Live-Action VFX

"Seamless" visual effects are the order of the 21st century. When I was a tot, invisible effects were mostly impossible. Audiences were often aware of matte-lines, focused on the fact that the man walking across Niagara Falls on a high wire in "The Big Circus" looked like he was anywhere but over actual water.

But that was in 1959. In 2015, the death defiance in The Walk looks realer than real. ...

It’s been a transformative year for the art of visual effects, demonstrated not only by the increasingly ordinary and realistic depiction of advanced technology or destructive superpowers, but also the elaborate recreation of mundane details like office curtains, or space station floor tiles. Two-time Oscar nominee Richard Stammers was tasked with both the mundane and fantastic as visual effects supervisor on Fox’s The Martian. Kevin Baillie faced entirely different difficulties for Sony’s The Walk, using an enormous number of effects to recreate normal life in the 1970s. ...

The reality of visual effects today: They're done worldwide. The top artists/techinicans work in Montreal, then n London, then in New Zealand.

And now that Free Money has become available for visual effects in California, more work has drifted back to Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Truly amazing what government subsidies will do to nudge free enterprise along.