ILM Releases Pacific Rim FX Reel

Gipsy Danger and other Kaiju are Isolated w/o Atmospherics Revealing Great Detail 

A new FX reel has been released by the team of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). In the video you get to see wireframes, layers of effects to add depth to environments and even the skeleton and musculature of kaiju.

It is quite an amazing reel, and I should probable just let it speak for itself. . .

3D Artist Creates Magnificent Category 5 Pacific Rim Kaiju

3D artist Marcus Dublin created this magnificent kaiju named Titanus (click picture to enlarge) 

 "I loved the designs of the [Pacific Rim] Kaiju so much that I decided to make one of my very own." --Marcus Dublin; 3D artist

This 3D model has so many novel details while staying true to the style to Pacific Rim, it is definitely a master piece. If we were to have any critique it would be that the silhouette is a little too similar to Leatherback, but with the the innovative placement of the exo-platting and horns that seem inspired by a  triceratops head plate is true genius. There is more than enough detail to make this Kaiju stand out on it's own.

Marcus Dublin's skills goes far beyond model making, he has rendered his model in different environments with different lighting and paid strict attention to textures. And the glowing kaiju blue highlights are as if Guillermo Del Toro drew them himself. If you look at the spiral marking of creatures from Hellboy or Pan's Labyrinth these spiral paths are signature to Del Toro and most artist miss the mark. These hit the mark perfectly, they look like they are dripped from above and take a life of their own by swirling back in on themselves. 

Check out more photos below. Click on any of the photos to enlarge, trust me, you will want to see these full screen!

Titanus in the City

Titanaus in the City at Eye Level

Titanus in the Ocean Above

Titanus in the Ocean Below

Finally for you 3D model geeks here are some of the meshes, Titanus without textures and the isolated textures themselves.

You can check out more Marcus Dublin's work at his two websites:

Marcus Dublin – Lead Artist

Art Bully Productions, LLC / Co-founder 

Company Website: www.artbullyproductions.com

Personal Website: www.marcusdublin.com

Customized Pacific Rim Toys Repainted With Details and Working Lights

Customized Leatherback toy with LED's and detailed paint

"I make custom toys, and try not to suck." -- Sabretooth Workshop

Sabretooth Workshop takes great toys and makes them greater. If he only added LED lights it would be amazing, but he recolors the toys with an airbrush and other detailed techniques to make these one-of-a-kind pieces of art collectibles.

Read his description of his amazing Leatherback kaiju:

There is an led located in the head with an easy on off switch located in-between his shoulders on his back.The batteries are inside the figure and are replaceable. This figure has a custom one of a kind paint job that I tried to get as close to the movie as possible, I used tamiya acrylics and other quality paints on this and I sealed it many times to reduce any chances of paint wear or chipping.

Recently he just did some incredible work on Gipsy Danger. See the progression below, click on any pic to see a larger view.

The toy starts in the box

First the toy is repainted and airbrushed

Additional paint details like weathering wear and tear are added.

LED lights and wiring are installed.

Sabretooth Workshop's Gipsy Danger is available on ebay.

Check out some the other links below to see more of Sabretooth's Workshop stuff. It is ALL amazing.

http://www.toyark.com/pacific-rim-leatherback-custom-158379/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sabretooths-workshop/111209265579890

http://sabretoothsworkshop.blogspot.com/

Pacific Rim Cocktails for New Years Eve

(Click to enlarge) One of many cocktails based on Pacific Rim

The folks at Hard Act To Follow had some cocktail suggestions based on the Pacific Rim movie. Click on the pictures below to mix your poison. Happy New Year, Drink responsibility and if your under 21 don't drink (alcohol) at all. 

(Click to enlarge) The Jaeger

(Click to enlarge) Gipsy Danger

(Click to enlarge) The Cherno Alpha

(Click to enlarge) The Coyote Tango

(Click to enlarge)  The Crimson Typhoon

(Click to enlarge) The Shatterdome

(Click to enlarge) The Striker Eureka

(Click to enlarge) the Drift

See you in the Drift!!!

