Fxguide has a nice rundown of some of our local VFX work for Grimm, featuring Hive-FX and Bent Image Lab. Much of the Bent breakdowns you see in the article were the basis of Fred Ruff’s VFX/PDX presentation last year, which also made the rounds both internationally and at Siggraph. Check out the fxguide article here.
Definitely worth a look – this is the sort of bread & butter work that’s keeping the Portland VFX machine humming! Be sure to check out the respective Grimm reels for both Bent and Hive-FX, and the Oregon film intern promo piece that featured both companies.
Looking towards the future, it will be interesting to see what the Portland studios are able to do with the creature pipelines refined through this constant flow of Grimm work. There are already rumblings of some indy films and other projects in the works, no doubt in part being leveraged against the flashy Grimm CG.
Speaking of some leveraging – it was sad to hear the last episode of Leverage Season 5 is indeed the series finale and there will be no 6th season in the works. But cheers to Dean Devlin and crew on that all-important 5th season and syndication! Hopefully Devlin can roll the momentum into possibly finding Leverage a new network home for a 6th season in the future (before being fully immersed in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day 2 and other pilot projects). There are certainly enough rabid fans out there chomping at the bit for more. Petitions, even!
Either way, Leverage had a good run and is definitely a source of Portland pride! Next time, in addition to our fantastic production crews – hopefully future Leverage work can employ some of our top tier VFX talent as well. Best of luck to them as they rally behind the battle cry: “Let’s go steal a season 6!“