The Visual Effects Society cites How To Train Your Dragon.
... [T]he Visual Effects Society announced their awards for the films of 2010 and the big winner was Inception with four awards including the award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual-Effects Driven Feature Motion Picture. Coming in second in the awards tally was DreamWorks's "How to Train Your Dragon" with three including Outstanding Animation in an Animated Feature ...
The space between animated features and live-action features has grown narrower and narrower through the years. Fifty-five years ago, Walt Disney Productions' own Josh Meador created the animated (and analog) visual effects for M-G-M's Forbidden Planet. (Meador, the long-time head of visual effects for Disney animated features, was an oil painter par excellence, as well as a gifted animator.)
Today, visual effects for big budget features are handed off to Rhythm and Hues, Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks and studios on continents around the globe. Oil painters need not apply.
(2011 marks Josh Meador's 100th birthday. You can view samples of his work here.)
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2 comments:
I was lucky enough to see Josh Meador's "Id Monster" at Disney back in the fifties. It was incredibly simple, yet very effective. The monster consisted of pencil drawings, that's all.
Just rewatched Forbidden Planet this week in HD.
The genius of that Id Monster really lies in the fact that they wanted a monster like you could do today in CG. A giant killer creature that could pick up and throw people and share the screen believably. But they knew that effects of that era weren't up to the task.
It was a brilliant solution to hand-animate just the parts that were illuminated by the laser beams.
Still, it doesn't quite hold up today. Even as a child I intuitively read it as a "cartoon monster" like Gossamer.
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