8-Bit Pacific Rim. Fire up that Super NES!

"Start Screen" for a fictional 8-bit Pacific Rim 

Fire up that Super NES and throw in that Pacific Rim cartridge.  Composer Kuso-Chan and graphic designers Kuso-Chan and Mame-Chan created this 8-bit vision of a Pacific Rim Game. The video below has the entire Pacific Rim theme in 8-bit moog sythesized style with a couple of 8-bit intro screens of Kaiju and Jaegers. You got to check it out in all it's 8-bit glory!!!

Pacific Rim from a Feminist Perspective

Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) sorting things out.

"This is what I mean when I say that Raleigh is a 'strong female character.'" -- Deborah Pless, BtchFlcks.com


Bitch Flicks is a self-described website devoted to reviewing films and television through a feminist lens. The premise of their review is Pacific Rim flips the script on traditional gender roles in a movie while allowing Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) maintain their dude-ness and femininity respectively. This is quite a refreshing review and a must-read unique perspective on Pacific Rim.

Read an excerpt from Bitch Flick's post titled ‘Pacific Rim’s Raleigh Becket Is a Strong Female Character, and That’s Great.

"In fact, the central emotional story of the film turns out not to belong to Raleigh, but rather Mako. An orphan of the Kaiju War, Mako wishes desperately to become a pilot in order to avenge her family, but is deemed too angry and emotionally volatile to make a good pilot. As it turns out, it’s Mako, not Raleigh, whose grief and rage endanger their connection, and it’s Raleigh’s job to emotionally balance her out and soothe the tempers around him.

This is what I mean when I say that Raleigh is a “strong female character.” Raleigh’s role in the film is that of friend, counselor, and emotional support–commonly the role given to a girlfriend or wife in a movie like this. He’s the Peggy to Mako’s Captain America, the Jane to her Thor, the Katara to her Aang. Raleigh is the supportive, emotionally intuitive counterpart to his impulsive, rash, and angry best friend. His journey is over in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Hers has just begun."

You can read the rest of Deborah's Pacific Rim review at BtchFlcks.com

Guillermo del Toro is Praised for Building Worlds Like Pacific Rim

Concept art for the kaiju skull city

 Ryan Lambie from DenOfGeek.us praises Guillermo del Toro's world building; from Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) through to Pacific Rim (2013).

Below in an excerpt you can read the high praise and interesting insights Mr. Lambie  has specifically for Pacific Rim:

In terms of world-building, Pacific Rim is arguably the most expansive movie del Toro’s yet created. Set in a near future torn apart by giant beasts which have, for reasons initially unclear, emerged from our oceans to wreck havoc on our cities, it sees a dwindling defense force gather together a handful of skyscraper-sized, human-driven robots to repel the incursion.

Proudly inspired by Japanese giant monster movies and anime, Pacific Rim creates its own realm of fantasy logic. We come to accept the strange, majestic movements of these towering robots, whose limbs move in time with the pilots’ own. Like all of del Toro’s films, it communicates so much through images rather than words; Pacific Rim’s designers draw from the symbolism of World War II tanks and submarines to give the machines a rusted, battered, lived-in sense of history, while the screeching kaiju have their own unique markings and individual videogame-like killer moves.

Like Mimic, Pacific Rim isn’t at all ashamed of its own inherent goofiness, and del Toro pulls off an impressive high-wire act of giving the movie both a sense of violent impact and also a childlike, playful sense of awe.

It’s this child’s eye perspective, perhaps, that is also key to the director’s world-building. Not all of his films are literally seen through a child’s eyes (though several of his best are), but they are all invested with the same childlike fascination for minute details and exotic, surreal images. Take, for example, a location somewhere in China, where an ad-hoc city has been arranged around the gargantuan bones of a fallen kaiju.

It’s a detail that is largely incidental to the plot, but it’s an idea that tells us so much about the history of this world without anyone uttering a word: the corpses of the kaiju are so utterly enormous that they’ve simply been assimilated into the landscape, and formed the part of a new and strangely beautiful place.

