Weta Digital is a digital visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. It was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for "Heavenly Creatures". Weta Digital has won several Academy Awards and BAFTAs. Weta Digital is part of a number of Peter Jackson's co-owned companies in Wellington which includes Weta Workshop, Weta Productions, Weta Collectibles and Park Road Post Production. The company is named after the New Zealand wētā, one of the world's largest insects, which is also featured in the logo.
Introduction
Weta Digital
Weta Digital | Introduction
Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk. Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk
who is josh hutcherson?
user
He is an American actor and producer.
assistant
does he own any production company?
user
No.
assistant
what was his role in the film that gave him a breakthrough?
user
Jesse Aarons.
assistant
and which movie was it?
user
Bridge to Terabithia.
assistant
what is the storyline of it?
user
It tells the story of bullied kids Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke, 12-year-old neighbors who create a fantasy world called Terabithia and spend their free time together in an abandoned tree house.
assistant
who sort of film is it?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
what is its genre?
user
Fantasy adventure film.
assistant
who managed the graphical effects?
user
Weta Digital.
assistant
who owns it?
user
Weta Digital is a digital visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. It was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for "Heavenly Creatures". Weta Digital has won several Academy Awards and BAFTAs. Weta Digital is part of a number of Peter Jackson's co-owned companies in Wellington which includes Weta Workshop, Weta Productions, Weta Collectibles and Park Road Post Production. The company is named after the New Zealand wētā, one of the world's largest insects, which is also featured in the logo.
Weta Digital | Introduction
New Zealanders Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk founded visual effects company Weta Digital, naming it after the insect. There have been suggestions that Weta changes the spelling of its company name so it does not translate as "excrement".
Wētā | In popular culture
The lead visual effects company was Weta Digital in Wellington, at one point employing 900 people to work on the film. Because of the huge amount of data which needed to be stored, cataloged and available for everybody involved, even on the other side of the world, a new cloud computing and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system named Gaia was created by Microsoft especially for "Avatar", which allowed the crews to keep track of and coordinate all stages in the digital processing. To render "Avatar", Weta used a server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's RenderMan and Pixar's Alfred queue management system.
Avatar (2009 film) | Visual effects
The visual effects were provided by Weta Digital, DNEG and Framestore and supervised by Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, Nick Epstein, Raymond Chen and Nigel Denton-Howes. Weta Digital was the primary vendor for the Alita digital puppet, which required the company to redesign its motion capture methods to capture all the subtleties and complexities of Salazar's performance.
Alita: Battle Angel | Visual effects
Visual effects were provided by Weta Digital and supervised by Ken McGaugh, Kevin Smith and Luke Millar. Weta designed the moving cities to actual scale in CG, which required building layout "puppets" that represented the different city tiers.
Mortal Engines (film) | Visual effects
As of 2017, Weta Digital has won six Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects: "" (2001), "" (2002), "" (2003), "King Kong" (2005), "Avatar" (2009), and "The Jungle Book" (2016). Weta Digital has developed several proprietary software packages to achieve groundbreaking visual effects. The scale of the battles required for "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy led to the creation of MASSIVE, a program which can animate huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules. To recreate 1933 New York for "King Kong", Weta created CityBot, an application which could "build" the city on a shot by shot basis.
Weta Digital | History
Joe Letteri, ONZM (born 1957) is a senior visual effects artist, winner of four Academy Awards, four BAFTA awards and four VES awards. He is the current Director of the Academy Award-winning Weta Digital, having joined the company in 2001. He has received several awards and nominations as visual effects supervisor, the latest () being "War for the Planet of the Apes". He attended Center High School (Pennsylvania) in 1975 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He gave the keynote address at UC Berkeley's December Convocation on 19 December 2010.
Joe Letteri | Introduction
Like "Rise", visual effects for "Dawn" were done by Weta Digital. In addition to the apes, Weta created other digital animals, such as a herd of elk, a grizzly bear, and CG doubles of the live horses. The elk were created using key-frame animation and the digital crowd enhancement software MASSIVE, the bear through key-frame animation, and the horses with a mixture of key-frame animation and motion capture.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes | Visual effects
The company was subsequently sold to Rage Games Limited. After the demise of Rage Games Limited, a company named Juice Games appeared in the same Warrington office, with some key members of staff. Juice Games later became THQ Digital Studios UK.
Digital Image Design | Introduction
Visual effects on the film were handled by New Zealand visual effects specialists Weta Digital and Weta Workshop who mainly did Crusoe. Most of the roughly 600 effects shots in the film involved Crusoe. And many of those shots involved the creature (Crusoe) interacting with water, which, in terms of the history of computer graphics, has always been a particularly difficult substance to deal with. In terms of the design of the creature, Weta Digital tried to not humanise him but instead based some of his expressions on real animals such as a dog. "We wanted to create something which seemed familiar, but was unique at the same time," said Russell.
The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep | Visual effects
As with "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Weta Digital was involved in the creation of special effects. However, as opposed to "The Lord of the Rings", where the actors who played Orcs portrayed them through full-body makeup and prosthetics, many of those actors in "The Hobbit" had computer-generated faces in order to portray them. Many of the actors who played Orcs in this trilogy portrayed them through performance capture.
The Hobbit (film series) | Visual effects
The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. A new texturing and paint software system, called Mari, was developed by The Foundry in cooperation with Weta. Creating the Na'vi characters and the virtual world of Pandora required over a petabyte of digital storage, and each minute of the final footage for "Avatar" occupies 17.28 gigabytes of storage. It would often take the computer several hours to render a single frame of the film. To help finish preparing the special effects sequences on time, a number of other companies were brought on board, including Industrial Light & Magic, which worked alongside Weta Digital to create the battle sequences.
