Worth a mention - 07/07/11

Transformers: Dark of the Moon Reaches $645 Million Worldwide‘Transformers 3’ - Wins Top Grossing Film in 2011

(Box Office Mojo) Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon continued its worldwide box office domination this weekend, adding another $47 million domestically and $93 million overseas. In North America, the Paramount Pictures release has earned $261 million and internationally it is up to $384 million, for a massive worldwide total of $645 million after less than two weeks in theaters. The sequel, which cost a reported $195 million to make, has passed up The Hangover Part II ($250.8 million) to become the top grossing domestic film so far this year.




"John Carter" Director Talks "Avatar Level Effects"

(comingsoon.net) "It's a little bit like Christmas," beams the eternally-jubilant Andrew Stanton, "I can't wait to show off some of this stuff."

He's got every reason to be excited. In moments, He's just shown the first-ever audience scenes from his own first-ever foray into live-action film making, John Carter. For Stanton and for fellow fans of the character the world over, the hero's debut on the big screen has been a long time coming.

Though ComingSoon.net has been asked not to go into deep detail of the footage yet, what was shown was very impressive. Opting for a photo-realistic look, the cinematic world of John Carter would find its visual match in something like "The Lord of the Rings." In the same way that Peter Jackson allowed the incredible natural beauty of New Zealand to represent Middle Earth, Stanton allows the otherworldly desolation of Utah's desert to stand in as the surface of Mars with only the slightest bit of CGI trickery to sell the illusion.

Stanton Adds:

Hitting the design of the aliens is where things get really impressive, blending Avatar level effects into the real-world scenery. Since Tharks stand more than the double the height of the average man, alien actors like Willem Dafoe (Tars Tarkas) and Samantha Morton (Sola) actually performed their scenes on stilts with performance-capture headsets to preserve their facial expressions. Decidedly less cartoony than any iteration of Tharks fans have seen before, Stanton's warriors are slender, pale green and, fascinatingly, have enough facial distinction to separate them from one another.




Final Harry Potter VFX Push Crews To 100hr Weeks

(bendigoadvertiser.com.au) AMANDA Pamela might not be Bendigo’s biggest Harry Potter fan but she has a large part of herself invested in the franchise.

Ms Pamela has just finished work on the final Harry Potter film, which will be released next week.

The 26-year-old works on film special effects, one of the final stages of production before a film is released.

But long before she was working on Harry Potter films Ms Pamela was a child reading JK Rowling’s famous series.

“I started reading the first book at school,” she said.

“I never thought I would end up being a fan and working on (the films).

“By the second time I was working on Potter some of the magic had gone, but I’m still a fan and keen to see the film when it’s completely finished.

“A lot of projects finish close to the deadline, you’re

under pressure but I love the whole line of work.”

See print screens of scenes Amanda worked on

The visual effects artist arrived in Australia from Indonesia at age 12 and attended Flora Hill Primary School.

Ms Pamela completed her schooling at Flora Hill Secondary and Bendigo Senior Secondary colleges, graduating in 2003.

“I went to university to do digital design, it never occurred to me to work on films,” she said.

“It’s a small industry and not many people know about it.”

Ms Pamela said she was a fan of Star Wars growing up, a film franchise that relied heavily on visual effects artists.

Visual effects artists put the final touches to special effects in films.

“I did some research (on visual effects) and thought: ‘this is great, it’s what I want’,” Ms Pamela said.

“I deferred my degree and went for another course in San Francisco to study effects and animation.”

After finishing university, she began working on films as a visual effects artist.

“(Visual artists) go where the work is so the next big step will be America or New Zealand,” she said.

The 26-year-old said passion for film and a desire to survive in the industry were the keys to working in film.

“Towards the end of a film we can be working 80 to 100 hours a week, just to get it done.

“Every time I see the movie, I am waiting for my effect and trying to blend it to the story.

“A lot of the time we don’t get sounds, just the shot, and have to work on the image itself.

“It’s good to see how it all comes together, it’s good to see it finished.”

Ms Pamela began special effects work on the BBC’s Animalia and moved to Sydney to work on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, kids’ film Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the last two Harry Potter films.

Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows part 1 was nominated for an Oscar in visual effects at this year’s Academy Awards but lost to Inception.

While the Harry Potter films weren’t filmed in Australia, Australian effects companies get a lot of international work.

