Over the past five years the changes in special effects technology for film and television have been monumental, causing large shifts and new issues for production companies and the software/hardware companies that service them. Bruce Manning outlines the issues and then sits down with Richard Taylor to discuss. Includes an image gallery from industry veteran Richard Taylor!

Exporting your animation to Flash so that it plays smoothly and soundly over the Internet is getting more complicated with every new product crowing about its 'Flash-export capability.' Mark Winstanley is here to make sense of it all for you.

At South Burlington's Imaging Lab, students learn the three "Rs" of Reading, 'riting, and Real-Time Rendering using Intergraph Computer Systems ViZual Workstations.

After amassing rave reviews and hit projects in just one year, it is time to visit the project:messiah Group, creators of 3D animation's newest leading software package, that was created from the ground up to fill both studio production and animators' artistic needs.

Project:messiah 1.5 is about to expand into messiah:studio, a new modular and innovative approach to animation. Mike Amron investigates. Includes QuickTime movie clips!

Bruce Manning drags a mouse wired to his Mac G4 through this new tool and reveals that no person wearing a blue shirt against a blue screen is too tough for this matte creating program. Happy compositing is here again.

Flash is the leading tool for Internet animation, but there are a few other options for production and augmentation. Here industry leaders reveal their secrets from high tech 3D software to good, old-fashioned talent.

So you want to get into this Internet game? Two of AtomStudios' animators, Kwesi Ako Kennedy and James Dalby, not only tell you how, but offer tips for success.

This year's SIGGRAPH keynote address was given by scientist, inventor and visionary Ray Kurzweil, who discussed "The Human-Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the 21st Century." Sound farfetched? Then take a look at Eyetronics' ShapeSnatcher demonstration.

Think those feature film software packages don't apply to comic book production? Think again. Joseph Szadkowski reveals the amazing meshing of production tools that is happening across many media.