See this series of pictures? It's a deep sea squid. In the first picture it's just a normal-ass looking squid, right? Well in the second one its been dissected to see its johnson. It's the white tubular (but not in a gnarly, hang-ten kind of way) thing in the lower half of the photo. And the third picture -- oh boy -- that's the same wiener, erect. I know, I just puked up the last of the deviled eggs from the 4th. The male squid's sexual organ is almost as long as its whole body, including the squid's mantle, head and arms. The squid uses its lengthy organ to reach into the body of the female, and it then injects the sperm directly to prevent it being washed away. How the sperm injected into a female's body then reaches her reproductive organs remains a mystery. Listen: I find biology as fascinated as the next guy who's ever pleasured himself to a science textbook, but that. Could you even imagine living with a member as tall as you are? STORY OF MY LIFE, SUCKERS! I had to weld two wheelbarrows together.
Also, I guarantee this thing's a delicacy somewhere. Super squid sex organ discovered [bbcnews] Thanks to Bertoni, ThatHorseRusty, Tim, Jennaiii, erin and I Prefer Lobster, who are all perverts whether they admit it or not. AMAZING Stop Motion Shows Evolution Of Earth From Big Bang To Nuclear Apocalypse Plastic PEWs!: Stop-Motion LEGO ShootoutLightbox: 'The Powerpuff Girls' Interview with writer/actor Haley Mancini Lightbox: 'Kubo and the Two Strings' interview with director Travis Knight Lightbox: Job, Joris & Marieke ('A Single Life'/'MUTE'/'[Otto]') Interview Lightbox: Mackinnon and Saunders Interview Lightbox: Cartoon Saloon's Tomm Moore on 'Song of the Sea' and 'The Prophet' Lightbox: The Good Dinosaur (Disney•Pixar) interview with Peter Sohn and Denise Ream Lightbox: Interview with 'We Bare Bears' (Cartoon Network) creator Daniel Chong Lightbox: Interview with 'Minions' directors Kyle Balda & Pierre Coffin Lightbox: Oscar-nominee Cordell Barker ("If I Was God...", "The Cat Came Back") - NFB
Lightbox: Morph - An Interview with creator Peter Lord (Aardman) Lightbox: BAFTA-winning Brothers McLeod - Interview with '365' director Greg McLeod Lightbox: Luc Chamberland, director of "Seth's Dominion" (National Film Board of Canada) Lightbox: Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre (MJSTP FIlms/National Film Board of Canada) - Interview Lightbox: Disney's 'Feast' - Oscar winning short film - Filmmaker Interview Lightbox: 'Shaun the Sheep The Movie' - Behind the Scenes with Aardman's Will BecherPlus all the major Vancouver facilities at the careers fair. And an innovative Women in VFX session looking at how to get more women working in the industry. That’s what you can see this year at Spark FX in Vancouver, which is happening Saturday 4th February at the Vancouver International Film Centre. The presentations at Spark are even more impressive considering many of those films and shows are Oscar and VES nominated, and feature some of the top talent in VFX right now.
I’m going to be there, too, moderating the Women in VFX panel, featuring artists and supervisors from Imageworks, Dneg and Image Engine. Here’s how it works – head to the Spark FX site and click on Online Reservations. The sessions are generally $20 each. The Women in VFX session is free. I’d get in now because they tend to sell out pretty quickly. Hope to see you there – please come say hi! Check out what some people are doing to help in this portrait and video series called Women in Visual Effects. And all the names behind the VFX work in those films. Congrats to all the nominees. Now that we’ve all seen Rogue One five times and deconstructed the storyline, the characters and the visual effects, it’s fun to also consider how some of the iconic shots came to be. Of course, ILM and Lucasfilm’s art department crafted many of the incredible concepts, but some of the first shot designs were done by the previs team at The Third Floor. The Third Floor also helped establish ways for visualizing and planning the shoot, and choreographed incredibly detailed scenes such as the third act battles, thanks in part to a tool called Random Cam.
The Third Floor previs/postvis supervisor Barry Howell takes vfxblog through the work. It was a much-hyped disaster flick set on a passenger 747 starring Lauren Holly and Ray Liotta, and released 20 years ago. The film may not by one for the history books, but its visual effects – a hybrid of miniatures and digital techniques – came right at a time where film VFX were transitioning heavily to CGI. In honour of the film’s 20th anniversary, vfxblog spoke to visual effects supervisor Mark Vargo, who was also credited as a second unit DOP, about how he and teams from Boss Film Studios, Pacific Title Digital and other effects shops handled the work – including depicting the jetliner amidst a wild storm, having it flip over, and an exciting crash into a rooftop carpark. Included are several behind the scenes images and clips of the miniatures work. Recently I wrote about MPC’s visual effects for the anti-gravity swimming pool scene in Passengers after talking to overall VFX supervisor Eric Nordby.
MPC had plenty of other challenges to solve in the film, too, including how to realize scenes of the spacecraft, the Avalon. Here Nordby runs down three things he and the team at MPC had to tackle specifically with the 1000 metre long ship, from design to scale and then coming up with an appropriate environment and lighting in space – something that’s harder to do than you think. One of the impressive feats accomplished by ILM for Rogue One is segueing from this ‘new film’ (made with advanced VFX techniques) into A New Hope (released, of course, in 1977, at a time when effects were done with models and motion control and optical compositing). To make that happen, a special ops team at the studio studied the look of the ILM’s old-school work and researched what made and the stop-motion, motion control and other animation ‘feel’ so real, and how the modern CG techniques might be used to reflect that feel. All the while, ILM still capitalised on the advancements that the studio has pioneered in visual effects since the release of A New Hope.