Posted January 25Jan 25 1.5 months until Oscars 2025 ceremony. All news, facts and funny moments around Oscars can be discussed here (if Better Man movie topic is not enough). ------ Just remind this week's happy news: Oscars Academy Awards - 02.03 - Best Visual Effects (Luke Millar, David Clayton, Keith Herft, Peter Stubbs)[/indent]
January 27Jan 27 Author 2025 Oscars: Best Visual Effects Predictions The epic "Dune: Part Two" is the favorite, up against "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. By Bill Desowitz January 27, 2025 Final voting is February 11-18. The 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2, and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions. The State of the Race The Best Visual Effects nominees are “Alien: Romulus,” “Better Man,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Wicked.” While the race has been shaping up as a simian battle between “Kingdom” and “Better Man” (both from Wētā FX), “Dune: Part Two” has emerged as the favorite for its epic work, building off the Oscar-winning “Dune.” However, “Kingdom” is certainly deserving of the franchise’s first win. The biggest hurdle has been the acting branch’s dislike of performance capture. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2” is more exciting and emotional, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) leading the nomadic Fremen in a holy war on Arrakis. VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and his Oscar-winning “Dune” DNEG team ramped up everything with much more visceral action, particularly with Paul and the Fremen riding the massive CG sandworms into battle against the Sardaukar. For Paul’s first ride, they created a separate “worm” unit, in which Chalamet stood on a platform with gimbals designed by SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer as the sandworm set piece, with gripping devices imitating the Fremen hooks and surrounded by an industrial fan that blew sand on the set. Wes Ball’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” kicks off the post-Caesar (Andy Serkis) saga 300 years later, diving deeper into the now dominant ape civilization. Wētā greatly upgraded its photoreal performance capture animation and VFX, leveraging tech from the previous “Apes” trilogy along with the Oscar-winning “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Additionally, Ball made use of a lot more VFX action set pieces (33 minutes are entirely digital — a franchise first) by incorporating his hand-held, single-take visual style. Michael Gracey’s “Better Man” shows off a completely different Wētā simian style (production VFX supervised by Luke Millar). The CG chimp conceit came about when Williams told the director that he felt like a performing monkey in his youth. This became the driving metaphor for Williams’ rise and fall as a result of arrested development and addictions. Wētā adopted a more human approach to mimic Williams’ mannerisms from youngster to adult (performance-captured by actor Jonno Davies). The highlight is the elaborate musical sequences, particularly “Rock DJ,” which was shot on London’s Regent Street throughout four evenings and stitched together like a single shot. Jon M. Chu’s populist Oz musical, “Wicked,” tells the origin story of Elphaba/the Wicked Witch (Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch (Oscar-nominated Ariana Grande). Aesthetically, it leans into magical realism for its depiction of Oz. ILM and Framestore split VFX duties, with ILM’s Pablo Helman serving as production supervisor. The CG work includes hundreds of animals (via Framestore and ILM’s monkeys), lots of set extensions, and the showstopping “Defying Gravity” number, with Erivo on wires against blue screen in collaboration with special effects supervisor Paul Corbould. Fede Álvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a standalone set between “Alien” and “Aliens,” concerns young colonists who encounter the parasitic Xenomorphs while scavenging a derelict space station. In a throwback to the original, there’s a deft combination of animatronics and CG. ILM joins Image Engine, Tippett Studio, and Wētā (production supervised by Oscar winner Eric Barba of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). There are Facehuggers and Xenomorphs (including a cool zero-gravity fight sequence), a hybrid human/Xenomorph from Wētā, and a diabolical android named Rook that resembles Ash (Ian Holm) from “Alien,” using a Legacy puppet and Metaphysic Live, the generative AI software from Metaphysic, for transferring the facially-captured and de-aged performance to the puppet. Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win. Contenders “Dune: Part Two” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” “Better Man” “Wicked” “Alien: Romulus” https://www.indiewire.com/awards/prediction...ons-1235022100/