Things like this abound in Pacific Rim, and if you take the time to see them, they add depth to a story that is constantly thundering along like an untethered beast. Look how the little blue highlight in heroine Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) precisely matches the color of the coat she was wearing when she was almost killed by a kaiju as a child - a little bit of her traumatic past still clings to her as an adult.

Continuing with the same theme, they take the kaiju skull city a step further by not only building around it, but by turning it into a temple.

You can read Ryan Lambie's  praise for Del Toro's other works at the Den of Geek article Pacific Rim and Guillermo del Toro's world building

Gipsy Danger and Otachi get Illustrated and Stuffed!

Inspired By Scott Campbell, Anna TheRed creates plush toys 

Larger Scott Cambbell Illustration of Gipsy Danger and Otachi

More details of Anna TheRed's stuffed toys, Gipsy Danger and Otachi

Unfortunately these plush Pacific rim inspirations are not for sale. They will be auctioned off  at the donation site Desert Bus. Auctions starts at 7:30 PM PST tonight (November 16th 2013).

Desert Bus is actually a mini-game from the never-released Sega CD game Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors. Challenging the player to drive a listing, unreliable, virtual bus on an endless, eight-hour-long strip of highway between Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, it is widely regarded to be the worst video game ever made.

We play it for as long as donations come in. In order to keep things interesting for our viewers we have live and silent auctions, giveaways and contests, celebrity guests and a lot of silliness.

You can get all the creative details at Anna The Red's Website where she descripbes how she cam up with the idea and why she donated it to desert Bus.

She has a lot more photos with incredible details. The giant boat actually attaches to Gipsy Danger's hand with a snap! 

NECA's 7" Pacific Rim Leatherback Kaiju Reviewed

7" Pacific Rim Kaiju Leatherback figure from NECA

The guy's at Toy News International (toynewsi.com) do great toy reviews. The recently reviewed NECA's 7" Leatherback Kaiju from Pacific Rim. They do size comparisons to NECA's other Pacific Rim offerings, Gipsy Danger and Knifehead, and give a complete joint-by-joint articulation and range of motion overview.

See ShartimusPrime's complete 7" Leatherback review below.

You can see a gallery of 19 photos of the toy from different angles at Toy News International's NECA's 7" Leatherback Photo Gallery

WATCH: Guillermo Del Toro Compares Transformers vs. Jaegers

How do Transformers and Jaegers compare?

AskMen.com asked Guillermo Del Toro who would win between a Transformer and a Jaeger. The question is easy to answer. Jaegers are almost 10 times bigger. Even Devastator, the giant transformer that is a combination of six Decepticons is only 120 ft tall. 

Now for you nerds, there is Metroplex, in robot mode he is 698 ft. When transformed into city mode the Autobots use him as a fortress. But for the most part as Guillermo Del Toro explains, the scale is totally different.

Pacific Rim Redefines How Movies Make Money

Pacific Rim was able to become profitable due mostly to foreign box office revenue

In an article about domestic markets vs international markets, Brent DiCrescenzo uses the movie Pacific Rim to illustrate a change in the entertainment industry. The change? America's market is an afterthought and Pacific Rim proved it could be. Read the excerpt below:

Pacific Rim underlined an important message for Hollywood: The American market is an afterthought. The movie grossed $407 million worldwide, and only a quarter of that came from the United States. It's no great mystery why. It was the first big-budget spectacle to depict on film the battle between kaiju and mecha so common in Japanese manga and anime, and it was the vision of a Mexican director, with Black, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Australian, Spanish and American actors. You know, what people in the world actually look like. It might have been the first blockbuster blatantly titled after its target demographic.

SRC: TimeOutofChicago.com

As a Kaiju enthusiasts, it's obviously great to hear how a favorite movie can also change an industry. This also bodes well for the possibility of a sequel. At ComicBook.Com, Scott Johnson writes about a similar sentiment.

