Category Archives: Blog

DNEG Lets You Ask The Questions

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Our good friends at major league VFX studio Double Negative (London/Singapore) are doing some fun social media things these days, not the least of which is opening things up for questions with a featured DNEG artist every week or so.

And I say “our good friends” because of the recent shift of DNEG’s HQ to Great Portland St. in London.  Clearly they think we’re great.  And who can blame them?

This week’s interviewee is Compositor Christopher Jaques.

If you have questions about life, the universe, everything?   Don’t ask Christopher.  VFX?  Career advice?  Compositing?  How many ounces are in an English pint?  Fair game.

Head over to Facebook and fire away.

Edit:  questions are now closed but you can read the answers here.

Look for future interviewees on DNEG’s Facebook page here.

Spark Conference & Job Fair in BC This Weekend

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The 2013 Spark FX conference, film festival and job fair takes place in Vancouver, BC this weekend.  A hop, skip and a jump across the border gets you access to a killer headliner lineup including Joe Letteri and all of the lead VFX Supervisors on the Hobbit w/Weta Digital, Scott Ross (formerly of Digital Domain), journeymen Bill Taylor, Hoyt Yeatman Jr. and others.

These are heavy hitters and certainly worth the drive.  Plus, if you’re lookin’, there’s a job fair as well.  Looks like over the course of Friday and Saturday it will catch all of the major players in the Vancouver market – Image Engine, Digital Domain, MPC, Pixar Canada, etc.  I’ve not been super impressed with Vancouver job fairs in the past, they usually seem to just be going through the motions (what’s that aboot, eh?) – but with so many new studios opening this past year there might be a genuine demand this time around.

More information at sparkfx.ca

Grimm Future Looks Bright

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Fxguide has a nice rundown of some of our local VFX work for Grimm, featuring Hive-FX and Bent Image Lab.  Much of the Bent breakdowns you see in the article were the basis of Fred Ruff’s VFX/PDX presentation last year, which also made the rounds both internationally and at Siggraph.  Check out the fxguide article here.

Definitely worth a look – this is the sort of bread & butter work that’s keeping the Portland VFX machine humming!  Be sure to check out the respective Grimm reels for both Bent and Hive-FX, and the Oregon film intern promo piece that featured both companies.


Grimm Behind the Scenes from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Looking towards the future, it will be interesting to see what the Portland studios are able to do with the creature pipelines refined through this constant flow of Grimm work.  There are already rumblings of some indy films and other projects in the works, no doubt in part being leveraged against the flashy Grimm CG.

Speaking of some leveraging – it was sad to hear the last episode of Leverage Season 5 is indeed the series finale and there will be no 6th season in the works.  But cheers to Dean Devlin and crew on that all-important 5th season and syndication!  Hopefully Devlin can roll the momentum into possibly finding Leverage a new network home for a 6th season in the future (before being fully immersed in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day 2 and other pilot projects).  There are certainly enough rabid fans out there chomping at the bit for more.  Petitions, even!

Either way, Leverage had a good run and is definitely a source of Portland pride!  Next time, in addition to our fantastic production crews – hopefully future Leverage work can employ some of our top tier VFX talent as well.  Best of luck to them as they rally behind the battle cry:  “Let’s go steal a season 6!

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