“We finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part two about a month ago,” she said.

“The (Australian) vendors always find work, we have some of the top effects vendors.

“Companies distribute the films, one company in Adelaide has been doing the Potter series since the third one.”

Ms Pamela said getting your foot in the door was the toughest part of the industry.

“We promote ourselves by sending reels to companies, it sort of happens behind the curtain. The more films you have under your belt, the easier it gets.”




Turbo-Charging Digital Render Farms

(datacenterknowledge.com) The visual effects in summer blockbuster sequels Kung Fu Panda 2 and Cars 2 were generated with powerful workstations and render farms. Here’s a closer look at some of the technology driving those projects.

Long time partners HP and DreamWorks Animation united once again to create Kung Fu Panda 2. DreamWorks artists used powerful HP Z800 workstations when designing whirling water and lush green lands, as well as battle scenes filled with thousands of animated martial artists. “The creative ambition for ‘Kung Fu Panda 2′ again pushed DreamWorks Animation to the cutting edge of technology,” said Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation. “The film’s lead characters are some of the most intricate ever created and the environments are among the richest and most vibrant in CG filmmaking. HP technology continues to help us cross these new boundaries, develop new standards for the filmmaking industry and ultimately create enjoyable films for audiences around the world.” The original “Kung Fu Panda” film, released in 2008, used more than 50 terabytes of data and required nearly 25 million render hours. With the switch to stereoscopic 3-D and the ever-escalating creative aspirations of the filmmakers, “Kung Fu Panda 2″ used 100 terabytes of data and required more than 55 million render hours. The final battle sequence in the film took more than 7 million render hours to produce 14,000 frames.

Pixar introduced some new technological breakthroughs in “Cars 2,” which required the company to triple the size and scale of its legendary render farm. New visual approaches to creating choppy ocean water and car reflections were met by technical teams with a powerful render farm located in the main Pixar headquarters building. The compute power required to for “Cars 2″ averaged 11.5 hours to render each frame. Some of the more complex sequences that involved ray tracing took as much as 80 or 90 hours per frame to render. The expanded render farm features 12,500 cores on Dell render blades and Pixar also ‘boosted’ its file servers and the network backbone.

Visual effects provider Whiskytree has implemented a clustered solution of Avere FXT 2300 appliances to scale its rendering performance by 700 percent, while reliably consolidating SAN and NAS data into a single storage pool and simplifying management. The storage fabric selected for the render farm is based on Arista Networks 10 GbE switches and Arista EOS switch software that provides new features for provisioning, scaling and managing networks. Whiskytree offers visual effects, post-production, concept art and design services and has worked on such films as Thor, Tron:Legacy and Terminator Salvation. With a growing render farm and the need to scale data fast and easily, Whiskytree sought out a solution that could support its existing Xsan environment and allow for a seamless transition from SAN to NAS. “On the networking front, we needed to increase performance to optimize the render farm’s utilization. The Arista installation was straightforward and the performance exceeded our expectations,” said Jonathan Harb, CEO of Whiskytree. “We’re now looking to extend 10GbE to our production workstations to further improve artist productivity while using standard twisted pair cabling.”




The Genius of Douglas Trumbull

(guardian.co.uk) Even for a director as accomplished as Terrence Malick, creating the universe can present a few problems. Hardly known for his special effects extravaganzas, Malick's approach to film-making – capturing spontaneous events – doesn't jibe with the pre-planned discipline of CGI processes; they're just too synthetic for his more organic methodology. Instead, Malick had to go with methods and skill sets that have virtually vanished. For the spectacular, epic, 22-minute birth of creation sequence in his new film The Tree of Life, Malick contacted one of the few people with the necessary experience, ability and creative drive to get the results he needed. In short, he needed Douglas Trumbull, a man who hadn't worked in feature films for almost 30 years, a man who may just be the saviour of cinema.

An artistic, self confessed "geeky creative", Trumbull had no real plan to become a special effects technician. The Los Angeleno arrived in Hollywood in the early-60s with a portfolio "all full of science fiction, alien planets, spaceships, things like that". He found work in advertising, doing layouts and paste-up work, while looking for a way in to the world of cinema. He was soon pointed in the direction of the small Graphic Films company, who made space films for Nasa. It was here that he did all the artwork for a short called To The Moon And Beyond – the only film shot in the Cinerama 360 process, whereby circular images were projected on to a domed planetarium screen. Shown at the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the film caught the attention of director Stanley Kubrick and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, there researching a possible collaboration called Journey To The Stars.

