What a weekend and start for the week it has been for Cinesite, Kodak's visual effects facility over in London!  At 3am on Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of my cell phone receiving a text message and was instantly awake.  I grabbed my phone and received confirmation from Cinesite Production Director Courtney Vanderslice-Law that over in Los Angeles it had just been announced that our team of seven nominees have been awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects on the HBO mini-series Generation Kill!  Fantastic news for everyone here.



This is the second Emmy we have been awarded; the first was for Rome (also HBO) back in 2005.  We have also previously received three nominations and a Royal Television Society award for our broadcast work.  For a Kodak-owned company primarily known for our feature film visual effects, that's not a bad track record!



It has been an exciting 6 months for Cinesite in many ways, particularly because we have won great visual effects work on some really cool films, due for release in 2010 and 2011.  Watch this space for more news about the spectacular effects sequences we are currently creating for the following films: Marmaduke, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows: Parts I & II, Naked Beauty, Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Leap Year.  More productions will soon be announced.

Cinesite (a Kodak subsidiary) has done work on movies such as last year's Best Visual Effects Oscar® winner - The Golden Compass, Harry Potter,  Bedtime Stories, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Hellboy II, The Day The Earth Still and this year's Oscar® nominated The Dark Knight.

In the run-up to the Oscars®, spare a thought for Cinesite.  We have received two nominations for Outstanding Visual Effects in the prestigious annual Visual Effects Society awards, which are announced on 21st February.  This is for our work on the acclaimed HBO series Generation Kill.

We created all of the effects, all of which were photorealistic and although extensive, were noticed by few reviewers.  This is a good sign that we did our job well!

Below are two examples of our work.  The first shows the creation of an entirely computer generated "superhighway" of military vehicles entering Iraq at the spearhead of the invasion.  The vehicles, environment, road and atmospherics are all entirely CG.







The second example shows the American Marine base Camp Mathilda; much of the environment, vehicles and people milling around are computer generated.





Fingers crossed for the awards on 21st...