February 1Feb 1 Yes man. @1885552825603940736 For those who do bot know the song ;) , it's a great tune .... "Swing Supreme" by Robbie Williams: This 2013 song by English singer Robbie Williams plays around the 42-minute mark as the film advances four years into the future when Rita reencounters Emilia in London. https://screenrant.com/emilia-perez-movie-soundtrack-songs/ aRDgFag8Mz4?si=33W9F1YGVWefLVFz Edited February 1Feb 1 by Sydney11
February 1Feb 1 From what I am reading so far Dune 2 is being predicted a winner in this category . Remember where I said that somebody I was speaking to thought the Better Man posters indicated it was some kind of King Kong movie , In the snippet from the article in the link below I can probably see how they might have had that thought . I keep my fingers crossed for Better Man though . :) However, while it’s potentially shaping up as a battle between “Kingdom” and “Better Man,” Wētā hasn’t won the Oscar for its ape work since “King Kong.” The acting branch, which has a dislike for performance capture, could make it a race between “Wicked” (which has a lot more going for it than flying monkeys) and “Dune: Part Two.” https://wdcnews6.com/2025-oscars-best-visua...ts-predictions/
February 15Feb 15 Author These guys look at all nominations. Very interesting video, better to watch since Wicked part. bByl1eQJfE4
February 17Feb 17 These guys look at all nominations. Very interesting video, better to watch since Wicked part. bByl1eQJfE4 Kingdom of The Planet Of The Apes has been added to my 'must watch' list .
February 22Feb 22 97th Oscars: Visual Effects | Meet The Nominees :) OlbiCW0144E Lovely to see Batter Man in the lineup but I think Dune 11 might be the winner . Let's hope for a surprise :cool:
February 23Feb 23 Author Still hoping on better choice ;) Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Visual Effects This is a category that significantly favors best picture nominees. by Ed Gonzalez February 22, 2025 Out of respect for the weekend crowd, we’re keeping this shorter than Better Man’s box office run. Besides, we need not contort ourselves into resembling the Xenomorph-human hybrid creature from Alien: Romulus to say that this race is one film’s to lose. There’s sentiment around Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as the franchise has yet to win an Oscar for its visual effects. But this is a category that significantly favors best picture nominees. We have two of those in the mix this year, and while a vote split might result in a welcome win for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, let’s not kid ourselves into pretending that Wicked’s flying monkeys hold a candle to the awe-inspiring grandeur of Dune: Part Two’s sandworms. Will Win: Dune: Part Two Could Win: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Should Win: Dune: Part Two
February 24Feb 24 Still hoping on better choice ;) Oscar 2025 Winner Predictions: Visual Effects This is a category that significantly favors best picture nominees. by Ed Gonzalez February 22, 2025 Out of respect for the weekend crowd, we’re keeping this shorter than Better Man’s box office run. Besides, we need not contort ourselves into resembling the Xenomorph-human hybrid creature from Alien: Romulus to say that this race is one film’s to lose. There’s sentiment around Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as the franchise has yet to win an Oscar for its visual effects. But this is a category that significantly favors best picture nominees. We have two of those in the mix this year, and while a vote split might result in a welcome win for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, let’s not kid ourselves into pretending that Wicked’s flying monkeys hold a candle to the awe-inspiring grandeur of Dune: Part Two’s sandworms. Will Win: Dune: Part Two Could Win: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Should Win: Dune: Part Two Hope dies last ^_^
February 27Feb 27 Want to win a visual effects Oscar? Go ape.CGI primates from “Better Man” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” face off in this year’s Oscars race for best visual effects.[img][img][img]What if I told you the most interesting Oscars race of the season isn’t the contest for best picture — or any of the other ones plagued by controversy — but a showdown between computer-generated primates? Two of the films nominated for best visual effects star animated simian protagonists: “Better Man,” the Robbie Williams biopic where he looks like a chimpanzee, and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” the fourth installment in the rebooted series about intelligent apes taking over the world. (“Wicked,” also nominated in the category, features flying monkeys but in supporting roles; the remaining “Dune: Part Two” and “Alien: Romulus” are sadly free of any nonhuman primates.)