Impressed with what he saw, Kubrick struck a deal with Graphic to take their best people over to England to work on the movie. The 23-year-old Trumbull quickly found himself transplanted to London, given all the resources of a major studio as a nine month gig turned into almost three years and the film was renamed 2001: A Space Odyssey.
douglas trumbull brainstorm Douglas Trumbull on the set of Brainstorm. Photo: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM

It's hard to imagine a better introduction into the world of film-making than 2001. Trumbull not only learned how to make the most of his creative impulses, he also learned the technical side of film-making to the highest possible standard. "There was every conceivable level of quality control that Stanley Kubrick himself supervised." Trumbull recalls. "Extreme testing, constant rigorous monitoring, on every camera and projector." Trumbull also approached Kubrick with an idea he had been working on, an effect that involved moving artwork while the shutter remained open, to solve the problem of the film's legendary Stargate sequence. "It required the building of a special camera," says Trumbull. "Once we got the thing going, it worked perfectly for months, running almost 24 hours a day."

Seeing the finished film, Trumbull was impressed at the immersive qualities of the climactic sequences and saw that this was an area worth exploring. But Hollywood had other ideas for him and so began years of trade-offs:

he would provide special effects for such films as The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters, Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but only so he could finance his plans to raise the state of the art and, also, further his ambitions to direct.

Trumbull's debut as director, Silent Running (1972), was an innovative piece of sci-fi that remains influential today. His second feature, however, ended in tragedy. Brainstorm (1983) was planned as spectacular trip into the inner mind utilising Trumbull's revolutionary Showscan process, a large-format, high-speed film technique offering images that would be indistinguishable from reality. But when star Natalie Wood drowned during production, the studio turned its back on Trumbull.

This meant a return to what he knew best, and Trumbull concentrated fully on developing his techniques. Decades of research and development followed, resulting in impressive, immersive theme park displays such as the Back To The Future ride at Universal and regular, unwanted offers of FX work. Unwanted, that is, until Terrence Malick came calling. "I just did [The Tree Of Life] as a friend," he says. "There's nowhere you can go to order up special effects like this, so I suggested we open up a little laboratory and do some experiments."

Dan Glass, the film's visual effects supervisor, takes up the story. "Terry approached me about five years ago with the project. It was something of a surprise – I never expected to be working with a film-maker like Malick. But it was clear a different approach was needed here. So we set up a little lab called Skunkworks and met up and brought in the cameras every few weeks."
'I'm exploring a new territory that goes way beyond what cinema has always been'

To show the swirling cosmic soup that the universe formed from, and other phenomena, experimentation was the order of the day. The creation sequence goes from sub-atomic occurrences that stretch nanoseconds to cosmic events that condense millennia. The approach was something like alchemy: using materials more likely to be found in a hardware store than a hi-tech CGI workshop (fluorescent dyes, flares, CO2, paints, chemicals, even milk), they came across images that were unique, striking and often accidental. It was up to Malick to keep them inspired and on the right track.

For Trumbull it was a return to happier times. "It was a working environment that's almost impossible to come by these days," he says. "Terry wanted to create the opportunity for the unexpected to occur before the camera, then make something of that. He didn't want to use a very stringent design process, he wanted the unexpected phenomenon to occur – and use that."

While computers were used to manipulate the images, Glass believes the key to the success of the sequence – virtually a film within a film – was variety. "We had a lot of vendors for the bits used. What you're seeing is practically a different technique used for every shot, which keeps it looking interesting and harder to figure out for the viewer. We all wanted to impress Terry. There's loads of this stuff that didn't even make it into the finished film."

For Trumbull it's just another in a long line of triumphs, the only difference being that this one is in the public eye. Over the years he has developed Showscan, brought IMAX to the public, worked on the Magicam realtime video compositing system (as seen in Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series), and even toiled away on an early interactive videogame. An impressive enough list of accomplishments these days – but when you consider these projects were all started in the late-70s, it's even more astounding.

