StudioDaily's Podcasts from the Front Lines

In 2012, veteran VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer shared an Academy Award for spearheading the stunning VFX work that led to the creation of a believable living, breathing tiger in director Ang Lee’s award-winning film, Life of Pi. Fast forward several years, with the state of the art hurtling past previous roadblocks, and Westenhofer found himself receiving […]

One of the conceits of Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, is the director’s skill at dropping unique fictional characters and a strange fictional story straight out of the director’s oeuvre neatly into a particularly loving photograph of reality in the form of Los Angeles, circa 1969.

Los Angeles VFX studio Engine Room has launched QuickFX.com, a cloud-based service platform for visual effects project management. According to Engine Room owner Dan Schmit, QuickFX has the potential to bring down the cost of VFX work and, in turn, make local L.A. talent more competitive on the global stage. QuickFX is a web-based front […]

According to Douglas Mackinnon, executive producer and director of the new Amazon limited series, Good Omens, the recent success in adapting the best-selling book penned in the late 1980’s by Neil Gaiman (now screenwriter of the series) and Terry Pratchett, was long overdue. He points out that “a survey done by the BBC a few […]

Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini chuckles in looking back at his 20-plus years collaborating with director Terry Gilliam, originally for 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ...

VFX industry veterans Eric Hollander and Eric Saindon had been involved with the intriguing notion of producing visual effects for Alita: Battle Angel for literally decades when the opportunity finally arrived.

With Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Tom Stern, ASC, unavailable, the famed director turned to Canadian cinematographer Yves Bélanger for the first time to shoot his current movie, The Mule, and in the process, gave Bélanger a big thrill. “I knew [Eastwood’s work] because I have been watching his movies since I was about seven years […]

As director Peter Farrelly began working on his current acclaimed film, Green Book, he quickly found an old colleague knocking at his door, asking to participate. Editor Patrick Don Vito had worked with Farrelly a couple of times in the past, and happened to read the Green Book script before learning his friend was attached to […]

As he finished shooting La La Land, earning himself an Academy Award in the process, cinematographer Linus Sandgren, FSF, learned his next project, also in partnership with director Damien Chazelle, was going to be a far different creature. It was on the set of La La Land that Chazelle first told Sandgren about his next […]

One of the biggest and most pressure-filled jobs on Christopher McQuarrie’s new action hit, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, fell into the lap of U.K.-based gaffer Martin Smith. McQuarrie was returning to the franchise for a second straight effort — the first director to direct two films in the series — but he was determined to craft […]

Director Ben Lewin says the biggest challenge he faced when making the new indie film, The Catcher Was a Spy, starring Paul Rudd, was his lead character himself. The movie spotlights a key time in the mysterious life of a unique historical figure, Moe Berg — a Jewish professional baseball player who spoke several languages […]

It didn’t take long for sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn to comprehend that A Quiet Place posed significantly different challenges from the blockbuster tentpole fare that has earned them both awards and accolades in the past. Indeed, the entire foundational narrative of John Krasinski’s new film is the fact that “it […]

Director Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion animated film, Isle of Dogs, is built on a foundation of Japanese cultural imagery, and that meant the visually obsessed filmmaker needed an intense collaboration with his production design team, headed up by co-production designers Paul Harrod and Adam Stockhausen. Harrod recently spoke to Studio for the Podcasts from the […]

As she sat down to chat with StudioDaily for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, editor Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE, was only a few days away from an Academy Award nomination for her work cutting together Craig Gillespie’s new film, I, Tonya. Having no idea that honor was coming her way on the heels […]

Paul Austerberry was excited and terrified simultaneously when he was told in 2015 about Guillermo del Toro’s “then-untitled fish movie.” What eventually became a current awards’ season darling, The Shape of Water, was originally discussed with Austerberry as “Guillermo’s passion project — a small black-and-white film. I was a bit terrified, because color is pretty […]