An organic blend of old and new techniques is featured in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. ™ & © 2008 Lucasfilm Ltd.

5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Trying to emulate the iconic look and feel of the previous three Indiana Jones films required more CG than anticipated on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But VFX Supervisor Pablo Helman and ILM were up to the task of delivering the needs of Steven Spielberg and creating an organic blend of old and new techniques. He says the environments were an organic blend of Digi-matte and stagework. An important new digital tool pertained to jungle repopulation by dragging and dropping virtual vegetation onto a 3D scene. The vfx team was also able to take advantage of production designer Janusz Kaminski's full lighting so the overall look would be complete and consistent. In fact, the opening Area 51 warehouse sequence, which took eight months to complete, was shot with smoke and lights and also required CG enhancement. "Steven relies on both previs and postvis," Helman reiterates. When analyzing the destruction of Doom Town, Helman explained that he first did a demo on the Avid to show how it would work with miniatures. "Steven came up with the idea of a triangular composition of sun, explosion and Indy," Helman adds.

Pixar tweaks its virtual camera in WALL•E. © Disney-Pixar.

6. WALL•E
Leave it to Pixar to expand the frontiers of animation (including vfx) with this sublime story of a lovable robot searching for humanity in Andrew Stanton's acclaimed second feature. Utilizing the vfx experience and wisdom of producer Jim Morris (formerly with ILM) as well as ILM legend-turned consultant Dennis Muren, Pixar tweaked its virtual camera to successfully emulate the look of classic '60s/'70s (including rack focus, barrel distortion and certain ovals of light), and radically altered their approach to depth of field with more of a shallow focus that would never look good in 3-D. "The effects on WALL•E were wide ranging," explains Chris Chapman, an effects sequence lead. "The film was heavy with man-made effects such as explosions, energy effects, propulsion effects, as well as more natural phenomenon such as dust storms, acid rain, sludge and solar flares." He adds that there were two primary vfx challenges: "Since the look of the movie was to be a more filmic style, we had to design the effects to fit within that framework. The second challenge was the sheer number of effects needed on the film. On Earth, for example, it was not uncommon for an average shot to have four or five effects elements just for 'environmental keep alive' where dust might be blowing about or trash moving around in the background. When you layer effects related to characters and story points on top of that, the number of effects adds up rapidly. The main way we went about solving the integration of the effects into a filmic world was by scrutinizing reference footage and essentially extracting its essence and imbuing that into our effects."