Avatar (2009 film) | Visual effects
Founded in 1987 by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger as RT Effects, Weta Workshop has produced creatures and makeup effects for the TV series "" and "" and effects for films such as "Meet the Feebles" and "Heavenly Creatures". A digital division, Weta Digital, was formed in 1993. Weta Workshop's output was used in director Peter Jackson's film trilogy "The Lord of the Rings", producing sets, costumes, armour, weapons, creatures and miniatures. It supported the creation of "Reclaiming the Blade" (2009), a documentary film on stage combat, historical European and Asian swordsmanship.
Weta Workshop | History
Digital Effects Inc. was an early and innovative computer animation studio at 321 West 44th street in New York City. It was the first computer graphics house in New York City when it opened in 1978, and operated until 1986. It was founded by Judson Rosebush, Jeff Kleiser, Don Leich, David Cox, Bob Hoffman, Jan Prins, and others. Many of the original group came from Syracuse University, where Rosebush taught computer graphics. Rosebush developed the animation software APL Visions and FORTRAN Visions. Kleiser later went on to found Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company, which experimented with creating synthespians and made the animation for Monsters of Grace.
Digital Effects (studio) | Introduction
The company was founded by film director James Cameron, Stan Winston and Scott Ross. They began producing visual effects in 1993 with its first three films, "True Lies", "Interview with the Vampire", and "Color of Night," being released in 1994. Digital Domain produced effects for more than 100 films, including "Dante's Peak", "Titanic", "Apollo 13", "What Dreams May Come", "The Fifth Element", "Armageddon", "" and "The Day After Tomorrow". Other films include "", "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", "", "", "2012", "", "", "Thor", "", "", "Real Steel", "", "Oblivion", "Iron Man 3", "Her", "", "Into the Storm", "Maleficent", "Furious 7", "Pixels" and most recently "Deadpool", "", "", "Suicide Squad", "Beauty and the Beast", "", "", Aquaman, "Captain Marvel", "Shazam", "", "" and "Sonic the Hedgehog".
Digital Domain | History
In May 2006, Digital Domain was purchased by an affiliate of Wyndcrest Holdings, LLC, a private holding company whose principals then included Wyndcrest founder John Textor, director Michael Bay, former Microsoft executive Carl Stork and former NFL player and sports television commentator Dan Marino. In connection with the acquisition, Mr. Textor and Mr. Bay would become Co-Chairman of Digital Domain and Mr. Stork was named CEO. Wyndcrest also acquired The Foundry in 2007, which was tasked with taking over the development of Nuke, a visual effects compositing tool that has since become one of the world's top selling visual effects software solutions.
Digital Domain | 2006–present
The visual effects were primarily provided by Weta Digital. Effects supervisor Erik Winquist and a small crew travelled to Chicago to create a model of the Chicago Loop that would be destroyed in the climactic battle, learning the building materials and architecture styles. Up to 15,000 photographs were taken with 3D scanners, while motion cameras covered downtown Chicago. As reference for the building destruction, the artists studied both the World Trade Center collapse from 2001 and implosions of buildings affected by the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake in Weta's hometown of Wellington. One of the more challenging aspects for Weta was figuring out how the weight and mass of the monsters would affect the city environment and destruction.
Rampage (2018 film) | Visual effects
Roy Pace sold Camera Effects to Brent Walker in 1979 who in turn sold on to the Rank Organization in 1981. The company directors (Sheldon Elbourne, Malcolm Bubb, Gary Pearlman and Pat Conway) acquired the company in April 1984, bringing the company back into private ownership for a few years before selling to Rushes in 1986. The Virgin Group bought Rushes the following year, shutting Camera Effects down in 1987 as the industry embraced new digital technologies, keeping the profitable motion control film studio side of the business going. The Virgin Group dissolved Camera Effects on 25 September 2001.
Camera Effects | Ownership
Sir Richard Taylor, the owner of Weta Workshop, was chosen as the 2012 New Zealander of the Year. A close friend of Peter Jackson, he and his company created all of the props, costumes, prosthetics, miniatures and weaponry for Jackson's epic "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
New Zealander of the Year Awards | 2012 winners
Jackson's Weta Digital created the visual effects, which included computer-generated imagery, as well as scale models (which were necessary to make Wellington look American), prosthetic makeup and practical effects with help from Weta Workshop. Visual effects supervisor Richard Taylor explained that effects work on "The Frighteners" was complex due to Weta's inexperience with computer technology in the mid-1990s. Prior to this film, Weta worked largely with physical effects. With so many ghosts among its main cast, "The Frighteners" required more digital effects shots than almost any movie made up till that time. For a special effects company that had been in existence less than three years, the eighteen-month period for completing "The Frighteners" was largely stressful.
The Frighteners | Visual effects
Barron contributed to the visual effects of more than 100 films during MWD's near-25-year run, creating innovative techniques for the digital effects of Zodiac", Captain American: The First Avenger, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", which won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 2009. MWD closed in 2012 after 24 years of service. The company's last project was for Martin Scorsese's "Hugo".
Craig Barron | Matte World Digital
Visual effects for the series are handled by SpinVFX and Weta Digital, which worked only on Pogo. VFX supervisor Everet Burrell confirmed that he used traditional art techniques for early concept art and referenced great actors with iconic faces. Burrell called Weta Digital, who previously worked for the rebooted "Planet of the Apes" series, to develop the visual effects for the character of Pogo. Ken Hall provided the motion capture for Pogo using a gray suit to later make additions to his captures to create the CGI of the chimpanzee, with Adam Godley making the facial expressions and voice acting of the character.
