VES: Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:10:19 +0000

Lola wins Visual Effects Society award for outstanding compositing on Captain America.

Thank you VES and Marvel!

Captain America: The First Avenger – Skinny Steve: Casey Allen, Trent Claus, Brian Hajek, Cliff Welsh

fxguide.com – Rob Legato – Hugo

admin — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 16:34:08 +0000

Listen to the fxguide.com podcast with Rob Legato (Lola’s anti-aging visual effects are discussed around minute :38)

‘Breaking Dawn’: Kristen Stewart’s extreme ‘Twilight’ transformation

admin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:02:19 +0000

LA Times

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1″

The fans who lined up over the weekend to see “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1″ — and there were a lot of them, considering that the fourth installment in the franchise adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling young-adult novels raked in an estimated $139.5 million — witnessed some pretty radical upheaval in the lives of young Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire beau Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson).

The couple marries, and during a romantic honeymoon getaway, they finally consummate their relationship. But Bella unexpectedly becomes pregnant and fights to carry the child to term, though the fetus is seemingly incompatible with her body.

To depict the great physical toll the pregnancy takes on Bella’s body — she’s unable to eat and essentially is withering away as her stomach swells — the “Breaking Dawn” filmmakers looked to Lola Visual Effects, the company responsible for downsizing muscular Chris Evans to a pre-transformation weakling in this summer’s comic book superhero film “Captain America.” The results are certainly eyebrow-raising, with Bella becoming increasingly pale and extremely gaunt.

“The idea was to leave you with a question mark about how they did it,” said the film’s director, Bill Condon. “We wanted you to think it was possible that Kristen actually lost a lot of weight for it.”

The visual-effects team added prosthetics to Stewart’s face (a process that took three hours of application) to make her eyes look more sunken and her ears larger. Stewart likened wearing the prosthetics to having a “big, skinny head” for the scenes. Still, the 21-year old actress was game for the transformation.

“I’m so happy that they were not afraid of it — to have your main character look so awful for half of the movie is a bold choice for a huge film,” Stewart said. “It was the one thing I wasn’t fully responsible for concerning Bella and it made me really nervous. I didn’t know what it would look like until I saw the movie.”

Bella’s precarious condition also allows the film’s visual effects artists to turn actress Kristen Stewart into a disturbingly emaciated shadow of her former self

admin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:55:47 +0000

Bella’s precarious condition also allows the film’s visual effects artists to turn actress Kristen Stewart into a disturbingly emaciated shadow of her former self, utilizing the same trick (I guess) that was used to transform Chris Evans into the skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America… the emaciated Bella, however, is the only convincing visual effect in Breaking Dawn Part One.

Breaking Dawn 1 – Hollywood Reporter on Bella Emaciation

admin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:54:33 +0000

During the very slow scenes depicting Bella’s deterioration, as Stewart appears progressively skeletal, so little else is going on that one is obliged to muse over whether the pounds came off digitally or the old-fashioned way.

www.hollywoodreporter.com

Wimp Building: The Making of “Skinny Steve” in Captain America

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:25:02 +0000

In my estimation, the Skinny Steve portion of the film is some of the best stuff CAPTAIN AMERICA has to offer and the success of the movie is due in no large part to the success of making the audience believe that frail dude is the same guy we see as the beefcaked Captain America.

joblow.com

Brawny ‘Captain America’ saved by ‘Skinny Steve’

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:24:02 +0000

“It’s pretty amazing,” added Evans. “They took shape out of my jaw line, they shrunk my skeleton and they made my shoulders less broad.”While it may sound easy, it wasn’t. Each time Evans’ body went through the digital nips and tucks, it created empty space in the background which needed to be filled in. Multiple shots had to be filmed with green screens just to superimpose the scenery that would normally have been there had bulky Evans really been little, scrappy Steve Rogers.

MSNBC

Captain America is an incredible war movie that just happens to star a superhero

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:51:18 +0000

“I’ll admit that there are a few moments where the special effects don’t look absolutely perfect, but they generally work fine within the film’s mildly stylized tone. And, most importantly, the film’s most important digital effect – the shrunken, 90-pound Steve Rogers – looks consistently fantastic, and is easily the most convincing human-based digital effect I’ve seen.”

i09

Director Joe Johnston Talks ‘Captain America’ & ‘The Rocketeer 2′

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:50:36 +0000

“We used two major techniques. Most of the shots were done by an L.A. company called LOLA that specializes in digital “plastic surgery.” The technique involved shrinking Chris in all dimensions. We shot each skinny Steve scene at least four times; once like a normal scene with Chris and his fellow actors in the scene, once with Chris alone in front of a green screen so his element could be reduced digitally, again with everyone in the scene but with Chris absent so that the shrunken Steve could be re-inserted into the scene, and finally with a body double mimicking Chris’s actions in case the second technique were required. When Chris had to interact with other characters in the scene, we had to either lower Chris or raise the other actors on apple boxes or elevated walkways to make skinny Steve shorter in comparison. For close-ups, Chris’ fellow actors had to look at marks on his chin that represented where his eyes would be after the shrinking process, and Chris had to look at marks on the tops of the actor’s head to represent their eyes. These marks then had to be digitally removed in post-production.

“The second technique involved grafting Chris’s head onto the body double. This technique was used mostly when Chris was sitting or lying down, or when a minimum of physical acting was required, although the body double was an actor in his own right. Unfortunately, the body double also proved to be too large and we usually had to shrink his element before we could graft Chris’s shrunken head onto the body. Both techniques were time-consuming and immensely complicated for the visual-effects team, but the end result is quite amazing.”

Screen Rant

Captain America: The First Avenger: Film Review

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:47:07 +0000

“In perhaps the movie’s best or at least weirdest visual effect, Evans’ face sits atop an unbelievably scrawny body that recruiting sergeants shoo away until German-American scientist Dr. Erskine (Stanley Tucci, with the phoniest of accents) sees something special in the young man. Col. Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones, having a fine time) dismisses Steve as a “90-pound asthmatic,” not without justification. But the minute Dr. Erskine performs a “procedure” on Steve — with equipment that looks like it was left over from Bride of Frankenstein – suddenly Steve is buff and fast-healing, in fact, nearly impossible to injure. Moments after his rebirth, he faces his first test as he races barefoot through Manhattan streets circa 1942 to take down a Nazi spy. This feat more than catches the eye of British military liaison Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), not to mention the press.”

Hollywood Reporter