Digital Domain recently received an HPA nomination for “Outstanding Visual Effects” for Black Widow

For decades, if you wanted to see Hollywood make the impossible look real, you needed to go to the theatres. Today, things have changed. The spectacles that were once reserved for Hollywood blockbusters are now expected for television and streaming as well. For proof, look no further than GameOf

Thrones, which regularly displayed digitally enhanced battles and realistic CG dragons, and recorded an audience of 19.3 million viewers for its finale alone. More recently, Marvel Studios’ Wanda Visionsaw 434 million minutes watched over its nine-episode run, while appearing alongside blockbusters like Cruellaand Mulan on the same platform.

This convergence of mediums has led to huge shifts in the way the visual effects industry operates. Digital Domain knows this better than most. For almost 30 years, the VFX studio has pushed the envelope of digital effects, earning nine Academy Award nominations and three wins for The CuriousCaseOfBenjamin Button, Tron:Legacy, and Titanic. They’ve destroyed New York countless times, created CG Terminators and Transformers that seamlessly battle with real actors, and even produced a photoreal 3D version of Air Force One.

So, how does an Oscar-winning studio pivot from blockbusters to working on shows like Wanda Vision, Loki, Carnival Row, and The Good Place? By treating them the same.

A TALENT FOR TELEVISION

Since its founding in 1993, Digital Domain has continued to expand, building on its work in feature films and adapting its tools and techniques to create game cinematics, interactive new media experiences, virtual reality worlds, digital humans, and more. It was also among the first major VFX studios to embrace the shift in episodic content, from ‘good enough for TV’ to feature-quality effects in every episode. Shows like GameOf Thronesand TheWalkingDead changed the industry, introducing photorealistic alternative worlds that could hold just as well on a big screen as a small one. It proved to be the start of a shift that would change the way Digital Domain approached VFX.