The Umbrella Academy (TV series) | Visual effects
Bay and Wyndcrest Holdings, a Florida-based investment firm, acquired the digital effects company Digital Domain from James Cameron and Stan Winston in 2006, infusing the struggling business with a $50 million investment. Digital Domain considered an initial public offering in 2009 but ultimately withdrew the offer, because of the lack of interest. The company was sold to Galloping Horse in 2012.
Michael Bay | Digital Domain
Weta Digital worked on the fight on Titan, where they also created a separate version of Thanos for their needs, applying the performance capture data to the tools Weta developed for their work on the 2010s "Planet of the Apes" series. Weta worked on 200 shots of him, along with their 250 other effects shots, that included the Titan environment and the other characters in the fight. Digital Domain also created Red Skull, and was aided by reference material from "Captain America: The First Avenger" to create the CGI character. Port noted there was "a wide spectrum of designs in terms of what he would look like", with some options including having Hugo Weaving reprise the role with make-up, had he returned, and a version "where the Tesseract did very bad things to his appearance, so he was much more skeletal." The final character design was "in between", one that "showed both that the Tesseract did affect him and choose him in some kind of way to be" the guardian of the Soul Stone.
Production of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame | Visual effects
Designing "Contact"s visual effects sequences was a joint effort among eight separate VFX companies. This team included Sony Pictures Imageworks, Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, and Effects Associates, with Pixar's RenderMan used for CGI rendering. Weta Digital, in particular, was responsible for designing the wormhole sequence. Jodie Foster admitted that she had difficulty with blue screen technology because it was a first for the actress. "It was a blue room. Blue walls, blue roof. It was just blue, blue, blue", Foster explained. "And I was rotated on a Lazy Susan with the camera moving on a computerized arm.
Contact (1997 American film) | Visual effects
For "The Two Towers", Weta Digital doubled their staff of 260. In total, they would produce 73 minutes of digital effects with 799 shots. The film would feature their first challenge in creating a battle scene, as well as creating two digital characters who needed to act rather than be a set piece, unlike 's Cave Troll and Balrog. Weta began animating Gollum in late 1998 to convince New Line they could achieve the effect. Andy Serkis "played" Gollum by providing his voice and movements on set, as well as performing within the motion capture suit later on. His scenes were filmed twice, with and without him.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers | Special effects
Kodak previously owned the visual effects film post-production facilities Cinesite in Los Angeles and London and also LaserPacific in Los Angeles. Kodak sold Cinesite to Endless LLP, an independent British private equity house.
Kodak | Motion picture and TV production
"Massive" was originally developed in Wellington, New Zealand. Peter Jackson, the director of the "Lord of the Rings" films (2001–2003), required software that allowed armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to fight, a problem that had not been solved in film-making before. Stephen Regelous created "Massive" to allow Weta Digital to generate many of the award-winning visual effects, particularly the battle sequences, for the "Lord of the Rings" films. Since then, it has developed into a complete product and has been licensed by a number of other visual effects houses.
MASSIVE (software) | History
Creatures such as trolls, the Watcher-in-the-Water, the Balrog, the Ents, the fell beasts, the Wargs, the "mûmakil" and Shelob were created entirely with computer-generated imagery. Creatures would spend months of creation and variation as sketches before approved designs were sculpted into five-foot maquettes and scanned into a computer. Animators would then rig skeletons and muscles before animation and final detailed colouring scanned from painted maquettes. Treebeard had a digital face composited upon the original animatronic, which was scanned for the digital model of his longshots. Along with the creatures, Weta also created highly realistic digital doubles for many miniature longshots, as well as numerous stunts, most notably Legolas.
Production of The Lord of the Rings film series | Animation and computer graphics effects
As the apes in "Rise" were meant to be actual, the producers decided not to use actors in suits. After considering real apes, instead Weta Digital created the apes digitally in almost every case through performance capture. Advances in the technology allowed the use of performance capture in an exterior environment, affording the film-makers the freedom to shoot much of the film on location with other actors, as opposed to the confines of a soundstage. The main breakthrough was a camera that enabled viewing the motion capture dots in daylight, employed mostly for the Golden Gate Bridge battle. A maximum of six actors could have their movements captured, with larger ape crowds using fully digital animals animated using Weta's move library.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes | Visual effects
Duborgh. From 1929, when William Duborgh died, Wettre was the company's sole owner, and when he died, the company was passed on to Ragnar Wettre.
Trygve Wettre | Introduction
Peter Lloyd, a high-tech commercial artist, designed the environments. Nevertheless, these jobs often overlapped, leaving Giraud working on the solar sailer and Mead designing terrain, sets and the film's logo. The original 'Program' character design was inspired by Lisberger Studios' logo of a glowing bodybuilder hurling two discs. To create the computer animation sequences of "Tron", Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International, Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.
Tron | Pre-production
The visual effects in the film were handled by the then newly created Weta Digital. The girls' fantasy life, and the "Borovnian" extras (the characters the girls made up) were supervised by Richard Taylor while the digital effects were supervised by George Port. Taylor and his team constructed over 70 full-sized latex costumes to represent the "Borovnian" crowds—plasticine figures that inhabit Pauline and Juliet's magical fantasy world. "Heavenly Creatures" contains over thirty shots that were digitally manipulated ranging from the morphing garden of the "Fourth World," to castles in fields, to the sequences with "Orson Welles" (played by Jean Guérin).
Heavenly Creatures | Post-production
The film used the Los Angeles-based company OTOY for its visual effects. Moving Picture Company, Pixomondo, Rodeo FX and Weta Digital also created visual effects for the film. Moving Pictures Company took on the visual effects for The Thing, rendering a fully digital character based on Jamie Bell's on-set performance and the Human Torch's fiery visual effects. Weta Digital handled Reed Richards' stretch effects. Pixomondo delivered Sue Storm's force-field and cloaking effects and augmented Doom's costume. James E. Price served as the over-all visual effects supervisor. Kinberg stated that the film would be converted to 3D in post-production, but those plans were canceled, with Trank stating that he wanted "the viewing experience of "Fantastic Four" to remain as pure as possible for the audience, which means in 2D".
