The characters fighting for Westeros in Game of Thrones are fighting mostly for CGI backdrops. Like many others TV series and movies, visual effects is a huge part of the production process as it handles details both great and small. A great credit to Game of Thrones is that the story is so good that we forget about the effects, and another great credit goes to the VFX team because their work is seamless. If you want to see the seams, you have to get a visual breakdown of how the shots are put together.

Created by artist and unassuming local celebrity, Keith Jennings, the first tree spirit arrived on St. Simons Island in 1982. The old story goes that Keith negotiated his way out of a bar tab, hence, a tree priestess was born behind Murphy’s Tavern, on a blurry Saturday morning. In his own words, however, Keith states that his first tree spirit was created in the back yard of a place called, “The Animal Farm”. Either way, Keith Jennings has been known to cut the rug around here, no matter how you slice it.

Talented French artist, Pierre Beteille, is skillful in manipulation of portraits (specially his own self portraits) using Photoshop. This is how he describes himself: “I am not a photographer or an artist, I just make images… I shoot very average or even bad photos that I try to improve thanks to Photoshop”…

Photo: “En attendant d'avoir des balles”...., 2007 (Photo by Pierre Beteille)

Kritchaya “Lolita” Boonhor (R) curls her eyelashes in ladyboy Candy's (L) room while she chats her about her boyfriend, in Bangkok, Thailand, 27 November 2017. Most things in life are a question of negotiation. Lolita is a woman, that was not to be negotiated. What needed to be negotiated was how she was perceived by those around her. And that negotiation was one that took time and effort. (Photo by Lola Levan/EPA/EFE)

Due to the influence of Sci-Fi movies, many of us have an obsession with giant robots. How cool would it be to ride a gigantic robotic dinosaur or elephant? It would be even cooler to control one! Regretfully, the modern technologies are not yet sophisticated enough to fulfill this dream. Pierre Orefice and François Delarozière, however, came very close. These two artists have made it their goal to turn Nantes, France, into a hot tourist destination spot for people who love robots. In their project of Machines de l'île in Nantes, they have created a whole park of robotic monstrosities, ranging from a giant 3 story high elephant to a 2 meter long centipede crawling on a rail track.

Elements of nature are too powerful for humans to subdue, yet it didn’t stop the most courageous individuals from trying. Conquering air, land, fire, water, and even the very fabric of reality – this is the ultimate goal of humanity. For now, we can only marvel at the beauty and tremble in awe before the Mother Nature. A short film “Ocean Gravity,” written and directed by Julie Gautier and Guillaume Nery, reminds us of how small and insignificant a human body is, as it is being swept away by an ocean current. Nevertheless, it never stopped people from attempting to subjugate these unstoppable forces, and someday, maybe the humanity will come out victorious.

Some people joke about having clowns at their funeral, but how about having a coffin that looks like a gigantic cellphone? It is impossible to tell at the first glance that these colorful sculptures are actually coffins. The coffins were made by Kane Kwei and his assistant Paa Joe more than twenty years ago and have been a somewhat grim tourist attraction ever since. These coffins were probably made as an advertisement for the actual business, since it would hard to imagine someone actually ordering a coffin such as this.