MGM and Paramount, who financed a lot of these developments, ultimately lost interest and passed on them. It's only now that directors like Peter Jackson and James Cameron have the clout to effect the changes Trumbull predicted and developed. Both Jackson's The Hobbit and Cameron's Avatar 2 will be shot at over double the usual speed of 24 frames per second – the idea being that faster you go, the clearer and more realistic the images. "I was doing this, what, 35 years ago," notes Trumbull.

The Tree of Life, though, has put Trumbull back in the game and he has big plans in mind. "I'm developing some high frame-rate 3-D processes that are going to be, I hope, indistiguishable from reality. This will be quite an unusual cinematic event – you don't just tell an ordinary story, it's more of a first-person experience where the melodrama doesn't get in the way. Being inside the movie rather than looking at the movie. I'm exploring a new territory that goes way beyond the experience of what cinema has always been." He laughs. "It's always been a struggle and probably always will be a struggle."





'Apes' Revives Performance-Capture Debate

Actor Andy Serkis arrives on the red carpet before a ceremony honoring British cinema at the Marrakech International Film Festival in Marrakech on November 19, 2008. (UPI Photo/David Silpa)

PASADENA, Calif., July 9 (UPI) -- The special-effects boss on the new "Planet of the Apes" film says Andy Serkis was the humanoid who made the computer-generated ape Cesar as effective as he is.

Serkis doesn't appear directly in "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes," but his talents are channeled on the screen by Cesar through the "performance capture" process, which VFX Supervisor Joe Letteri said puts his ape a step ahead of standard computer-generated critters.

"Performance capture (is) really (designed) to give you the actors' moment -- the spontaneity, the thought, the insight that really comes from an actor who really truly understands his role," Letteri said this week at a lecture on the new film in Pasadena.

The Hollywood Reporter said a positive reception for Serkis after "Apes" is released next month could revive the debate within the movie industry about how performance capture fits into the Academy Awards and other film honors. Serkis was used for the performance-capture character Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" 10 years ago and was basically snubbed for the acting nominations.

Serkis, in fact, did act out his scenes with his co-stars on the set of the movie, but he was overlayed with the computer-created ape.

"There's the look, the physicality -- bones, muscle, tissue, fur," Letteri said. "In a way, that is just the starting point, what we are really after is the performance."




Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri Talks Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes!

WETA's Joe Letteri talks in detail about the process behind creating a convincing army of digital apes for the upcoming prequel, which stars James Franco and Freida Pinto!

Take a look: http://comicbookmovie.com/fansites/joshw24/news/?a=41243




SIGGRAPH Announces Winner of 2011 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art

(villagegamer.net) ACM SIGGRAPH, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques will present its Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art to Charles Csuri for his visionary and creative merging of art and technology.

Through his work, Csuri inspired generations to embrace computer imaging as a serious form of artistic investigation. An artist, computer graphics pioneer and professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Csuri will receive the award at SIGGRAPH 2011 in Vancouver, BC, August 8.Charles Csuri

ACM SIGGRAPH Art Award Chair Cynthia Beth Rubin said Csuri is a true visionary. “Decades ago he embraced the aesthetic potential of early computer imaging, and since then he has unfailingly worked in both teaching and aesthetic production, keeping us growing, discussing, and moving forward.”

Csuri was instrumental in the establishment of Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), a leading center on the use and integration of emerging arts technologies, with funding from the National Science Foundation. “Chuck Csuri’s early and unique vision of an interdisciplinary collaborative, creative research center between the arts and sciences continues to permeate our culture,” said Maria Palazzi, director of ACCAD. “All of us who have had the privilege to study and work in this environment are profoundly grateful to Chuck for his vision, persistence and leadership in this field and at Ohio State. He has impacted the lives of generations of students who are now top professionals in graphics and animation throughout the world.”




'Rango' a Game-Changer for ILM

(torontosun.com) SAN FRANCISCO -- The unlikely but thrilling success of Rango, one weird little animated western that garnered upbeat critical reviews and generated decent box office earlier this year, has changed George Lucas' special effects shop forever.

These are the people who originally created everything from the light sabers to the spaceships for Lucas' Star Wars movies. These are the people who make up the braintrust and working artists at Industrial Light & Magic, a unit of Lucasfilm that has spent 35 years creating effects for an incredible diversity of films and franchises. These are the people whose credits range from Star Wars to Indiana Jones, Ghost Busters, Star Trek, Back to the Future, The Mummy, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar and one-offs as different as The Last Temptation of Christ, The Abyss, Galaxy Quest, The Perfect Storm and idiocy such as The Love Guru.