Looking at Pacific Rim’s worldwide box office reveals an even better story for the film. Pacific Rim is now in the top ten highest grossing movies worldwide for the year. At $397.4 million, Pacific Rim is also very close to becoming only the tenth movie of the year to cross the $400 million mark at the worldwide box office.

The $400 million worldwide number is a very significant number. Because Pacific Rim cost around $190 million to produce, $400 million worldwide has been the number widely reported that the film needed to do in order to break even.

Now, here’s another interesting, but very important trivia fact about Pacific Rim. Of the nine films ranked ahead of Pacific Rim worldwide, eight of them were either sequels or based on pre-existing books or comic book characters. The Croods was the only brand new intellectual property, and it was an animated film. Pacific Rim was the highest grossing live action movie worldwide based on a brand new intellectual property.

It’s a pretty powerful accomplishment for a film that was branded a failure by many in the media right after it was released. If Pacific Rim doesn’t get a sequel, then Hollywood should probably re-assess whether they even want to continue to do big budget live action movies based on new IP, because it doesn’t get any more successful than Pacific Rim (at least this year so far).

So, financially there seems to be a good argument for Pacific Rim too. Del Toro has announced that a script for Pacific Rim 2 is in the works. You can watch Guillermo del Toro talk about Pacific Rim 2 in our earlier post.

WATCH: del Toro Says Pacific Rim 2 Script in the Works

Although not greenlit by the studio, Pacific Rim 2 Script is in the works.

Earlier in the month Guillermo del Toro confirmed he is already working the sequel to Pacific Rim. You can read his response to an IGN interview below.

IGN: Do you think with something like Pacific Rim 2, can the Blu-ray make or break a sequel?

GDT: No, we are writing the sequel. Travis Beacham and I are writing, so that is active. The decision to green light or not, that’s definitely above my pay rate.

IGN: Right, that’s definitely a film we hope to see. Obviously, you’ve already built this universe. So for someone like me looking from the outside it seems like in a lot of ways it would be easier to make the sequel, because so much of this infrastructure already exists. Does that make sense?

GDT: It does. To me, what was beautiful and flattering was how people saw the movie not once or twice but three, four times or more. People that love it, love it with great passion. So I would love to continue telling stories about that world.

Del Toro also told MTV, "We will have Gipsy 2.0 for sure. Second thing is you're gonna see a merging of Kaiju and Jaeger. And that is quite special."

Other ideas of potential sequel spoilers were reveled by actor Charlie Day in an interview at Crave Online

“I remember when I first met with him that he liked the idea of Newt becoming a bit of a villain in the second film,” Day said. “But, I think over the course of making the film, and the way the character resonated with the audience, I don’t think he would want to turn him into a villain now, but I really have no idea.”

Despite fans returning to theaters multiple time, domestically in the Pacific Rim domestic take was modest, but international sales have soared. According to SciFi Now, "Opening in China this week, Pacific Rim has taken $9 million which is a new record number for Warner Bros, bringing the full takings so far to $226,446,094  – with over 60% of that being from outside the US.

Fingers crossed, hopefully we will see Hannibal Chau in a more pivotal role too. You can watch the MTV interview with del Toro below.

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

WATCH: Rodeo FX's Pacific Rim VFX Breakdown Reel

Among Hong Kong Bay and mostly inside Gypsy Danger,
Rodeo FX also worked on Newt's first drift partner 

Rodeo FX tackled a comprehensive array of creative and technological challenges through its contributions to “Pacific Rim,” marking the company’s ninth collaboration with ILM. Rodeo FX created and produced 200 visual effects shots for Guillermo del Toro's “Pacific Rim”.

The effects include key matte paintings and CG environments, including Hong Kong Bay and the Shatterdome military base, along with the accompanying set extension work and practical rain effects.

Check out the reel below


Pacific Rim - VFX Breakdown from Rodeo FX on Vimeo.

