Tim Burke for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Andrew Jones of I, Robot and John Dykstra of Spider-Man 2.

For the second consecutive year, VFXWorld asked three of the Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisors to evaluate each other’s work: Tim Burke (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the first in the popular franchise to be nominated), Andrew Jones (I, Robot) and John Dykstra (Spider-Man 2). Their responses are indicative not only of what stood out last year among the nominees for best visual effects but they also touch on the vfx zeitgeist.

Bill Desowitz: What impressed you most about each other’s work?

Tim Burke: In Spider-Man 2, I particularly liked the use of dramatic sweeping camera moves, which followed Spider Man through real and CG environments, giving his movement and the film great energy. I thought the design and technical accomplishment was very well executed. I also really liked the animation developed for Doc Ock’s tentacles; the “character” that the animators managed to convey through such relatively “featureless” objects was superb.

In I, Robot, the character and range of emotions portrayed through the facial animation of Sonny worked very well, given his smooth and fairly featureless design. It allowed for a subtle contrast with [more] “emotional” robots. The destruction of the mansion house was also an exciting and well executed scene.

Spider-Man 2 made huge improvements from the first film on its CG characters. ™ & © 2004 Marvel Characters Inc. © 2004 Sony Pictures Digital. All rights reserved.

Andrew Jones: In Spider-Man 2, the virtual camera work and the backdrops in general I thought were amazing. Just the fly through the city on the train disaster — the fact that we’re looking at pretty much all-CG shots — was pretty amazing. Doc Ock impressed me quite a bit — both the metallic of the CG arms and the realistic look of his face. As far as Azkaban, my favorite part, of course, was the Hippogriff. The animation, by far, is some of the best that I’ve seen on a creature. In terms of making a creature like that look real in terms of weight and movement, and the integration of the character into the scene was just beautiful. Secondary to the story, what I really liked is that many times the camera would be following the actors talking and the Hippogriff would be moving around in the background, out of focus, and it just fit — they didn’t go out of their way to feature it.

I thought the work on The Dementors was impressive too. The first introduction of the hand on the train, especially, looked incredible. In general, this Harry Potter was superior to the others in many ways. All the varied effects are all done so well.

John Dykstra: The most impressive thing to me in the Harry Potter movie, oddly enough, wasn’t The Dementors, which they are touting, but the environments. I liked the job they did of placing the Hogwarts’ castle into the environments for approaches and departures. Of course, I liked this film in general more than the others. A really good part of visual effects is how well they support the story. And, of course, how good a story is determines to a certain extent the result of the effects. I thought The Dementors were a very cool effect and that there’s a complexity there that the people who made it were expecting people who weren’t conversant to understand. In other words, there was probably more to it than meets the eye.