Yet Rango, brought to ILM by Gore Verbinski after he worked with the shop on the first three Pirates episodes, has sent wonderfully creative shock waves through the studio in San Francisco's storied Presidio neighbourhood. Rango is the first animated feature ILM has ever made from beginning to end. It will not be the last. And audiences will benefit.

"Well, it already has," ILM's Hal Hickel says when Sun Media asks whether Rango will change the way ILM approaches filmmaking. The timing for the interview is appropriate: Rango debuts Friday as a stand-alone DVD and as a Blu-ray combo pack loaded with making-of extras. With $242.6 million in boxoffice receipts worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, Rango is already in a profit position. It cost an estimated $135 million. But it needs strong home entertainment rentals and sales to push it into mega-hit territory. Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment is expecting that to happen. Meanwhile, ILM is enjoying the ride.

Working on Rango has expanded what ILM does, says Hickel, animation director on the project. "I mean, there are a lot of things about doing animated films that are very different from live action. For one thing, with visual effects, we are almost always working within the context of filmed footage that we are adding stuff to. Occasionally, we have sequences that are all CG, but those are rare. Mostly, it's a framed shot. We have a dinosaur that's over here and he has to get over there for the explosion. Animated films are a lot more of a blank slate."

Verbinski married his own core team on Rango with the ILM team of computer animators. "Gore really felt very strongly (about this). We had a great relationship with him from the Pirates film but I think it was very much the visual effects vendor relationship. Gore really wanted to make sure that, on this film, we felt that we were all filmmakers. We were all making this film together. We were in it from the beginning to the end. And that was kind of a nice cultural change for everyone. Everyone felt a lot more invested. They felt they had more authorship over the work. I think that was huge. And, technically, there were a lot of challenges to overcome with the size of the project."

So, is ILM eager to do it again? "Yes," says Hickel, "absolutely!"

Paramount is now ramping up its own animation department and could employ ILM again as a rival production house to giants such as Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks. Rango is so not what ILM is used to doing and that is a good thing. "It's definitely not the kind of film that George would have made," Hickel says. "It's a very specific weird little thing."

And people love it ... even George Lucas.

Canadian animator can relate to Rango

An introverted Canadian animator contributed to the creative lunacy of Rango, a colourful chameleon who overcomes his fear and cleans up crime in a dusty desert town in the animated film.

"I think I got into animation because I'm a shy Canadian," says Ottawa-born and Sheridan College-trained Kevin Martel. "And it's way easier to do a performance hidden behind a couple of (computer) monitors and a keyboard than it is to actually stand up on a stage."

That is way Martel is in awe of what the voice cast members of Rango -- led by Johnny Depp as the title character but also including Isla Fisher as the heroine and Ned Beatty as the arch villain inspired by John Huston in Chinatown -- did in their recordings. They were all amazing, Martel says, explaining at his computer at Industrial Light and Magic how animators combined what the actors offered with the drawings of production designer Mark (Crash) McCreery. There was also the creative input of director Gore Verbinski and other sources.

"We put a lot of ourselves in there, too," Martel says. For Depp's Rango, a lonely critter thrust into an existential crisis, it was personal. "I know, for me, it's always good when you get a character you can relate to and I can relate to a lot of his awkwardness. I spent a lot of time growing up drawing -- isolated -- and here at work it's very isolated. So that's definitely another piece of the puzzle for each animator to find something that they can identify with and connect with and they can bring something of themselves into the character."

The Rango character, Martel says, should not be so popular, yet he is. "He is one ugly fella but, somehow, endearing."




KABOOM! Michael Bay Coming to Shanghai for Transformers 3 Premiere

(shanghaiist.com) Michael Bay, the explosion-happy director of "Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon", is coming to Shanghai for the Mainland China premiere of the third outing in the Transfomers franchise. It's been out worldwide for the last few weeks (and has grossed around $500 million), with pirated copies already available in the mainland. Its official run in Chinese theaters begins next Thursday, on July 21st.

Chinese are big fans of the Transformers movies, and are likely to be proud of the product placement of Chinese products in the latest shapeshifting robot spectacle. The last Transformers movie, "Revenge of the Fallen", featured Optimus Prime fighting with Demolisher in a Shanghai industrial district. Though the robots don't appear in China in the latest iteration of the Transformers box office juggernaut, plenty of Chinese products do, including Shuhua Milk, Meters/Bonwe and Lenovo.

