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(Source: scifisquad.com) As impressive as the visuals in Avatar are, I don’t think they stand on the same plain as The White Ribbon or Inglourious Basterds, two of the fellow Best Cinematography nominees. Or, if you want to keep the argument entirely within the sci-fi bubble, I don’t think Avatar’s visuals are comparable with fellow 2009 sci-fi releases Moon and District 9.

I don’t want to make light of Avatar’s accomplishments. It’s a visually stunning movie and there are things in it that I have never seen in movies before. It’s an accomplishment.

(Source: cgw.com) There will be much excitement and great content as SIGGRAPH returns to Los Angeles.

Dynamic changes in 2010 include the new SIGGRAPH Dailies! program celebrating excellence in computer graphics by showcasing behind the scenes work and the artists stories that enhance their extraordinary power and beauty. Contributors submitted short (5-15 second) animations of recent work [from the past 18 months] whether professional, personal, academic, or student work.

(Source: Variety.com) Much of the impact of “The Cove,” which collected the documentary feature Oscar on Sunday night, comes from underwater footage that could not have been captured without help from Lucasfilm spinoff Kerner Optical.

Kerner runs a hush-hush “skunk works” that solves high-tech problems for private industry, government contractors and the occasional three-letter agency. Since Kerner’s expertise is in models, miniatures and camera engineering, many of those problems involve exotic cameras.

For “The Cove,” which exposes the slaughter of toxin-laden dolphins for meat in Japan, director Louie Psihoyos needed HD cameras that could sit on the sea bottom undetected and record the events at the surface. Kerner production manager Kevin Wallace became “rock camera supervisor” for the movie.

VFX Gag Order Removed – Digital Effects Studio Goes Public

(Source: Variety.com) Lowry Digital can now boast having worked on the past two vfx Oscar winners.

Lowry, which helped remove any digital artifacts from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” was also quietly engaged to work on “Avatar.” It was sworn to secrecy during most of awards season but was able to go public Tuesday with glowing quotes from producer Jon Landau. Lowry developed its software for film restoration and has adapted it to remove noise from footage captured with digital cameras.

The Visual Effects Society announced the winners of the 8th Annual VES Awards tonight at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The annual event recognizes outstanding visual effects in more than twenty categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games.

Filmmakers, producers and guests joined more than a thousand attendees from the visual effects industry for the sold-out gala which honored James Cameron with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Dr. Ed Catmull with the Georges Méliès Award for Pioneering.

(Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com) “More science, less fiction” is the message from the scientific community to Hollywood, even as the sci-fi film Avatar continues to rake in cash at the box office. Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz took to the stage at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to encourage more science in movies, but also to beg filmmakers not to bungle up their facts. For example, a movie should only be permitted to break one law of physics, he suggested.

(Source: NYTimes.com) Computer science researchers at the University of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.

The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos.

(Source: thewrap.com) The Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony, which took place Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, demonstrated a couple of things conclusively.

First, it showed that filmmaking is a very complicated business, particularly to those of us who can’t tell high fidelity reflectance data from sub-pixel offsets of the CMOS array sensor.

Second, it showed that the people who do understand that stuff need to have a pretty good sense of humor.

(Source: marinij.com) In the nearly four years since George Lucas took his filmmaking colossus to the Presidio in San Francisco, the model makers and special-effects gurus who stayed behind as Kerner Group haven’t exactly wallowed in his wake.

In that time, the San Rafael company, which was spun off from Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic in a 2006 management-led buyout, has churned out effects work for some of the biggest blockbusters on the planet, including franchises like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Transformers,” “Harry Potter,” “Indiana Jones,” “Terminator”- even the recent mega-hit “Avatar.”

(Source: trektoday.com) While no match for the Avatar juggernaut, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek still received six nominations for the Saturn Awards today.

According to the full list of nominations posted on the SF Site, Star Trek was nominated as Best Science Fiction Film, while both director J.J. Abrams and writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci were nominated in their respective categories. The full list of nominations for Trek, as well as the films it will be competing against, can be found below:

Best Science Fiction Film

Best Director

Best Writing

Best Make-Up