Hollywood Magic: Engineering in the Movies

Bringing a touch of Hollywood glamour to Create the Future this week, we interview two visual effects (VFX) engineers whose companies have, between them, received Oscar nominations for visual effects on the Lion King, Gladiator, Life of Pi, the most recent Jungle Book, and won an Oscar for the hugely successful World War 1 movie, 1917. 

Unlike special effects – explosions, animatronics, and atmospheric conditions created on set – visual effects are added to a scene digitally during post-production. Visual effects have created some of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema – the liquid metal terminator in Terminator 2, the dragons in Game of Thrones, and the magic in Harry Potter. But good visual effects are more than just visual entertainment; they add to the story that the creatives are trying to tell. Often, when they’re done well enough, we don’t notice them at all.

In this episode, we explore the crucial role of visual effects in storytelling across cinema, television, and advertising with Roy Trosh, Vice President of Global Systems Architecture at Technicolour, and David Spilsbury, Chief Technology Officer for advertising at the Moving Picture Company (MPC) in Soho London. We learn about their journeys into engineering, explore how to make a swimming pool in space, and discover why and how VFX engineers ‘chase the sun’.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

Follow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.