“Better Man” and “Kingdom” brought these talking animals to life with help from the computer whizzes at Weta FX, a New Zealand-based visual effects (VFX) and animation company co-owned by Peter Jackson of the Lord of the Rings franchise. VFX supervisor Luke Millar, a first-time Oscar nominee, and his team of hundreds made the fictionalized version of Williams, the British pop star who has commented on feeling like a “performing monkey,” appear as a chimp in flamboyant human clothing. Meanwhile, “Kingdom” VFX supervisor Erik Winquist, who was previously nominated for his work on the 2014 film “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” led his cohort in animating an entire civilization of primates — mostly chimps, plus a gorilla or orangutan here and there. There was some overlap between the two processes, including the use of human actors in motion capture suits, but considerable differences as well.Here’s how each team pulled it off.Step 1: Plan out the monkey businessLet’s just get this out of the way: Monkeys are not apes, and apes are not monkeys. They’re different animals, though both count as primates. Though Williams said he feels like a monkey, he appears in “Better Man” as a chimp — which is a great ape, but not a monkey. (Pamela Carter, a chimpanzee forest area manager at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, would argue that he doesn’t much resemble that animal, either: “It was really weird and hard to watch,” she says of the film’s trailer.)But none of this really matters, does it? If you’re watching a movie about a hard-partying rock star chimpanzee, you’ve signed up to suspend disbelief (especially because the film never addresses his unusual appearance). Millar, the VFX supervisor perhaps more attuned to the absurd than the typical person, is rather matter-of-fact about the assignment he received from director Michael Gracey: “I could totally see it working if it was done a certain way,” Millar says of his initial response to the chimp premise. “One of the things I was quite keen to guide and ensure was that Robbie would be ape in representation only, and it wouldn’t turn into a caricature. … It had to be realistic. You had to almost forget that you were looking at a digital character and just be taken along with his story and narrative.”The artists behind “Kingdom” knew there would be an audience for the film, as it followed three successful installments in the rebooted franchise. But because its events take place hundreds of years after Caesar leads his fellow apes in a rebellion against humankind, the VFX team was tasked with visualizing whole new ape societies. Director Wes Ball wanted to highlight cultural development, says VFX supervisor Winquist, so the animators visualized costumes of either natural fibers or harsh metals, depending on the clan.Despite the fact that real great apes are unable to speak — their vocal anatomy isn’t advanced enough to produce the required sounds, according to the expert Carter — the characters in “Kingdom” have much to say.“There’s more dialogue spoken by characters in this movie than the previous trilogy combined,” Winquist says. “One of the biggest things for us is that we needed to look at the way we were approaching facial animation for this.” Would facial animators work from scratch with the actors’ performances as a reference, or would they rely on an algorithm to help speed things up?Step 2: Suit up the human actor[img]Both Williams and the ape protagonists of “Kingdom” were played d by humans in motion capture suits. English actor Jonno Davies provided the physical performance and speaking voice for the pop star character, with Weta using visual effects to make his face and limbs look like a chimp’s. (The real Williams and a singer named Adam Tucker recorded the music.) Davies says he was nervous for the role, having no previous experience in motion capture work. But once he stepped into that “snug, gray pajama suit,” he realized this could be a “brilliant learning tool” for him as an actor.“When we’re performing, we often use our costume — we use our pockets, our shirt collar as things to interact with to help bolster our presence in the scene,” Davies says. “You don’t have that when you do motion capture. Not having that physical attachment to you can be quite exposing. You can feel quite vulnerable. But as soon as you get over that and realize it’s down to you to create that essence, you realize … your playfulness as an actor can really shine through.”Step 3: Roll the cameras[img]In some ways, Millar says, the set of “Better Man” resembled that of a traditional movie production; Davies simply wore a gray motion capture suit instead of fanciful pop star costumes. “I didn’t want to get into a world where we started to use tennis balls on sticks, which I know some people do [to mark a physical space that will be replaced with a different visual in postproduction], or put dots on a chin because that’s where the eye line needs to be,” Millar explains. “We wanted everyone to interact with Jonno [and vice versa] as though this was just a regular film.”Some dots were involved: Motion capture markers, which look like little facial stickers, helped Weta mimic Davies’s expressions when they transferred his performance to the chimp face. The actor wore a helmet with two connected cameras, one sticking out about a foot in front of his face.