special effects

Imocap image courtesy Animation Weekly News

Much like puberty and Ramadan, the movie awards season begins earlier and earlier each year. But this year, the nerds get to fire the opening salvo. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (emphasis on the "Sciences") has released its short list of nominees for the Science and Technical Oscars. The list includes some of the best known names in computer animation and special effects, like Pixar and Industrial Light and Magic, as well as some less famous companies that have been quietly changing the process of filmmaking.

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Remember those weird ghoulish souls coming out of the Arc of the Covenant in the first Indy flick? Well, Hollywood has come a long way since then. And while Indiana Jones himself may have lost a step since he last appeared on the big screen, the effects backing him up this time promise to be a vast improvement. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fedora-wearing adventurer will encounter strange creatures, including an army of monkeys, race through some wild jungle scenery and face-down thousands of man-eating ants - thanks to Industrial Light & Magic.

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Its blockbuster season, and that means mad scientists, angry robots and a certain flexibility with the laws of physics. Heres our guide to movies made especially with PopSci fans in mind. In it, a roundup of the season's best (and worst) geek candy, along with our expected gibberish quotient, so youll know which lines are pure comedy—even if no one else is laughing.

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Filming conventional high-speed action fare is hard enough, but to bring the classic cartoon Speed Racer to life, the Wachowski brothers had to contend with 300mph racecars sporting fanciful features like robotic reconnaissance pigeons and wheels that can rotate 180 degrees. With 2,300 visual-effects (VFX) shots—twice as many as last year’s eye-popping 300—it heralds the future of summer-blockbuster fare: The entire movie, aside from the human actors, exists only in a computer.

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New York City has just been destroyed by a 40-foot-tall deluge. Pirates battle around a giant, violent whirlpool. Without years of work by the 2007 Scientific and Technical Oscar winners, none of those images would have made it to a computer—and then a multiplex—near you.

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