Dan Lemmon

On Tuesday night we were treated to a fantastic presentation by one of Avatar’s special effects designers Dan Lemmon from Weta Digital.  Hosted by the IALD, Dan’s talk was held at Hoyts cinema in Melbourne Central and attracted a crowd of around 200.  Dan took us through the development of visual effects over recent years and showed us some of his work on the Lord of the Rings and Avatar.  It is just incredible the amount of work that goes into a scene: they will have an image as a backdrop, insert some 3D hills, add a waterfall here, some mist there, a jungle full of trees, some flying banshees and then some animated semi-human creatures carrying machine guns.  It was especially interesting to see some of the ‘tricks of the trade’ where they get to modify some of the laws of physics to get the shot looking completely amazing.

This has to be one of the best presentations I have ever witnessed and I will never look at an animated film in quite the same way again.

Dan Lemmon in Melbourne