X-Men

(Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox)

X-men was released on July 14, 2000 to the largest opening weekend gross of any non-sequel film, and Hammerheaad created the effects for over 100 of it's shots. Under the surpervisory lead of Theresa Ellis, Hammerhead created four distinct effects for X-men. For Wolverine, we animated his claws and rapid healing effect. Our claws emerge and retract from between the character's knuckles pinning Wolverine's opponent to the wall on one occassion, and impaling an unsuspecting ally on another. We also created the exagerated blood vein activity that happens whenever Rogue touches another character's skin. This Rogue effect involved painstakingly handpainting physically accurate vein textures for each individual shot. No mean feat considering we delivered 18 of these shots! The fourth effect we created for X-men was Cyclops' optic blast. The beam ranges in intensity from a finely focused tool for shattering Toad's venomous death mask off of Jean Grey's face, to a powerful force capable of blasting the evil henchman Sabretooth out of the picture, and when Cyclops loses his high tech shades, it becomes a literal loose cannon.