Emmy-Nominated VFX Designer on Creating Terrible Worlds in The Man in the High Castle

Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle portrays a comprehensive and convincing alternate reality in which the Nazi Reich was victorious in World War II. It’s a disturbing world that fortunately never was, but the show is a hearty visual feast that dives unrestrained into the terror. Visual effects supervisor Lawson Deming guided his team to build entire cityscapes outside Hitler’s window, reimagines where technology would lead in an America controlled by the Nazi Reich,

The Man in the High Castle‘s Emmy-Nominated Production Designer on Building a Nightmare America

Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel Man in the High Castle imagined the horrors of living in an America where the Allies were defeated in World War II. The series follows Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) who refuses to accept the terrible outcome and believes that things could be another way. Production Designer Drew Boughton has received two Emmy nominations for his harrowing interpretation of a world in which Nazi Germany has seized most of the United States while Imperial Japan controls the west coast.

Composer Christopher Willis on Mickey Mouse Shorts, The Death of Stalin & More

From London’s Royal Academy of Music to Mickey Mouse? Why yes — for composer Christopher Willis, it’s all part of an extensive, varied resume that’s seen him receive a PhD in Musicology from Cambridge as well as score everyone’s favorite series in political satire, Veep. We sat down to chat about the rather complicated music going on in those Mickey Mouse Shorts, why creating a soundtrack to a Disney ride is so tricky,

Looking Back at the VFX of Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The 1980s were a pinnacle for practical effects, but CGI was still in its infancy by the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991. James Cameron is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time, but also tops the list for one of the most pioneering. Terminator 2 is being re-released in 3D and VFXBog did a super deep dive speaking with the effects team about what it took to make the film.

Emmy-nominated Casting Director on Finding the Kids of Stranger Things

Supernatural thriller Stranger Things co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer not only made the inspired choice to bring Winona Ryder out of semi-retirement to star as the show’s unhinged mother-in-crisis; they also assembled primetime’s most endearing ensemble of twelve-year olds to portray four adorable boys and one mesmerizing mystery girl. Emmy-nominated casting director Carmen Cuba, teamed with co-nominees Tara Feldstein Bennett and Chase Paris, looked at more than 1000 in-person and video auditions to find the kids of Stranger Things.

How Destiny Called Gotham‘s Emmy-Nominated Sound Editor

Emmy season is in the air, and fan-favorite Gotham has certainly not disappointed, racking up three nominations this year alone. The series is no stranger to Emmy nominations either; this is the third year in a row that the show has been recognized for its sound editing. Destiny Calling was the episode put forward for consideration this year, the intense first part of Season 3’s two-part finale. Gotham’s sound supervisor,

Veteran Documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein on his Yiddish Comedy Menashe

Making his scripted feature debut, director Joshua Z Weinstein drew not only on his background as a veteran documentary filmmaker but also on silent films. His Menashe is spoken nearly entirely in Yiddish, even though Weinstein speaks very little of the language, and it stars the largely unknown Hassidic comic and actor Menashe Lusting, whom Weinstein describes as “Chaplinesque.”

Yiddish was necessary because Menashe, a contemporary father-son story.

Gretchen Mol on Finding the Complexity in a Mother’s Story in A Family Man

In A Family Man, Gerard Butler plays an ambitious headhunter determined to win an important promotion – until his young son becomes critically ill and he has to rethink his priorities.  Gretchen Mol plays Butler’s wife and the mother of the sick child. In an interview with The Credits, she talked about what she learned from her extensive theater work (including a starring role in “Chicago” on Broadway) and how she made the too-often thankless role of the “you’re never home” wife into a real and complex character in this film.

Annabelle: Creation Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre on What Gave him Goosebumps

Films from The Conjuring universe have been scaring and thrilling audiences in equal measure for years. The fourth movie, Annabelle: Creation, hits theater today, and is sure to deliver more of the high-quality horror we have come to expect from the series. Already raking in praise and positive reviews, Annabelle: Creation undoubtedly owes part of its success to the vision of cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. Having worked on an array of terrifying films,

Double Emmy Nominee Ann Dowd Talks The Handmaid’s Tale and The Leftovers

Frightening to begin with, The Handmaid’s Tale gets even more creepy fifteen minutes into the first episode with the introduction of “Aunt Lydia.” Played with fierce authority by Ann Dowd, Lydia hectors a group of young women forced to bear children for the men who rule near-future “Gilead.” Striding around the classroom in short hair, drab gown and combat boots, Lydia stops at the desk of a surly student and abruptly jabs the handmaid with a cattle prod.