Fantastic Four (2015 film) | Post-production
However, work on visual effects will continue at Weta Digital in Wellington.
Avatar 3 | Filming
The company's original animation system consisted of a Tektronix display with a 1200 baud modem connection to a remote Amdahl V6 in Bethesda, Maryland, with rendering done on an IBM System 370, recording on an Information International Inc. (III) film recorder in Los Angeles, and final processing and optical printing completed back in New York. The V6 ran APL, and could render at a rate of one polygon per second. The company later built one of the first frame buffers and video paint systems (the Video Palette), acquired a Harris mini-mainframe computer, and a Dicomed 35mm color film recorder. Digital Effects was one of the first companies in the world to produce "flying logos" for television and advertising, but they aggressively and rapidly expanded their capabilities to include motion capture, form morphing, raster effects, and so forth.
Digital Effects (studio) | Introduction
Novita is owned by its CEO Yrjö-Koskinen with his sister and brother. All siblings are involved in the company's operations: Patricia Gylfe participates in digital content production while Swiss-based Ernst Gylfe takes part in production and raw materials development projects.
Novita (company) | Owners
In the absence of computer graphics facility, the director of the show Hafeez Tahir managed to create many special effects with the simple chroma key technique. Some indigenous techniques were invented to make those effects with the help of able lighting cameramen and his technical crew. Many layers were created and matted to create imaginative video effects.
Ainak Wala Jin | Special effects
Digital Domain is an American visual effects and digital production company based in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. The company is known for creating digital imagery for feature films, advertising and games, from its locations in California and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, including its own virtual production studio.
Digital Domain | Introduction
They asked themselves the question: How many times has a brilliant idea been levelled by the restrictions of a budget? Digital technology answers the question of how to make an excellent quality film on tight finances. With the advent of 3chip DV, original ideas were finally beginning to be realized. It was the Figgis Brothers childhood dreams of making movies and the advent of digital technology lead them to set up the company in February 2001. Jason directs while his younger brother Jonathan produces. Watching Hammer Films was a passion for them both and equal to the terror as they half hid behind pillows was the thrill at being confronted by monsters, swirling mists and dark villainous characters.
October Eleven Pictures | Introduction
"Prince Caspian" has over 1,500 special effects shots, more than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"'s 800 effects shots, yet the film had less time to complete them. The scale of special effects led Andrew Adamson to base production in the UK, to take advantage of new tax credits. Therefore, it legally qualifies as a British film. This also meant the director only had to walk five minutes from the editing room to supervise the effects. British visual effects companies the Moving Picture Company and Framestore CFC were hired to create the visual effects alongside Weta Digital. Framestore worked on Aslan, Trufflehunter and the door in the air; Scanline did the River-god; Weta created the werewolf, the wild bear and Miraz's castle; MPC and Escape Studios did the main battle, the tunnel scene, the castle assault, the council scenes and all the other creatures.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian | Effects
The visual effects are provided by Weta Digital and supervised by Bill Westenhofer and Guy Williams, with support from Park Road Post, Universal Production Partners (UPP), Scanline VFX, Legend3D, Inc., The Third Floor, Inc., East Side Effects, Clear Angle Studios and Stereo D.
Gemini Man (film) | Visual effects
Dima Malanitchev came up with the drawings for the creatures with Csupó's guidance. Csupó chose to have Weta Digital render the 3D animation because he "was impressed with their artistic integrity, the teamwork, the [fact that] people were really nice, and also they responded to our designs very positively". Weta modified some of the creature designs, but ultimately remained faithful to Csupó's original designs. There were around 100 crew members from Weta working on the effects for the film. Weta was already working on animating the creatures while the film was being shot, and Weta crew members were on-set for all the scenes that involved special effects during the filming.
Bridge to Terabithia (2007 film) | Design and effects
Weta Digital visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon explained that, "It's a bunch of silver beads that are suspended through a magnetic field, and the machine is able to control that magnetic field so that the collection of beads behave almost like three-dimensional pixels, and they can create a surface that floats in the air and describes whatever the thing is you're supposed to be seeing." The beads of the display, which up close would appear to be pyramids with a slight bevel, were designed to create a surface of the object to depict inside a "console-like" figure. In the modeling and animation aspect of the liquid geometry, Goodwin explained, "We had to develop a pipeline to bring in assets, so instead of going through the route of reducing the polygon count to something usable what we would then do—you would take the model in whatever way it was made and just scatter discrete points onto it, and extract the matrix onto the animation and copy these points onto the matrix and have these sparse points behaving in a way that the model would." After the animation, artists duplicated the beads onto the animated geometry for a pre-simulated lighting version to get approval on how the object would read.
Man of Steel (film) | Effects
The destruction of the Ravager ship the "Eclector" was handled by Weta Digital. Weta Digital also handled Ego during his fight with Quill, utilizing a digital double of Russell for many of their shots. Weta also needed to create a digital double for David Hasselhoff for the moment when Ego shifts into Hasselhoff's guise. Guy Williams, Weta's visual effects supervisor, said, "We tried morphing to a live-action Hoff—but it did not hold up as well. The Kurt version looked better than the Hoff version ... and while we had built a very detailed Kurt digi-double ... we didn't want to go to the same level on the Hoff for just two shots.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 | Visual effects
The company produced visual effects for the films:
Adam Shand (manager) | Visual effects
In 2016, WeTransfer announced the acquisition of digital design studio Present Plus, established in 2010 by Damian Bradfield and WeTransfer co-founder Nalden, whose clients included Adidas, MR PORTER, British Airways, Sonos and Christie’s. In September 2016 WeTransfer opened their first office in the United States, in Venice Beach, Los Angeles. In early 2017, Gordon Willoughby became the company's Chief Executive Officer, taking over from Bas Beerens, who became Executive Chairman. In August 2018, WeTransfer acquired app developer FiftyThree, whose portfolio included sketching app "Paper" and collaborative presentation app "Paste".
