ILM leads the Visual Effects Society awards with six noms for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Transformers, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, SGA, and 300 also got nods.
ILM making inroads to Oscar nomination
Three ILM films are finalists for the VFX Oscar nomination: Evan Almighty, Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Five of their films made the preliminary list.
The Academy also gave out their science and technical awards Friday, with Nick Rasmussen, Ron Fedkiw and Frank Losasso Petterson honored with a plaque for their development work on ILM’s fluid simulation system.
Happy Holidays from LFL
The official site gets in on the card love with their own roundup of the past 30 years of holiday cards – including (naturally) many that Slashfilm didn’t have!
In fact, there were so many great cards I had trouble picking just one for this entry… But due to my weakness for pastiche, I had to go with this 2005 JAK Films number by Erik Tiemens and Ryan Church.
ILM makes VFX semi-finals
No surprise here: Five ILM films are on the preliminary list for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. The list of 15 will be narrowed down to 8 finalists, and from there to the 3 Oscar nominees.
LFL threefer: Post-pro and Padawans
Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound servicing more than just the big budgets – both post-production firms are becoming more available to ‘smaller’ films.
Cnet’s Daniel Terdiman gets to visit the Ranch for a behind-the-scenes look at Skywalker Sound. (Copy editing quirk: Han Solo has a lightsaber?)
Last but by no means least: Lucasfilm Animation Singapore is starting up the Jedi Master Program – a paid apprenticeship for computer graphics artists. Sounds like an amazing opportunity – the competition to get in is sure to be fierce!
LFL folks celebrate Halloween
Video: Meet the TFUers
A new video is up over at the LucasArts site, ‘A Force Wrecking Ball’, that discusses the game’s characters. There’s also an interesting look at how LucasArts and ILM are digitally capturing the actors, which has a corresponding story on StarWars.com.
Also, will the TFU acronym ever stop being funny? Please tell me it will.
Star Wars roundup: Yippie ki-yay
George Lucas attends Salesforce.com user conference and gives keynote, talking about education and technology. The company has registered force.com. Forget Lucas – what does Philip Wise think?
- The BBC returns to ILM.
- Poll: BloggingStocks pits George Lucas against Steven Spielberg.
- You’ve just been dying to know Natalie Portman’s prequel makeup secrets, right? (via)
Fandom
- Vic and Lisa’s Star Wars home theatre gets some love from Gizmodo. Famous on the internets!
- The 501st has put troopers on all seven continents this year. Next up: The moon!
Expanded Universe
- Wired’s Geekdad blog gets an early look at A Pop Up Guide to the Galaxy. (via)
- Timothy Zahn will be at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books next month.
Catching up with Labor Day weekend
George Lucas is becoming ‘increasingly involved’ with the Clone Wars animated series. Good? Bad? Gungan? Only time will tell! In other CW news, Disney really wants the broadcast rights.
Infodrop
- American Heritage covers ILM before computers. (via)
- Dan Wallace spotlights Michael Allen Horne, who authored two pivotal RPG guidebooks for West End Games.
- The Legacy Revealed reruns Thursday.
- The new Insider is shipping. It also appears on the latest Diamond shipping list (for comic stores) so probably available in standard book shops as well.
Listings
- The Empire Strikes Back makes Premiere’s list of twenty biggest plot twists.
- USA Today’s Whitney Matheson picks Vader’s lightsaber as the most awesome movie prop.
Weird & Wacky
- Steamtroopers! Steampunk stormtroopers, Fett and an Alien pal spotted in Dubai mall. (via)
- The Darth Vader lamp. Well, that’s… ironic. (via)
Movie News: Iron Man, Trek, Mummy, HP
ILM will be doing the visual effects for the upcoming Iron Man movie, with Skywalker Sound in on sound design and mixing. Ben Snow, who was VFX supervisor on AOTC, will head ILM’s team.
Also in film…