Bay will be at the premiere with Shia Lebouf and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in tow, the two actors who happen to be the leading humans in the movie (the explosions are the real stars of any Michael Bay schlock-fest). Huntington-Whiteley replaced Megan Fox after she compared Bay to Hitler, a removal which came at the behest of none other than the Box Office Ubermensch himself.

The movie's been playing in Hong Kong for several weeks, and has already blown up box office records there. Theater owners believe it will be the first non-James Cameron movie to shatter the HKD$100 million record.





Star Wars Brings Out the Futuristic Side of Dubai

(thenational.ae) DUBAI // The Star Wars creator George Lucas has gained a reputation as one of Hollywood’s great recluses, seldom speaking in public or giving interviews.
Picture gallery:The Dubai Invasion

Parisien photographer Cedric Delsaux uses Dubai's urban landscape as the backdrop for the third and last installment of his Star Wars themed series where various iconic characters are merged with reality.

More from Sound & Vision

But now the legendary director, who describes himself as shy, has been moved to break his silence to give his verdict on a book about Dubai.

The work is Dark Lens, which features photographs by the French artist Cédric Delsaux that depict characters and spaceships from the Star Wars films against the backdrop of scenes of Dubai. In one image a droid army masses along Sheikh Zayed Road, in another the unmistakable figure of Darth Vader gazes out at night at a half-constructed building and in a third, the giant shape of an AT-AT Walker, barely visible through the sandy haze, looms over an intersection.

The book is due to be published later this year and has an introduction by Lucas, who writes: “Over the years, many artists have interpreted Star Wars in ways that extend well beyond anything we saw in the films.

“One of the most unique and intriguing interpretations that I have seen is in the work of Cédric Delsaux, who has cleverly integrated Star Wars characters and vehicles into stark urban, industrial – but unmistakably earthbound – environments. As novel and disruptive as his images are, they are also completely plausible.”

The works were first exhibited under the title The Dark Lens: Dubai Invasion, held at the Empty Quarter gallery at the Dubai International Financial Centre in 2009, and quickly became a hot topic among Star Wars bloggers.

“It’s developed into a cult thing, which I didn’t expect when it opened,” said Elie Domit, the gallery’s creative partner. “There were only 20 people at the opening, which isn’t many.

“But the show went on to be very successful sales-wise, mainly with Dubai-based and Sharjah-based collectors.”

Delsaux had already produced digitally manipulated photos featuring Star Wars characters in other settings, and was at first reluctant to reprise the idea in Dubai.

“I approached him in 2007 to do this project but he didn’t want to do it; he didn’t want to repeat himself,” Mr Domit said. “Then I insisted and in 2008 he came to Dubai to shoot.

“The idea was not that we were into the Star Wars thing. Star Wars is more like the psyche of the pop culture that we grew up in, the sci-fi fantasy world. It’s a phenomenon that represents popular culture, and everyone interprets the symbolism in their own way.

“This is why we said in the text at the exhibition, perhaps half-jokingly, that people build cities so they can live in a sci-fi world, and Dubai is a prime example of this. Before the crisis, if you had seen a Star Wars ship you would have thought it was a new property or a new project, that’s how over-the-top this city was, and we zoned in on this kind of thing.”

¿The process of creating the pictures has evolved over the years. The first step is to shoot the backdrops, then Delsaux photographs the models in his studio, making sure the lighting matches the outdoor settings. The two are then merged digitally.

“At first it was toys that were embedded into the images,” Mr Domit said. “Later it was 3D models; he worked with the George Lucas team with the real models from the films.

“It’s a matter of getting the right model and the right lighting, so for example the picture of the drone army on Sheikh Zayed Road took several months to create.”

The Dark Lens book is due to be launched in October by French publisher Éditions Xavier Barral and will cost €39 (Dh206). It contains an essay by Kazys Varnelis, a US academic, who writes: “That the Millennium Falcon flies past the upper reaches of the Burj Khalifa seems almost plausible. Indeed, it raises the question of which is stranger: the familiar forms of Star Wars or the unfamiliar forms of the urban landscape.” Next page

Take a look: http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/the-dubai-star-wars-invasion