Identifying trends in visual effects is fraught with danger. Technology is constantly changing, as are the VFX location hotspots. Right now, a truly worldwide visual effects industry exists, propelled in part by an explosion in comic book and sci-fi films, animated features, virtual reality and TV visual effects. Here’s a look at 5 current trends that are shaping the future of VFX – from returning to practical roots to new technology and creative innovations.
1. The push for VFX as creative partner
Filmmaking is clearly a collaborative medium, yet historically visual effects and post-production has come in, unsurprisingly, mostly at the end of the line. However that’s certainly changing, not least of which because VFX changes can be quite substantial, meaning planning is crucial.
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Research by Animal Logic into fractals, among many other things, paved the way for the look of the Internet as shown in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Another reason VFX studios are finding themselves a larger part of the creative process is that they are now made up more and more of talented concept artists, designers and visual effects supervisors who are good at problem solving and have the tools to do it with. The director might only say, ‘Just make it look cool’, and suddenly a lot is left up to VFX.
Take Animal Logic’s work for Avengers: Age of Ultron, for example, where they had to design what the Internet looked like. The studio did that via weeks of R&D, both conceptual and technical. Or how about Iloura’s recent work for the Battle of Bastards episode in Game of Thrones, where they conceptualised the look of battling horses and soldiers in a very messy fight. The trend here isn’t so much a technical development but more a higher degree of trust and collaboration placed in the VFX team to get the job done.
2. Going practical, or making it look practical
Although pretty much anything can be done with CGI now, there has, of late, been a resurgence in practical effects nostalgia. In what might be a response to criticism that visual effects are becoming ‘too CGI’, it could be argued that more and more shots are being handled with practical gags, or at least attempted as ones.
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Shooting as much for real was a large part of Chris Nolan’s approach in Interstellar, even though visual effects remained a crucial part of achieving that film.
Some of the best filmmakers already approach their films with this as a key consideration – think Christopher Nolan and the use of large scale sets, practical effects and miniatures in the VFX Oscar-winning Interstellar. Or George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens.
Of course, all of these films also involved substantial digital visual effects work. The point, though, is that the starting line seemed to be what could be achieved on-set practically, rather than the other way around. And even when VFX were relied upon, any digital shots were imbued with a sense of real life photography and phenomena. Likewise, the success of some digital tools that draw on the practical side of effects – Pixologic’s digital sculpting tool ZBrush is a great example – it helps let artists return to hand-crafted beginnings.
Looking to the future of VFX, it will be interesting to observe whether this trend persists, even as realism with CGI continues to improve.
3. VFX is VR is VFX
We are clearly in some kind of virtual and augmented reality revolution. A lot of money is being spent on and invested in this technology which is likely to find use in gaming, home entertainment, advertising and…who knows what else. Interestingly, the studios behind some of the best VR/AR work are also visual effects outfits. That’s because some of the hardest things to solve in VR are things that VFX artists have been trying to solve for years, including stitching panoramas and 360 degree video, compositing, HDR lighting, dealing with stereo and making digital assets.
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An ILM featurette on their work for Warcraft.
There are countless other examples. Pixar developed a new crowd system called MURE specifically for The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory, as well as a tool called AutoSpline for animating curves for their CG Octopus Hank in that film. Atomic Fiction, the studio behind the freeway chase VFX in Deadpool, built its own cloud based renderer called Conductor. There are a lot of smart people in visual effects.
That’s 5 trends that are shaping the future of VFX and the industry as a whole, but there are clearly many others to take note of such as physically based rendering tools, real-time rendering, tools to deal with higher frame rate filmmaking and, possibly one of the biggest, the greater accessibility of tools and plug-ins for artists. What are some of the biggest trends you’re following in visual effects?
Source: Av3software