Digital Domain: The Leading Edge of Visual Effects

by Piers Bizony

A fascinating exploration of one of the great movie effects companies takes readers deep inside Digital Domain in search of film magic and provides frame-by-frame deconstructions that demonstrate how stunning visual and special effects were created for such movies as Titanic, The X-Men, Apollo 13, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Genres: Nonfiction

250 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2002

About the author

Piers Bizony is a science journalist and space historian who writes for magazines such as Focus and Wired as well as the Independent. His award-winning book on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was described as 'full of sparkling enthusiasm' by the New Scientist and 'excellent, in every way worthy of Kubrick's original precision-crafted vision' by the Evening Standard.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Piers Bizony states, in his introduction, that he wanted to write this for himself and other moviegoers who “would be interested to discover how visual effects are conceived and produced in the computer age” with the minimum of technical gobbledegook. And, essentially, he does achieve that but trying to explain the various computerised processes is, quite often, terribly dull - it’s all scatter patterns and elements and this-that-and-the-other. As I’ve said in the past, making-of books for me are much more interesting when you see people photographing models, or building them, or creating matte paintings - it’s tedious to see people cramped around a monitor, or see comparison photos which are essentially colour overlays for the various computer programs. The book is a decent attempt, certainly and on the practical side of the effects there are some terrific pictures, but too much of it got bogged down in computers and I ended up skipping chunks of it. A worthwhile read but not what I would consider essential.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book - it charts the creation of the company and introduces some of their famous projects. It explains how some of its most famous works were created - the challenges that they met. Special effects fall in to two categories - those effects that we know are not real - they are totally impossible and as such the effects challenge is to make us accept them and ignore them, while the other category is where they are so subtle and unassuming that we totally over look them, the team behind Digital Domain have proven themselves masters of this so many times over.