As part of the team nominated for Best Visual Effects at this year’s Academy Awards, Jeff White was the Visual Effects Supervisor at ILM on Marvel’s The Avengers, having worked on a little over 700 shots in the film.  After working as a Creature Technical Director on such films as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and Lemony Snicket’s: A Series of Unfortunate Events, White served as Digital Production Supervisor on Transformers, and then was elevated to Association Visual Effects Supervisor on the subsequent sequels Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon.

During this recent exclusive interview with Collider, Jeff White talked about how incredible the Oscar recognition is, which sequences ILM was involved with, collaborating with director Joss Whedon and Marvel, how he ended up working at ILM, and the shots that he’s most proud of pulling off.  He also talked about starting pre-production on Transformers 4, which he says has some really exciting stuff in it, his hopes to be involved with The Avengers 2, and what it’s been like to be involved with Transformers: The Ride, which is at Universal Studios Hollywood.  Check out what he had to say after the jump.

Amassing 1.5 billion box office dollars on the worldwide stage, it goes without saying that The Avengers was a huge success for Marvel this year. The film united superheroes from four independent movie franchises under one banner. No scene was more exemplary of this fact than the major sequence showing the heroes battling the Chitauri in a decimated New York City. It might have escaped your notice while you were caught up in the climactic scene, but not all of the on-screen heroes were flesh and blood (shocker). Now, a new featurette from Industrial Light & Magic shows just how this final battle scene was constructed. Hit the jump to check it out.

Earlier this summer, Universal invited us to go to Industrial Light & Magic, the effects studio behind Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other classic blockbusters.  With the upcoming release of Battleship on Blu-ray, we spoke with visual effects supervisors Grady Cofer and Pablo Helman.  When we look at visual effects, we tend to notice the in-your-face stuff, but the true magic is in effects you never see or immediately think about: the water droplets, the weight of objects, etc.  This is fascinating stuff, and in my interview with Cofer and Helman, we spoke about the challenges of animating water, how they translated the board game pegs into weapons, the sinking of the USS John Paul Jones, creating the shredder, and more.

Hit the jump to check out the interview.  Battleship hits Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital Download on August 28th.

Recently, I was invited to visit the ILM Campus in the Bay Area to discuss the development of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and see some of the new Blu-ray features that Disney has developed for the disc. While touring the effects house, I got to talk to visual effects art director Aaron McBride and visual effects supervisor Ben Snow.

During the interviews, Snow and McBride told me about how pirate maps influence the design of the films, why they can’t reuse digital armatures, what it’s like to be nominated for an Oscar, how the director influences the effects work, and more.  Read on for the complete interviews and a list of the 15 things I learned.

To promote the upcoming Blu-Ray release of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, hitting stores on October 18, Disney invited myself and a few other journalists up to the Bay Area to visit the Industrial Light and Magic campus and see how the film was made.

During my visit, I got to tour ILM, see concept art, some of which differs wildly from the finished product, and interview visual effects supervisor Ben Snow and visual effects director Aaron McBride. We’ll have write ups on the disc’s unique iPad-based interactive features as well as the interviews everyday this week, but today I just want to tell you about what it’s like to walk through the halls of ILM.  Hit the jump for the full story.

Good news people, we are only a month and a half away from the release of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. Very soon cinephiles from around the world will be able to celebrate the universal appeal of watching big robots go boom. Michael Bay has even seen fit to offer a $25,000 reward for anyone who can spot the racist robots from the last Transformers flick, so there’s really no reason not to be excited now that there’s a potential cash award involved. In celebration of this sure to be earth shattering cinematic event, a rather impressive special effects video from the first Transformers that Industrial Light & Magic posted has gone online. Though not a great deal of thought may have gone into the writing of these movies, the artistry behind the special effects is undeniably impressive. Hit the jump to see the massive scale model used for a single stunning shot in the greatest giant robot movie Michael Bay has made so far.

A week ago, the online community was in a tizzy when reports that the African American WWII airplane drama Red Tails was in a tailspin and that George Lucas would step it to make a hefty overhaul of the film in place of director Anthony Hemingway. Now, according to Nicole Sperling in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly [via The Playlist], much of that was grossly exaggerated.  Sperling reports that the reshoots are quite normal and this is nothing out of the ordinary. Of course, how Lucas and company plan to get the cast back together is something of a mystery, if in fact these reshoots weren’t worked into the schedule beforehand.

For a deeper explanation of the madness and why this story might not quite be finished, hit the jump.