The Embassy Visual Effects is pleased to announce that its work on director Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. “District 9” marks the second time in two years that The Embassy’s work has contributed to a visual effects Academy Award-nominated film.
Extraordinarily, it is only the second feature film project that The Embassy has worked on. Their first was the Mark 1 sequence for “Iron Man,” a film that was also nominated for a visual effects Oscar in 2009.
“The Embassy Visual Effects was founded in 2002 originally to focus on commercial visual effects, and we were fortunate enough to work on spots that garnered attention from the film community. ‘District 9’ is only the second film visual effects project that we completed, and we consider ourselves doubly fortunate that both of our film projects, this and ‘Iron Man’, were recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences with nominations in the visual effects category,” said Winston Helgason, founder, The Embassy Visual Effects.
“District 9” was co-written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who was an original founding partner of The Embassy Visual Effects prior to embarking on a full-time film-directing career. Blomkamp tapped The Embassy to complete the climactic Exo-suit sequence in “District 9”.
The Exo-suit is a very sophisticated piece of alien weaponry, essentially a larger-than-life mechanized suit of armor controlled by its wearer. The Embassy co-founder Winston Helgason spent one month on set in Johannesburg, South Africa supervising the sequence shoot.
The Embassy key-frame animated, rendered, and composited the Exo-suit for seamless scene integration. In total, The Embassy worked on just over 100 shots, mostly in the film’s 12-minute final battle sequence. The company also created alien weaponry and small lobster-like alien creatures used by both the Aliens and Humans in a type of cockfight.
“The response to The Embassy’s work in ‘District 9’ has been overwhelming. The Exo-Suit shots were very complex, and in addition to building and animating the suit itself, there were extensive amounts of dust, debris, gunshots and other elements that had to be composited into the quick-moving sequence-all the while maintaining a photo-real style to keep the viewer engaged in this gripping documentary-style story. I’m thrilled that ‘District 9’ received a nomination amongst a pool of really high-quality VFX projects this year,” said Robert Habros.
The Embassy VFX is currently working on “Battle Los Angeles” for Columbia Pictures.
About The Embassy Visual Effects
The Embassy Visual Effects, Inc. is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada and is best known for its photo-real visual effects work for the film “Iron Man”, and high profile commercial projects for clients including Nike, Citroen, Verizon, Volkswagen and more. The facility specializes in visual effects for commercials and feature film that blend anything from futuristic robots to photo real creatures seamlessly into real world environments.
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