Emmy-Nominated Veep Writers Master Insult-Driven Satire in the Age of Trump

On the face of it, few things sound less intrinsically funny than “presidential library.” And yet for ten wickedly hilarious episodes this spring, HBO comedy Veep packed in more jokes per minute than any of its competition by tracking the self-glorifying quests of a narcissistic politician, expert in the art of personal attacks, who’s willing to say anything and betray anybody if it means holding onto power. Portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Selina Meyer spends most of the season on a quest to memorialize her eight-month “legacy”

Writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton on Adapting Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle

Writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton re-teamed with his Short Term 12 star Brie Larson for The Glass Castle, based on Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about her chaotic childhood. Walls’ parents struggled with substance abuse and mental illness, and their four children were often hungry and neglected. Larson plays Walls as a young adult, professionally successful as a gossip columnist in New York. As the film opens, we see her leave an elegant restaurant after dinner with her Wall Street fiancé and his prospective client. From her taxi,

The Brilliant Sound Technique That Makes Dunkirk so Viscerally Intense

We’ve written quite a bit about Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, specifically about the film’s boundary pushing technical brilliance. We explained to you why it matters that the film was shot in 70-mm (and how it affects your movie-going experience), and we wrote about how Nolan and his team’s use of IMAX cameras helped tell one of the most miraculous escapes in military history.

Now,

Game of Thrones Explainer: Bringing Dragons To Life Demands Animators Follow The Sun

First a skeleton, then the meat. Next some scales, then some fire. A layer of color. A layer of shading. Then some motion. Frame by frame.

It might not be as grueling as battling a dragon, or defending all of Westeros from hordes of White Walkers, but making the dragons of Game of Thrones come to is a Herculean feat all its own. It’s one that up to 30 animators do daily at visual effects company Pixomondo.

Taylor Sheridan Talks his Chilling Directorial Debut Wind River

From actor (lawman David Hale on FX’s Sons of Anarchy) to acclaimed screenwriter (2015’s Mexican drug-war thriller Sicario, 2016’s Texas-set neo-Western Hell or High Water) to writer-director (Wind River, opening today), Taylor Sheridan has had quite a career trajectory since he first popped up on the Hollywood scene in the mid-90s as a TV acting staple. The 47-year-old Lone Star native considers his three feature films so far to be part of a trilogy that examines the state of the American frontier,

The Handmaid’s Tale DP on Using Old Lenses, Vermeer and Drones to Conjure Dystopia

Liverpool-born cinematographer Colin Watkinson quit his job as a surveyor to work as an entry-level “runner” on a British soundstage, rose through the ranks to shoot Tarsem Singh’s The Fall in 2006, and on the strength of that film’s universally hailed visuals, became one of Los Angeles’ most prolific television commercial DPs. By the time cinematographer-turned director Reed Moreno invited him to shoot The Handmaid’s Tale in Toronto,

Landline‘s Costume Designer on Bringing Back ’90’s New York Fashion

Most of us would like to think that the 1990s weren’t that long ago, but the age of dial up Internet, CDs and home phones has already been made into period piece Landline. Love or loath what you wore at the end of the millenium, you’ll definitely recognize some of these looks. Costume designer Elisabeth Vastola combed through consignment racks to revive the era in a recognizable and authentic way. Set in New York,

Legendary Playwright, Author, Actor & All Around Icon Sam Shepard Passes Away

Sam Shepard, age 73, has died from complications due to Lou Gehrig’s disease at his home in Kentucky. It is hard to measure Sam Shepard’s impact on contemporary art, performing and otherwise, for several reasons. He was a prolific worker, yielding a vast array of award winning plays, short stories, film scripts, and memorable performances over his lifetime.

One cannot precisely say what Shepard is best known for. He co-wrote for Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara,

Talking to Emmy-Nominated Ewan McGregor About Splitting Himself for his Fargo Dual Roles

For years, Ewan McGregor yearned to play a role that required complete physical transformation, but the timing couldn’t have been worse when Fargo creator Noah Hawley asked the svelte actor to grow a beer belly. “I had a jawline that you could cut paper on and I’d never been so fit in my life,” laughs McGregor, who remembers returning to Los Angeles in top physical condition after shooting “Trainspotting 2” in his native Scotland.

Emmy Nominated Planet Earth II Composers on Scoring the Most Interesting Animals in the World

Ten years after the original series aired, BBC returns to explore our natural world in Planet Earth II. The stunning exploration of the green planet’s jungles, grasslands, deserts and more spawned a viral video of a daring iguana escaping certain death that couldn’t be more hair-raising if it had been scripted. The show’s dynamic score earned composers Jasha Klebe and Jacob Shea of Bleeding Fingers Music an Emmy nomination. The duo had worked separately on major blockbusters including