Welcome to The Fx

Welcome to my blog. I am Alan, a VFx student and am utilizing this as a gateway to help people get to know about how inspiring, powerful, and how beautiful Visual effects are within the complexity of our imagination and its limitations.

Here you will encounter an in depth path to understanding  what VFx can reach, be in emotion, recreating sceneries one may assume a blue moon and creating the fantastical into a (digital reality).

Firstly, I would like to discuss a movie that fully encompasses the art it can create and the power to move people like me.

Andrew Stanton (2008) WALL-E
Original by Pete Docter
Source: IMBd

This film presents cinematography, technical prowess, and the imaginative power of the human mind in the way it can move a person even with very minimal dialogue present within it. This film, funnily enough, was created at a baseball game, The Hollywood reporter states that;

'Andrew Stanton had a great idea for a Pixar movie, one that centered on the last robot on Earth. He just wasn’t sure what the robot was going to look like. Then inspiration struck.“I was at a baseball game with my editor on Finding Nemo,” the director, 54, tells The Hollywood Reporter's It Happened in Hollywood  podcast. “I borrowed his binoculars and then I missed an entire inning just looking at them and starting to make them look happy and mad and sad. … That cracked it open for me. That’s pretty much what I did: I put binoculars on top of a trash compactor.” That epiphany led to the design for the title character of 2008’s WALL-E, Stanton’s Oscar-winning follow-up to 2003’s Finding Nemo, which also took home the Oscar for best animated feature.'

The film sort of presents an adventure the viewer is partaking in alongside the tiny robot protagonist it provides. When it started, it first presented the solitary life of Wall-E, the robot in question, as he rovers around the wastelands of Earth doing what he was programmed to do (squeeze garbage together and organize it in blocks to soon be akin to a tower). after which, are followed by scenes in which he is shown to have emotions of sadness and loneliness as he only has a cockroach as a companion. Even so, this tiny robot shows perseverance, continuing his solitary duty. All of this presented in a way that catches the audience in awe, as each scenery presented is as or even more so addicting of eye candies, such as the gargantuan towers of garbage across the landscape.

There was also a scene during the space-sequence of the movie, where Wall-E was touching the 'stars' that, as a film in 2008, still surprises me on how they were able to animate it so beautifully, creating a scene most people would not see in their lifetime but  could only see in picture.

This is but a taste of what had taken me into this path of VFX, however, this is what I aim for ever since I was a child; To be able to create scenes that would never need of dialogue, that would give a story and would give this mixed feeling of shock and warmth. I want to be able to give imagination a way to seep into 'reality'. And I am hoping that soon enough in the future, I too am able to inspire a young child to soar with his imagination.

References

TheHollywoodReporter(2020) ‘WALL-E’ Was Inspired by Rise of Amazon and Apple, Director Says [Online] Available from :https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/wall-e-director-andrew-stanton-film-was-inspired-by-amazon-apple-1279519/