By CHRIS McGOWAN The newest addition to the Greater Las Vegas skyline is the 366-foot-tall Sphere. Its exosphere, the exterior shell of Sphere, has 580,000 square feet of LED panels that morph into all types of images. Sphere’s images range from a giant eyeball and leaf-like color bursts to an architectural lattice and a vivid [...]

Chris McGowan Snoop Dogg at Astro Project motion capture studio in Santa Monica for his “Crip Ya Enthusiasm” music video utilizing the Vicon system and StretchSense gloves. (Image courtesy of Vicon and Astro Project, LLC) Motion capture, performance capture and volumetric video technologies are rapidly advancing, incorporating AI and ML to a greater extent and [...]

By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Netflix. A major visual effects undertaking was constructing the environment and crowd at Tsinghua University watching the torture of intellectuals during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A computational conundrum occurs when the motion of three celestial bodies mutually influences each other’s gravitation pull. This serves as the premise for the [...]

By Trevor Hogg Images courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios. Searit Huluf, Writer and Director of “Self.” With the release of “Self,” a cautionary tale about the desire to please and be accepted by others, Searit Huluf got an opportunity to showcase her filmmaking talents as part of the Pixar SparkShort program. The project was partly [...]

By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of FX. Actor Hiroyuki Sanada had a key role in making sure that period-accurate Japanese was spoken by the characters. Inspired by the power struggle in feudal Japan that led to the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu to Shōgun and his relationship with English sailor William Adams, who became a key [...]