WeTransfer | 2016–present
With the Lanston Monotype Company's stock he acquired much of Frederic Goudy's materials. He and Jim Rimmer adapted these for digital form; and from 1988 to 2004 ran the digital foundry, Lanston Type Company.
Gerald Giampa | Biography
Nothing Real L.L.C, a company founded in October 1996 by Allen Edwards and Arnaud Hervas, developed high-end digital effects software for the feature film, broadcast and interactive gaming industries. Apple Inc. purchased Nothing Real in February 2002 for its flagship digital effects software, Shake.
Nothing Real | Introduction
During the 2000s, and today, the visual effects industry has continued to be a financial challenge for nearly every services-only visual effects company. DDMG and Co-Chairman John Textor believed it necessary to expand the business into film production, content ownership and new media. His aggressive North American expansion plans were heavily supported by nearly $200 million of new capital from private investors, the State of Florida and the city of Port Saint Lucie (Florida). After a doubling of revenues since its acquisition in 2006, and with significant operating cashflow in 2010, DDMG also completed a successful IPO capital raise of $40 million in November 2011.
Digital Domain | Financial difficulties
Among their early works were historic animated sequences of Times Square, commercials for "Scientific American," and a set of MTV-style demonstration reels. But they are perhaps best remembered for their contribution to the computer graphics in the movie "Tron" — among other things, they were responsible for creating the main title, and for the animation of the Bit, including one that accompanies Kevin Flynn in his reconstructed Recognizer.
Digital Effects (studio) | Introduction
Framestore was founded in 1986 by husband and (then) wife William Sargent and Sharon Reed, together with three friends. Tim Webber joined Framestore in 1988 and led the company's push into digital film and television, developing Framestore's virtual camera and motion rig systems. In 1992, Mike Milne started the CGI department, adding computer-generated animation to the company's range of facilities. The company's work covered award-winning images in commercials, music videos, television graphics and television drama. In 1994 its film visual effects division was set up.
Framestore | Foundation
Founded in 1974 by George Patton, the company was originally an in-house display manufacturer known as George Patton Associates, Inc. Targeting mainly New England area businesses, GPA expanded rapidly due to Patton's persistent marketing efforts. In 1992, he sold the company to his sons, Tom and Chris. Their catalog business quickly grew, forcing the company to acquire a larger warehouse. In 1997, plans were made to build a new 45,000 sq. ft plant near the company's location on Market St. in Warren, RI, but Warren's water main expansion fell 1600 feet short of where the Pattons planned to build the new warehouse, preventing its construction.
Displays2Go | 1974–2011
The company was established on April 30, 2009 after studio Gonzo decided to sell its digital video division to Q-TEC, which then established the company with the resources acquired, along with 25 employees that worked with the previous company then became part of Graphinica, with an initial total of 60 employees when it was created. On April 1, 2010, absorbed and merged Decoloco (an animation filming/VFX company) of Q-TEC group to the company. On April 1, 2011, it opened the Ogikubo Studio and started 2D drawing animation production. On December 1, 2017, Graphinica's owner Memory-Tech Holdings announced that they have acquired AOI TYO Holdings' TYO Animations subsidiary, with the company then being put as a subsidiary of Graphinica after the acquisition.
Graphinica | History
C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures was a Canadian film and television computer animation special effects studio, which branched out into fully animated television series and feature films. On March 15, 2010 the company announced it was suspending operations, and shut down. C.O.R.E. signed a production partnership deal with Radar Pictures.
C.O.R.E. | Introduction
The majority of the visual effects were handled by Riot, Ignite Media, and Digital Dodge, with Erick Torrente supervising the special effects.
Resiklo | Production
In 1995 Cinergi Pictures acquired an effects company from visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull. It was originally known as Cinergi F/X but was subsequently named Mass Illusions. Mass.Illusion operated as a special-effects house owned by Cinergy, an independent movie studio. By 1997, Cinergy needed to sell Mass.Illusion for financial reasons, and began looking for investors to buy the company. Mass.Illusion had $1 million in debt, but had assets including artists and a $7.5 million contract to produce "What Dreams May Come" special effects. It had also submitted well-received test shots for "The Matrix". In 1997 Cinergi pulled out of Mass Illusions.
Manex Visual Effects | Founding and first works
Digital Productions was a computer animation company in Los Angeles, California, that produced advertisements and special effects for films in the 1980s. The company was founded by John Whitney, Jr. and Gary Demos in 1982, following their departure from Triple-I. They received financial support from Control Data Corporation. Whitney and Demos felt that greater computer power was needed to produce effects such as those being made by Triple-I for "Tron"; Digital Productions became famous for using a Cray X-MP supercomputer to render their animations. The company referred to its animation as "Digital Scene Simulation." Digital Productions created 27 minutes of animation, in 300 scenes, for the film "The Last Starfighter".
Digital Productions | Introduction
The original face has been digitized by the current owner, Kingsley/ATF and is sold by Bitstream Inc. The ITC version is also available from Linotype, Monotype, and Adobe Systems, along with ITC Cheltenham Handtooled, a 1993 version with highlight, designed by Ed Benguiat. Other versions are available from Tilde, Font Bureau, URW++, Scangraphic Digital Type Collection, and Elsner+Flake. Besley Clarendon is available from HiH.
