Here’s a short but fascinating glimpse into the world of CGI, and how photography was used to help digitally build New York from the ground up for The Avengers movie. As it turns out, creating a digital world into which you can insert these actors takes, not only an insane amount of CGI and attention to detail, but a whole lot of photos to lay the groundwork. Read more…

We’ll preface this by saying that this is very dangerous and if you choose to attempt it you do so at your own risk — we don’t recommend anyone try this at home. That being said, this is also one of the coolest “backyard” special effects we’ve ever seen, and one that would make for some kick-a photography backgrounds or slow-motion video. Read more…

Video effects team Corridor Digital created this clever short film titled “Photoreal” featuring a magical Canon DSLR that creates floating planes of frozen reality.

(via Photoxels)

New Zealand-based photographer Geoffrey H. Short has an ongoing series titled Towards Another (Big Bang) Theory that explores “the relationship between terror and the sublime” with images of large explosions frozen in midair. Short hired film industry special effects technicians to create the “big bangs” using fossil fuel mixed with gunpowder.
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Here’s yet another example of the crazy visual effects found on today’s TV shows — this time it’s from HBO’s series “Game of Thrones“. Just making composites this realistic using still images would be difficult enough, but for video? Wow.

(via Reddit)

Here’s an idea: find a bunch of photography-lovin’ friends, borrow their DSLR cameras, and shoot your own Matrix-style bullet time videos from home! The above video shows a workshop where they were able to bring together 24 cameras for this awesome purpose.

This reminds us of the video we shared a while back in which 52 Canon Rebel DSLRs were used to shoot bullet time videos of surfers.

(via f stoppers)

Here’s a nifty behind-the-scenes video tutorial by photographer Jay P. Morgan that shows how to make a cheap DIY rain machine for adding rain to your photographs.

(via f stoppers)

Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in “bullet-time“, the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.
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HBO posted this interesting behind-the-scenes video that gives a glimpse into the kind of special effects that went into filming the popular miniseries John Adams. It’s pretty crazy how they construct entire realities around the actors using CGI.

And you thought Photoshopping was hard…

Here’s a really imaginative short film called AT-AT day afternoon, created by Canadian filmmaker Patrick Boivin. Boivin took a vintage Star Wars Walker toy and transformed it into man’s best friend. The film was created using a blend of stop-motion animation, puppetry, and clever household green screens that aren’t always green. Boivin, who is self-trained in filmmaking and effects, said in an interview that he shoots primarily with a Canon 5D Mark II.

Check out the behind-the-scenes video below. Read more…