Henry Selick, director of Coraline, gives a fascinating insight into what might be a puppet’s point of view, with a cleverly worked animation as an example (00:57-1:06).

Way back before Avatar had even been release, James Cameron sat down with Popular Mechanics to talk about how he ended up inventing a completely new way of creating CG movies with his Stereoscopic-Virtual hybrid camera. He also explained how CG animation will never replace real actors because it is not the geeks behind the computers who are driving the performance, but rather the actors themselves through the motion capture technology. Taken from the Popular Mechanics article:

In fact, Cameron doesn’t even like the term “motion capture” for the process used on Avatar. He prefers to call it “performance capture.” This may seem like semantics, but to Cameron, the subtle facial expressions that define an actor’s performance had been lost for many of the digital characters that have come before. In those films, the process of motion capture served only as a starting point for animators, who would finish the job with digital brush strokes. “Gollum’s face was entirely animated by hand,” says Weta Digital effects master Joe Letteri. “King Kong was a third or so straight performance capture. It was never automatic.” This time, Cameron wanted to keep the embellishment by animators to a minimum and let the actors drive their own performances.

It’s probably this misconception that caused Avatar to loose out on best picture at the Oscars recently. Perhaps those at the Academy see CGI as a threat to future acting talent. James Cameron thinks otherwise.

A nice compilation showing the use of the chroma key technique in some popular TV and films. Using green or blue screens in the background, actors are shot and then composited into purposely shot footage from on-location by removing the chosen colour. This means production companies can save money by shooting footage in studios rather than closing down famous landmarks like Times Square (03:43) in New York.

This is the trailer for the up and coming Iron Man sequel with appearances from Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), along with Iron Man’s partner War Machine (Don Cheadle).

Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett of LegoMatrix.com have completed 440 hours of stop-motion production to reproduce the famous bullet-dodge scene from the Matrix, just in time for its ten year anniversary.

We went to great lengths to match camera angles, lighting conditions, continuity errors, focal depths and so on, but obviously we had to work within the limitations of point and shoot cameras and the Lego medium. Not having any knees or elbows on the minifigs can make it tricky to reproduce the actor’s movements, but we tried our best.

For extensive behind the scenes info, click here.