Cheltenham (typeface) | Digital Versions
Takahashi attended Hampshire College in Massachusetts, as well as the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which enabled him to study computer graphics and animation. He began working at Industrial Light & Magic in the early 1980s and subsequently rose to become the head of its animation department. After essentially ceasing work with ILM in the 1990s, he helped to establish the New Zealand-based effects studio Weta Digital with filmmaker Peter Jackson. He has been with International Technological University since 2011 and currently works as the Department Chair of its Digital Arts Faculty. Along with Charlie McClellan and Richard Taylor, Takahashi received a nomination for Best Special Effects at the 23rd Saturn Awards in 1997 for their work on the 1996 film "The Frighteners".
Wes Takahashi | Education and career
Digital Extremes is a Canadian video game developer founded in 1993 by James Schmalz. They are best known for creating "Warframe", a free-to-play cooperative online action game, and co-creating Epic Games' "Unreal" series of games. Digital Extremes is headquartered in London, Ontario. In 2014, 61% of the company was sold to Chinese holding company Multi Dynamic, now Leyou, for $73 million. President Michael Schmalz and two partners retained 39% of Digital Extremes, and will continue to manage it. On May 22, 2016 Leyou exercised a call option and now owns 97% of Digital Extremes for a total consideration of $138.2 million US.
Digital Extremes | Introduction
Following a job at Rocket Science Games until the company's bankruptcy in 1996, Butler went to Tippett Studio and did effects work in "Starship Troopers" and "My Favorite Martian", rising up to a technical director job, and Cinesite for "Practical Magic". While reluctant at the requirement of moving to New Zealand, Butler was convinced by his writer-actor brother Jared to jump at the opportunity of working for Weta Digital in "The Lord of the Rings". His biggest achievement was working in the creation of Gollum. Butler also worked as a computer graphics supervisor on "I, Robot" before an invitation to work as an effects supervisor for the Moving Picture Company, in London.
Greg Butler (visual effects supervisor) | Introduction
New England Digital ceased operations in 1993. According to Jones, "The intellectual property was bought up by a bank—then it was owned by a Canadian company called Airworks—and I bought the intellectual property and the trademark back from a second bank which had foreclosed on it from Airworks."
Synclavier | End of manufacture
In 1992, he managed the Indigo digital printing company (founded by Benny Landa) in Ness Ziona, and in 1994 led it to an IPO on NASDAQ.
Giora Yaron | Early years
Render time refers to the amount of time it took the computer to process the image into a usable format; it does not include the amount of time it took the texture artists to "draw" the frame. The hair dynamics of CG Gollum in "The Two Towers" were generated using Maya Cloth. Because of its technical limitations, Weta subsequently moved to the Syflex system for "The Return of the King".
Production of The Lord of the Rings film series | Animation and computer graphics effects
Wettre was the sole owner until his death in 1936, when his brother Ragnar Wettre took over. He brought in Haakon Wettre (died 1938) and Ole Kr. Røed as co-owners; the latter brought in his son Egil Røed in 1940. When the father died in 1970, Egil Røed continued on his own. The company became a limited company in March 1990. It now specializes in life insurance, general insurance, money loans and savings. The headquarters are at Lysaker.
Duborgh Forsikring | Introduction
She and Spanish owner of "Hola!" Eduardo Sanchez Junco own the "Hello!" print media brand internationally.
Marquesa de Varela | Introduction
Founded in 1993 as Mainframe Entertainment, the studio was started by British animators Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson and Phil Mitchell, after having used their technology to produce music videos such as "Money for Nothing" and "Let's Get Rocked". Due to the cost of shipping equipment back home, advantageous tax credits and proximity to Los Angeles, the company set up shop in Vancouver, Canada. Mainframe became a publicly traded company with a listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange on June 17, 1997. In conjunction with the public offering, Alliance sold 700,000 shares in the company, lowering their ownership to 7.8%. Pearson served as the initial President and Chief Executive Officer, Blair as Director of Operations and Mitchell as Vice President Operations.
Rainmaker Digital Effects | History
As with "Rise" and "Dawn", the visual effects for "War" were created by Weta Digital; the apes were created with a mixture of motion-capture and CGI key-frame animation, as they were performed in motion-capture technology and animated in CGI.
War for the Planet of the Apes | Visual effects
As wētā are endemic to New Zealand, they have become a local icon of sorts, using the wētā symbol in advertising and as a business and marketing tool, for example Weta Digital, a special effects company founded by Peter Jackson.
Deinacrida elegans | Cultural uses
In 1995, Weigert founded the company Dreamscape Imagery Inc. with his wife Stacey. He became VFX Project Manager for the film "Independence Day" (1996), for which Weigert created "Digital Assistant for Visual Effects", a project management software to manage, schedule and track the filming of VFX elements. In conjunction with the software, Weigert also developed a design for a visual effects production board, in conjunction with manufacturing company Hollywood Production Boards. Between 1996 and 2000, he created new software versions to include the post-production process. Digital Assistant for Visual Effects has been used for several feature films, including "Stuart Little", "Alien Resurrection", "Flubber", "Volcano", "Godzilla", "Wing Commander", "Monkeybone", "Bless the Child" and "X-Men", as well as on television films and series.
Marc Weigert | Later career
The company was renamed after its main asset in 2000, to h2g2. Following the dot-com crash in 2001, many h2g2 staff continued to work without pay until the h2g2 site, brand and several staff moved to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The game division became a new company, Phase 3 Studios, which continued for several months under the ownership of PAN Interactive, but ultimately closed in 2002. The 3D game of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it was working on was never released.