Rodeo FX was once again called upon to create exceptional environments and immersive 3D matte paintings. However, Rodeo's CG contributions were much larger than on any previous motion picture. In addition to environment work, ILM trusted Rodeo FX to create, simulate, and animate fully CG creatures and vehicles for a variety of sequences. Rodeo FX was also responsible for all the variations of the interior Robot Head shots, which included building and animating a complex CG rig used to control the actions and movements of the robots – a seamless photo-real blend of both CG and practical FX.

More here : http://www.rodeofx.com/all-films/pacific-rim

Pacific Rim Animator Describes Inspiration for Creating Epic Scale

(The Colossus by Goya on the left, Photoshop work by me on the right)

"That was first image [Guillermo del Toro] showed us, The Colossus by Goya, and the first words [he] spoke to us about Pacific Rim were 'operatic' and 'poetic'." -- Hal Hickel, Pacific Rim Animation Director

Pacific Rim animation director, Hal Hickel in his office

Marc Chacksfield of TechRadar interviews Pacific Rim animation director, Hal Hickel. Below is an excerpt on how a painting by an 18th century Spanish painter was used to inspire the animators of Pacific Rim. Check out the stunning before and after video after the interview.

"[Guillermo del Toro] told us to forget about the painting's landscape and imagine it was the ocean and the clouds were sea spray and this figure was coming out."

And that was how the scene was set in pre-production for Pacific Rim, a movie with the achingly simple premise: man-made robots fight giant monsters.

Imagining these amphibious creatures (or Kaiju as they are known in the movie, a description ripped from the pages of Japanese storytelling) and giant robots (called Jaegers in Pacific Rim) takes a lot of computational power, VFX wizardry and, well, suspension of disbelief.

But this is something Hickel is well versed in. His CV is a geek tick-list of VFX laden Hollywood movies.

Dream job

As animation supervisor at ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) his work can be seen in the Star Wars prequels, Super 8 and the movie that began Marvel's cinematic superhero onslaught, Iron Man.

It was Pacific Rim, however, that proved to be the perfect job for Hickel and his animation team.

"It was a dream come true working on this movie. If you could see my office, I am completely surrounded by toy robots and Kaiju.

"We hadn't worked with Del Toro before but we all knew he had a great vocabulary for visual effects."

Before Pacific Rim, del Toro had already showed the world with Pan's Labyrinth and two Hellboy movies he could successfully meld VFX with humour and pathos.

Much like his contemporaries Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, del Toro came from the practical effects laden world of horror before hitting blockbuster status – a grounding Hickel believes worked well for Pacific Rim.

"The colour, the vibe, del Toro knew exactly the mood to go for with the movie," says Hickel.

"Pacific Rim is a bit like a comic-book film. We were taking on a goofy sub genre but del Toro had the right tone. He didn't want to it to be too adult, he wanted it to be fun."

It's credit to a movie, then, that focuses on lumbering robots that these oversized metal machines close-up looked like practical effects but were practically all CGI. This was due to the 'colossal' scale of the movie del Toro, by way of Goya, wanted to create.
It was a movie that was even too big for the streets of Hong Kong.

"This was definitely a movie that was heavy on CG. Typically you go out and shoot as much as you can in camera but the scale meant we couldn't," notes Hickel.

"While the baby Kaiju scene was typical special effects, the big battles were 100% CG. The action was on such a huge scale. There aren't any boulevards in Hong Kong wide enough for that type of action. There is quite a lot of destruction and water interaction in the movie that we had to incorporate."

Read the rest of the interview at Meet the man who brought Pacific Rim's Kaiju and Jaegers to life

Pacific Rim Kaiju Battle Recreated with Legos

LEGO artist OliveSeon not only recreated Knifehead from Pacific Rim, but also the battle when Gypsy Danger drags the battleship like a club. 

(Click Kaiju Image to Enlarge)

(Click Kaiju Image to Enlarge)

(Click Kaiju Image to Enlarge)

Check out OliveSeon other creations at his Flickr page, including a Mothra set too!

(Click Kaiju Image to Enlarge)