We Talked About "Sneakers" on Defocused

 

I had the pleasure of talking with Joe Rosensteel and Dan Sturm about one of our favorite movies, "Sneakers" (1992) on the Defocused Podcast.

Here's some images based on things we talked about on the show:

The film's (probable) Texas Switch

The hidden ramp for Whistler to drive over, complete with parking spot paint.

A screenshot of the San Francisco Chronicle from the film.

VFX Artist Todd Vaziri Answers Movie & TV VFX Questions From Twitter for WIRED Tech Support

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It was a lot of fun to participate in WIRED's "Support" series for YouTube. Named "VFX Support", I do my best to answer actual questions from actual movie fans, and not sound like a complete idiot while doing so!

Thank you to everyone over at WIRED for inviting me to be a part of the program.

Here are some "show notes":

• "Weapon of Choice" music video, directed by Spike Jonze
• "King Kong" (1933)
• "Citizen Kane" (1941)
• "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (1959) A terrific video explaining how the forced perspective visual effects for the film was created called "Little People Big Effects"
• "The Dark Crystal" (1982)
• "Poltergeist" (1982), and some fun tweets about the movie
• "The Thing" (1982), and some fun tweets about the movie
• "The Abyss" (1989), and some fun tweets about the movie
• "Death Becomes Her" (1992)
• "1917" (2019)
• A ton of Texas Switch tweets from me
• A ton of Texas Switch tweets from Edgar Wright
• Charmaine Chan from ILM explains StageCraft and how it was used on "The Mandalorian" to Vox. Charmaine does a great job giving an overview of the workflow, and emphasizes something that didn't make my video: the screens are so large and powerful that the screen imagery actually lights the real-life actors.
• "The Queen's Gambit" visual effects reel from Chicken Bone FX
• Lola Visual Effects, the visual effects studio that created the "young" Robert Downey Jr. effects for "Captain America: Civil War"
• Corridor Crew's video about muzzle flashes

More to come.

And now, here are two things I got wrong in the video.

• I mistakenly said "Poltergeist" (1982) was the first non-Lucasfilm visual effects project undertaken by Industrial Light & Magic, but it was actually "Dragonslayer" (1981) a year earlier. The next year saw ILM take on "Poltergeist", "Star Trek II" and "The Dark Crystal", three more non-Lucasfilm projects.
• I also said Robert Zemeckis and Ken Ralston would use what they learned from "Forrest Gump" (1994) on "Death Becomes Her", but meant to say the exact opposite, since "Gump" was made after "Death".

Watch the video here.

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