Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Hugo, Rango triumph at the 2012 Academy Awards


No one puts footage of animators’ speeches on YouTube, so here are some actors doing their thing at this year’s Academy Awards. You can read some mercifully thespian-free making ofs via the links below.

Best Visual Effects: Hugo
Hugo has swept the boards in the craft categories at last night’s Oscar ceremony, winning awards for art direction, cinematography, sound and visual effects.

In the latter, Pixomondo’s VFX work beat off competition from Weta (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Digital Domain, the latter of which worked on two nominated movies: Real Steel and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

fxguide spoke to Pixomondo’s Ben Grossman and Alex Henning, and in a separate interview, overall VFX supervisor Rob Legato, which you can access via the handy-dandy unified link below.

Watch fxguide’s videos on the making of Hugo’s VFX

Best Animated Feature: Rango
Rango’s success in the Animated Feature Film category was less of a surprise, ILM’s first animated feature having previously taken both Annie and VES Awards.

Fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to making of material here, ILM having recently released a number of behind-the-scenes videos, but CGSociety has a good interview with VFX Supervisor Tim Alexander.

Read CG Society’s interview with Tim Alexander on the making of Rango

Best Animated Short: The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore
In the animated short category, the Oscar deservedly went to Moonbot Studios’ fabulous The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore.

Moonbot has taken the short down off its website (it’s on sale via iTunes), although you can still see a lower-res version on YouTube.

3D World comes up with the goods here, having just posted an interesting article from the magazine’s Debrief section online, in which Moonbot discusses the rights and wrongs of its production process.

Read 3D World’s post-mortem article on The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore

You can read a full list of winners in the other categories (we believe there was some buzz about some film or other called The Artist) on the Academy Awards site itself.

Read a full list of this year’s Oscar winners and nominees