All right, John Carter was largely mediocre and it failed at the box office but it still had some interesting visual effects and involved a lot of talented Pixar artists.

Like Patrick Giusiano, who helped animate some of the sequences. In this video he explains how modern movie magic is created and how they get those CG effects into live action films nowadays.

Director Andrew Stanton brought on select Pixar employees to make storyboards. From these storyboards, Stanton filmed the backgrounds. Then Giusiano shot reference footage on his own, and then animated that into Stanton’s real life background shots. He showed the stuff to Stanton and then Stanton would suggest tweaks or changes.

That’s how CG works. I know, I love the old fashion special effects days of makeup and puppetry, but this new fangled CG takes a lot of skill, planning and artistry to complete. [via Movies.com]

john carter, pixar, special effects