Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Weta Visual Effects Supervisor Sean Walker Breaks Down The Process Of Bringing Dragons To Life In ‘Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings’
deadline.comFor Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, VFX supervisor Sean Walker, along with his team at Weta, was tasked with bringing the Great Protector and the Dweller-in-Darkness to life. “The most challenging part with these insane, massive, mystical and mythical creatures, is that the human mind knows that these things can’t possibly live,” says Walker. “They can’t possibly be real, so everything that we do has to make it feel like you can touch them.”Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings follows Shaun (Simu Lu), whose real name is Shang-Chi, as he confronts his past when the Ten Rings organization, run by his father Xu Wenwu (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung), comes for him.
Along with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) and his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), he returns to his mother’s homeland to protect them from the Organization and stop them from releasing a great evil.Below, Sean Walker gives a breakdown of how Weta created the Great Protector and the Dweller-in-Darkness for the film.“There’s a combination of a few programs we use,” Walker says. “The first image was rendered in Houdini and Mantra.
We animate the creatures with a combination of Maya puppets and our proprietary Loki puppets, which is a tool we use at Weta.
For the most part, the animators use Maya and our effects artists use Houdini.The first one is actually kind of a proxy version of the dragon and the Dweller that our effects artists use.
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