“Every take with motion capture is usable, whether the camera is on you or not,” Davies says. “It could be a close-up of a scene partner, but all the witness cameras are still capturing your performance. You can provide a real encyclopedia of takes for your director.”The animal cast of “Kingdom” is led by Owen Teague, who also played the young chimp protagonist, Noa, with motion capture markers on his face. For this installment, the actors performed for both facial and “twin cameras,” says Winquist, who explains that capturing footage from multiple angles “gave us [stereoscopic] parallax on the actual performance that allowed us to make a 3D mesh of the actors at 48 frames a second.” The team fed that footage into a “deep learning facial solver,” providing the animators with a consistent baseline.“The algorithm took the moving dots on the actor’s face and was trained to understand what that meant for the mapping of the character,” Winquist says. “It took care of the nuts and bolts … and allowed the facial animators to spend all of their time on clocking the emotional nuance.”Step 4: Get to animating[img]Fair warning: This step can take a very long time to accomplish — in the case of “Better Man,” it was about two years, factoring in additional shooting. The VFX team pulled data from Davies’s performance and translated it onto a digital version of him, Millar says. After comparing this digital rendering with the original footage to make sure Davies’s work was being accurately replicated, they transposed it onto chimp Williams.“It’s not a copy [and] paste,” Millar explains, even though it was “by far the most anthropomorphized character I’ve ever done.” Sometimes, Davies would make a face that chimps can’t because of their protruding muzzles. They would tweak things in those instances, though Millar estimates the character is about “90 percent Jonno.” They kept his eyes and eyebrows similar to a human’s but leaned into the chimp characteristics “around the muzzle and the ears and the forehead.”The “Kingdom” team adopted a similar approach, keeping “all the specificity around the eyes” as they did with Andy Serkis’s performance of Caesar, Winquist says. While they relied on the deep learning algorithm to stick to a tight 58-week postproduction period, the animators took time to manually tweak specific features, whether it was the shape of a jaw or the arch of a brow.[img]These characters look a bit more realistic than Williams in “Better Man.” Carter, the chimp expert, breathes a sigh of relief when talking about “Kingdom” for that reason. Apes “don’t walk upright as often as they show them walking upright in the movies,” she says, “but the body shapes, the hair, they look like what you would expect. They did a decent job with physical characteristics.”This was the goal. Earlier in the rebooted franchise, such as in “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” the chimps were designed to look “straight out of a zoo or a Jane Goodall documentary,” Winquist says. But in Noa’s timeline, which takes place hundreds of years later, the storytellers aimed to highlight the apes’ intellectual development by finding “an interesting place between that pure naturalism and something more stylized, like the 1968 Charlton Heston movie, where you had actors walking fully upright, pontificating.”Realism is ideal, but it isn’t always the goal — or possible, if your character is more human than ape. On “Better Man,” things got, um, hairy when it came to certain costume choices. Williams wore a lot of tight leather pants in his heyday, accentuating aspects of human male anatomy that look different on a chimp. “Essentially, we had to model what can best be described as a cricket box [or jockstrap], like a pair of digital socks,” Millar says. “We had to stick them down his pants so all the tight-fitting costumes would actually sit properly. That’s probably going to be a first and a last, for me.”Step 5: Bask in the glory of your creationIt can be an emotional experience to witness VFX work in its final form. “There’s about 500 names in the credits for us — a lot of people have touched this movie,” Millar says, though his core team was made up of around 50 people. “What was achieved on screen takes my breath away.”Winquist, who says he was “absolutely thrilled” to be nominated for an Oscar, admits that “it’s a big weight of responsibility that I feel, being one of the four people who’s representing the work of over a thousand people who poured immense talent into … everything you see on screen.”