The Digital Village | Introduction
"First Class" employed 1,150 visual effects shots, which was done by six companies: Rhythm and Hues was responsible for Emma Frost, Mystique and Angel, as well as set extensions; Cinesite handled Azazel, the visuals for Cerebro and environment effects; Luma Pictures did Banshee, Havok and Darwin; Moving Picture Company did Beast, Riptide, and the scene where Shaw's yacht is destroyed and he escapes in a submarine; Digital Domain created Sebastian Shaw's powers, and Weta Digital was responsible for the climactic battle in Cuba. The overall coordination was provided by visual effects designer John Dykstra, who said the biggest difficulty was the tight schedule: "It was slightly less than a year and I've never done anything like that before ("Spider-Man" was frequently two years)." British company 4dMax employed special 3D scanners to digitize data of the sets and actors which would be used by the effects companies.
X-Men: First Class | Effects
The company was founded by former Rapture TV boss David Henry and Information TV boss Fred Perkins. On 11 November 2011, David Henry was disqualified from acting as a company director after failing to ensure that one of his former companies paid the appropriate amount of tax. Until he resigned from the company in February 2012, Henry had been the company's managing director. Between 2014 and 2016, General Satellite (a Russian manufacturer of set-top boxes) held a majority of the voting shares in Real Digital TV Limited. During that time, Dmitry Pasechnik was the chief executive officer of Real Digital TV Ltd.
Real Digital | Management
He asked Shankar to increase the filming schedules by six months to include pre-production requirements. Both Mohan and Shankar visited several visual effects companies, including the New Zealand-based Weta Digital and the United States-based Industrial Light & Magic, Cafe FX and Tippett Studio before partnering with Legacy Effects. The original Eros-Ayngaran visual effects budget was 700 million, but after Sun Pictures took over production, it was significantly reduced to 200 million. As a result, the visual effects team had to omit and alter some sequences, making Chitti wear sunglasses for most of the film to reduce the cost and difficulty of animating his eyes.
History of visual effects in Indian cinema | History
On December 13, 2019, Bushiroad announced that it had acquired 8.2% of Sanzigen. Ultra Super Pictures now owns 75.4% of Sanzigen and studio president Hiroaki Matsuraa owns 16.4% of the company. On February 10, 2020, it was announced that Sanzigen had formed a partnership with Millepensee to form a new CG studio IXIXI.
Sanzigen | Introduction
By that date, digital sales accounted for half the company's revenue.
Dwayne's Photo | History
"Prometheus" contains approximately 1,300 digital effect shots. The main effects studio was Moving Picture Company (MPC), which produced 420 of the shots. Several other studios, including Weta Digital, Fuel VFX, Rising Sun Pictures, Luma Pictures, Lola Visual Effects, and Hammerhead Productions, also produced effects shots for the film. The creation of life from the disintegration of an Engineer in the film's opening scene was created by WETA Digital. The scene was difficult to produce because it had to convey the story of the Engineer's DNA breaking apart, reforming and recombining into Earth DNA in a limited span of time. The team focused on making the DNA stages distinct to convey its changing nature.
Prometheus (2012 film) | Visual effects
Matte World Digital was a visual effects company based in Novato, California that specialized in realistic matte painting effects and digital environments for feature films, television, electronic games and IMAX large-format productions. The company closed in 2012 after 24 years of service in the entertainment industry.
Matte World Digital | Introduction
Weta visual effects supervisor Matt Aitken explained that process involved in interpreting the creatures was "split into two steps". First, natural-looking creatures were created based on pencil sketches by Csupó and Malanitchev, and this was done mostly through Photoshop collages done by visual effects art director Michael Pangrazio. The second step was to figure out animation or motion styles that best suited these creatures.
Bridge to Terabithia (2007 film) | Design and effects
The company was purchased by 505's parent company Digital Bros S.p.A. in 2017.
Kunos Simulazioni | Introduction
Digital Reality silently shut down in 2013. On 2 February 2016, Austrian publisher Nordic Games announced that they had acquired a range of intellectual properties formerly under the Digital Reality banner, withunder also "Black Knight Sword", "Imperium Galactica" and "Sine Mora".
Digital Reality | Introduction
Appleton owns two patents. The first, issued in 1997, covers a method for the production of digital movies. The second, issued in 1998, describes a computer display system for the real-time display of digital movie frames. Appleton’s software applications include the following:
William Appleton (entrepreneur) | Career
Stuart owns the first Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 to enter California and often visits the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
LaFarr Stuart | Preserving computer history
Weta developed MASSIVE, a first-of-its-kind crowd simulation computer program used to create automatic battle sequences rather than individually animate every soldier. Stephen Regelous developed the system in 1996, originally to create the battle scenes for "The Lord of the Rings". The system creates a large number of choices for each software agent to pick when inside a digital arena. Catherine Thiel provided the movements of each type of soldier, like the unique fighting styles (designed by Tony Wolf) or fleeing. To add to this, digital environments were also created for the simulations. MASSIVE also features "Grunt", a memory-conservative special purpose renderer, which was used for scenes containing as many as 200,000 agents and several million polygons.
Production of The Lord of the Rings film series | Software
For the battle, they recorded 450 motions for the MASSIVE digital horses (though deaths were animated), and also had to deal with late additions in the film, such as Trolls bursting through Minas Tirith's gates as well as the creatures that pull Grond to the gate, and redoing a shot of two "mûmakil" Éomer takes down that had originally taken six months in two days. On a similar note of digital creatures, Shelob's head sculpture was scanned by a Canadian company for 10 times more detail than Weta had previously been able to capture. Like the previous films, there are also extensive morphs between digital doubles for the actors.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | Visual effects
It was last owned by Barry Diller's IAC, as well as Time Warner, parent of CNN, The CW and Cartoon Network.
