Creative studio Luma, known for its visual effects work, has hired Ben Hibon to serve as head creative director.
A career as an artist and animation director has taken Hibon from television commercials to branded content to video game creation for clients like Disney, Microsoft, Sony, and Riot Games. He has lent his design skills to feature films such as Snow White and the Huntsman and The Last Witch Hunter. Most notably he was at the helm of the Academy Award-nominated The Tale of Three Brothers animated sequence from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.
VFX house Luma is expanding into the realm of original content. Luma’s Santa Monica and Melbourne studios will continue their exclusive service model while developing partnerships that enable the company to be active in creative as well. Hibon will be working with the heads of Luma’s animated and live action content, and new content and media arms, helping to shape and guide the new branches toward varied forms of storytelling.
Founded by Payam Shohadai, Luma Pictures debuted in 2002 with visual effects for Charlie’s Angels and has gone on to contribute visual effects for such films as Deadpool, Captain America: Civil War, and Doctor Strange.
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
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