process of designing, building, and executing complicated color palettes for such movies...

Step By Step: The NFL on Fox  

By Ellen Wolff

This promises to be the year of “transformers,” and Fox Sports Graphics and Blur Studios have already made menacing robots work for them. . Fox chose Blur Studio in Venice, Calif. to animate the 3D-CG show opener for its National Football...

Digital Acrobatics 

By Michael Goldman

At Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City, Calif., as work on Spider-Man 3 winds down, many of the key players behind the film’s visual effects extravaganza (just less than 1,000 shots) are finally starting to contemplate life without the spider...

Commercial Calls for Multi-media Recording and Custom Camera System  

When Co-directors, Steve Osborn and Zach Passero of El Paso, Texas-based Tortilla Productions were first approached to produce a commercial campaign for their clients Helen of Troy and TIGI, they knew that one format wasn’t going to be enough to capture the individualism and cutting-edge style that their clients are known for nationwide. ...

NAB 2007 

By D. W. Leitner and Dan Ochiva

In my millimeter coverage of last year's NAB 2006, Cameras and Other Driving Forces, I divided the massive show into four vectors of interest: cameras,...