IWon | Introduction
The brand was acquired by Gordon Brothers. It is now operating as an online-only retailer.
Wet Seal | 2015–17: Bankruptcy and liquidation
The New Zealand visual effects studio Weta Digital was initially selected to assist in creating a preview clip for the 2007 Comic-Con Convention. The studio's 100 employees later developed the visual effects for 300 of the 600 shots in the film. In total, there are more than 100 jumps in the film, and each jump was modified based on the distance and location the character(s) jumped. The jumps were developed using Nuke and Shake software; many, including those to Big Ben and the Sphinx were created with Maya. Weta's VFX supervisor Erik Winquist explained how the visual effects of the jumps were created: "The concept of what a jump looks like changed and evolved a little over the course of post production.
Jumper (2008 film) | Visual effects
Ross was named Senior Vice President of the LucasArts Entertainment Company, which comprised Skywalker Sound, LucasArts Commercial Productions, LucasArts Attractions, EditDroid/SoundDroid and ILM. Under Ross' direction, from 1993-2006, Digital Domain garnered two Academy Awards and three nominations, receiving its first Oscar in 1997 for the ground-breaking visual effects in "Titanic". That was followed by a second Oscar for "What Dreams May Come". Digital Domain received additional nominations for "True Lies", "Apollo 13" and "I, Robot" and won three Scientific and Technical Academy Awards for its proprietary software.
Scott Ross (film executive) | Introduction
Another unusual element of post-production was that all of the film's visual effects shots were delivered by a single VFX artist. During development, Nooshin and producer Zack Winfield traveled to Wellington to meet with Weta Workshop special effects head Richard Taylor, an avid train fanatic and supporter of the script. But with the film's budget constraints, shooting in New Zealand was deemed unfeasible. Nooshin and his producers ultimately put their faith in Tim Smit, a Dutch VFX artist who had worked on the original £500 trailer, to deliver all the digital effects shots.
Last Passenger | Visual Effects
"Image United" was a crossover event featuring the characters created by the six remaining founders including Youngblood, Spawn, Savage Dragon, Shadowhawk, Witchblade, Cyberforce and The Darkness. Whilce Portacio—whose first Image Comics series "Wetworks" is now owned by DC Comics via their buyout of Wildstorm—created a new character for the series, Baxter Montgomery, code-named Fortress. The villain has been revealed as the original Spawn, Al Simmons, now known as Omega Spawn.
Image United | Background
Sir Richard Leslie Taylor (born 1960s) is the founder, creative director and head of New Zealand film prop and special effects company Weta Workshop.
Richard Taylor (filmmaker) | Introduction
After George Coupland Thomas died in 1955, the ownership was bought by Coupland Thomas's family lawyer Warren B. Wilson, brother of Lionel Wilson, the past mayor of Oakland, California. During the big California home development boom of the late 1970s Wilson moved the company to a newly built state-of-the-art designed building in the industrial park area of Irvine, California, in early 1980. For 40 years Wilson served as CEO and owner of Thomas Bros. Maps and was responsible for leading the company into the digital age. Starting in the 1990s Wilson hired many CEOs to run the company to give him more time traveling and studying his love of art.
Thomas Guide | Acquisition by Warren B. Wilson, digital age
Media 100 was established as a division of Marlboro, Massachusetts-based Data Translation, Inc. then spun off as an independent company in 1996. After absorbing or merging with several companies (Terran Interactive, Digital Origin, and Wired, Inc.) it entered bankruptcy proceedings, with its assets and employees acquired by Optibase in March 2004. It is owned by Boris FX, which acquired the company from Optibase in October 2005.
Media 100 | Introduction
The company was founded in 1968 by David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland, professors in the Computer Science Department at the University of Utah. who were pioneers in computer graphics technology. They formed the company to produce hardware to run the systems being developed in the University, working from an abandoned barracks on the university grounds. The company was later housed in the University of Utah Research Park. Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark, who started Silicon Graphics, Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, John Warnock of Adobe, and Scott P. Hunter of Oracle.
Evans &amp; Sutherland | History
In 1992, the company was renamed Matte World Digital, reflecting the new technological tools available to matte painters. Since then, MWD has created digital-matte environments for films directed by (among others) Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, and David Fincher. After working on shots for more than 100 films, Matte World Digital closed its shop in August, 2012.
Matte World Digital | History
Red Digital Cinema was founded by Jim Jannard, who had previously founded Oakley. As a self-described "camera fanatic" owning over 1,000 models, Jannard started the company with the intent to deliver an (relatively) affordable 4K digital cinema camera. Jannard dates this idea to a time when he bought a Sony HDR-FX1 video camera and learned that the files had to be converted with software from Lumiere HD and were not viewable on Mac OS. Lumiere HD's owner Frederic Lumiere collaborated with Jannard on developing an alternative and introduced him to Ted Schilowitz who became Red's first employee. The early team members engaged in undisclosed research on how to make a digital camera feasible for Hollywood productions.
Red Digital Cinema | History
The visual effects were provided by Weta Digital and supervised by Chris White.
Maze Runner: The Death Cure | Visual effects
Klotz Digital was founded in 1990 by Thomas Klotz. The company's products were first used in live sound installations and later in the 90s found their way into broadcast facilities. In 2002 the company entered into the public address market with a digital public address product line named Varizone. The live sound, broadcast, and public address markets were the main markets for the company. At the end of 2009, Klotz Digital AG was acquired by United Screens Media AG. Thomas Klotz resigned from his position, and Dr. Andreas Gruettner, known as CEO of United Screens Media AG, was appointed Klotz Digital’s new CEO.
Klotz Digital | History