“It’s one of those interesting categories,” he says. “Unlike best actor or something — that’s a very singular performance — this is such a collaborative art form, visual effects.”But actors, too, feel differently about their work in these films. Davies says he “lived in this bit of fear for two or three years in between wrapping and seeing it,” as he wasn’t sure whether he “was just going to be a reference point or a foundation for the animators to build upon.”“So to see myself on screen, despite looking like a chimpanzee … it felt very special,” he says. “You look back at social media and see, ‘Why am I crying over monkey Robbie Williams?’ People forget after five minutes that they’re following a chimpanzee. That’s part to [Gracey], part to me and certainly due to Weta.”CGI primates from ‘Better Man’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’ face off at the Oscars - The Washington Post Edited February 27Feb 27 by Sydney11 .Video edit
February 28Feb 28 Author Thank for a good post above, Tess!With all graphics the post looks great.--Oscars 2025: The biggest snubs from this year’s nominationsThe 97th Academy Awards are this weekend – and is it fair to say this has been a relatively tame awards season? Sure, there’s been controversy: Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón’s racist and sexist posts resurfaced on X, the ongoing discourse around Sean Baker, from not using intimacy coordinators on Anora to who he follows on social media (including an account called IDFBabes), and the fact that The Brutalist could win Best Picture despite using generative AI. But other than all that, it’s been smooth sailing, baby.Here at Dazed, when the nominations were announced, some made perfect sense – Jeremy Strong for Best Supporting Actor as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice? Hell yeah. Nickel Boys for Best Picture? Absolutely. Others, not so much. But beyond what made the cut, we were more disappointed by what didn’t.Below is our list of films, actors, and scores we believe should have been nominated for this year’s Academy Awards.BETTER MANNow, I know Better Man has been nominated for Best Visual Effects, but it should be nominated for Best Picture. Everyone mocked Robbie Williams and director Michael Gracey for deciding to depict Williams as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee, but I applaud them for their bravery and willingness to experiment! As our senior editor Dominique Sisley wrote in her article David Lynch and the shrinking value of imagination, the film industry in its current state is defined “by its banality”. Truly imaginative work that “redefines or reimagines our ideas about life or existence” is rare. This may not have been what she had in mind, but it is exactly what Better Man offered me this year, and only the real ones appreciated it. (HJ) DazedOscars 2025: The biggest snubs from this year’s nominations
March 1Mar 1 Rob may yet attend the Oscars, I have no particular reason for saying that but as yet I have no proof that he will not do so. Who do the invites go out to , I have no idea. I did hear some months ago on the radio that the winners have ways & means of finding out before the actual show. It's not always top secret 😉
March 2Mar 2 6 hours ago, Sydney11 said:Rob may yet attend the Oscars, I have no particular reason for saying that but as yet I have no proof that he will not do so. Who do the invites go out to , I have no idea. I did hear some months ago on the radio that the winners have ways & means of finding out before the actual show. It's not always top secret 😉I thought that Tess.I think if he and Ayda aren't attending -it's because he knows Better Man hasn't won.Which would be a terrible shame.
March 2Mar 2 I still have not given up on Rob appearing at The Oscars , He posted a video on Instagram where at the end he says he is at the other side of the world, Looks like he was on a plane when he made that video so maybe it's LA, then again it could be anywhere in the world 😂Or else Tim Metcalfes wedding in OZ 😎https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGsUDRvNIcG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Edited March 2Mar 2 by Sydney11 .
March 3Mar 3 & the Winner is :Achievement in visual effectsPop Culture Happy Hour'Dune: Part Two' nails the dismount in the conclusion(?) of the sweeping sci-fi sagaWINNER: Dune: Part TwoAlien: RomulusBetter ManKingdom of the Planet of the ApesWickedOscars 2025: The complete winners list : NPR Edited March 3Mar 3 by Sydney11
