A film crew is a group of people, hired by a production company, for the purpose of producing a film or motion picture. The crew is distinguished from the cast as the cast are understood to be the actors who appear in front of the camera or provide voices for characters in the film. The crew is also separate from the producers as the producers are the ones who own a portion of either the film company or the film's intellectual property rights. A film crew is divided into different departments, each of which specializes in a specific aspect of the production. Film crew positions have evolved over the years, spurred by technological change, but many traditional jobs date from the early 20th century and are common across jurisdictions and film-making cultures.
Special effects are illusions or visual tricks used in the film, television, theatre, video game and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual world.
Eiji Tsuburaya was a Japanese special effects director responsible for many Japanese science-fiction films and television series, being one of the co-creators for the Godzilla series, as well as the main creator of the Ultraman series.
The Academy Award for Best Visual Effects is an Academy Award given for the best achievement in visual effects.
Set construction is the process undertaken by a construction manager to build full-scale scenery, as specified by a production designer or art director working in collaboration with the director of a production to create a set for a theatrical, film or television production. The set designer produces a scale model, scale drawings, paint elevations, and research about props, textures, and so on. Scale drawings typically include a groundplan, elevation, and section of the complete set, as well as more detailed drawings of individual scenic elements which, in theatrical productions, may be static, flown, or built onto scenery wagons. Models and paint elevations are frequently hand-produced, though in recent years, many Production Designers and most commercial theatres have begun producing scale drawings with the aid of computer drafting programs such as AutoCAD or Vectorworks.
Jean-Christophe "Pitof" Comar is a French visual effects supervisor and director notable for Vidocq and Catwoman.
Mario Bava was an Italian cinematographer, director, special effects artist and screenwriter, frequently referred to as the "Master of Italian Horror" and the "Master of the Macabre". His low-budget genre films, known for their distinctive visual flair and technical ingenuity, feature recurring themes and imagery concerning the conflict between illusion and reality, and the destructive capacity of human nature.
Aleksandr Lukich Ptushko was a Soviet animation and fantasy film director, and Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR. Ptushko is frequently referred to as "the Soviet Walt Disney," due to his prominent early role in animation in the Soviet Union, though a more accurate comparison would be to Willis O'Brien or Ray Harryhausen. Some critics, such as Tim Lucas and Alan Upchurch, have also compared Ptushko to Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, who made fantasy and horror films with similarities to Ptushko's work and made similarly innovative use of color cinematography and special effects. He began his film career as a director and animator of stop-motion short films, and became a director of feature-length films combining live-action, stop-motion, creative special effects, and Russian mythology. Along the way he would be responsible for a number of firsts in Russian film history, and would make several extremely popular and internationally praised films full of visual flair and spectacle.
John Charles Dykstra, A.S.C. is an American special effects artist, pioneer in the development of the use of computers in filmmaking and recipient of three Academy Awards, among many other awards and prizes. He was one of the original founders of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects and computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. He is well known as the special effects lead on the original Star Wars, helping bring the original visuals for lightsabers, space battles between X-wings and TIE fighters, and Force powers to the screen. He also led special effects on many other movies, including Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Stuart Little, X-Men: First Class, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.
Brian Johnson is a British designer and director of film and television special effects.
Dennis Muren, A.S.C is an American film special effects artist and supervisor, most notable for his work on the films of Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and George Lucas. He has won nine Oscars in total: eight for Best Visual Effects and a Technical Achievement Academy Award.
The set decorator is the head of the set decoration department in the film and television industry, responsible for selecting, designing, fabricating, and sourcing the "set dressing" elements of each set in a Feature Film, Television, or New Media episode or commercial, in support of the story and characters of the script. The set decorator is responsible for each décor element inside the sets, from practical lighting, technology, art, furniture, drapery, floor coverings, books, collectables, to exterior furnishings such as satellite dishes, Old West water troughs, streetlamps, traffic lights, garden furniture and sculptures.
Robert Burks, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer known for being proficient in virtually every genre, equally at home with black-and-white or color, and for his many collaborations with the celebrated film director Alfred Hitchcock.
Christian Rivers is a New Zealand storyboard artist, visual effects supervisor, special effects technician, and director. He first met Peter Jackson as a 17-year-old, and storyboarded all of Jackson's films since Braindead. He made his directing debut in the film adaptation of Mortal Engines, and planning a remake of The Dam Busters, both produced by Peter Jackson.
Guido Quaroni is an Italian visual effects supervisor, voice actor and Head of Software R&D at Pixar Animation Studios. He was one of the developers of solidThinking, a NURBS based 3D modeling and rendering software.
Eric Brevig is an American film director and visual effects supervisor known for his work in several major theatrical films and television shows. He was Visual Effects Supervisor and Second Unit Director on the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay action drama Pearl Harbor.
Joe Letteri, ONZM is a senior visual effects artist, winner of four Academy Awards, four BAFTA awards and four VES awards. He is the current Director of the Academy Award-winning Weta Digital, having joined the company in 2001. He has received several awards and nominations as visual effects supervisor, the latest being War for the Planet of the Apes. He attended Center High School (Pennsylvania) in 1975 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He gave the keynote address at UC Berkeley's December Convocation on 19 December 2010.
The VFX creative director is a position common in films, television programs, and computer games using a large amount of visual effects (VFX).
Special Effects is a 1984 American horror-thriller film directed by Larry Cohen and starring Zoë Lund and Eric Bogosian. Its plot follows a woman who is cast in a film by a director based on a murder he committed.
Babubhai Mistry was an Indian film director and special effects pioneer who is best known for his films based on Hindu mythology, such as Sampoorna Ramayana (1961), Mahabharat (1965), and Parasmani (1963).
