The visual effects of The Avengers were simply, outright stunning. I mean it was phenomenal work. And that work has not gone unnoticed. ILM’s work on this film has received an Oscar nomination, and it’s well deserved.

This is an effects reel from ILM about the building of the visual effects in The Avengers. It’s awesome stuff and any geek should enjoy this. I’ll assume that most of you reading this site are geeks in some fashion or another (if you are not, congrats, but you might still enjoy this video), so go ahead and dive in for almost 5 minutes of awesomeness.

If you were wondering how Whedon might be planning to make Avengers 2 bigger than the first Avengers, which was a fairly big, large scale spectacle, well the answer is, he is not planning on making it bigger. He thinks the answer is to “go deeper.”

“Don’t go bigger; go deeper.” ... “Now you can spend your time just digging in — and by digging in, I mean with a scalpel, to cause pain.”

That sounds like the Joss Whedon we know and (usually) love.

One other thing he said in the video that I thought was a very good point, very astute and well thought:

“Something I always say to…

Here, let me bring you a little bit of funny on this fine Friday morning.

This is so horrible, but so funny. It’s a must see. And we can be glad that Disney did not make the original Star Wars films, although this may have been an improvement over the prequels.

Warning, you will probably never be able to unsee this when watching Star Wars in the future.

This is it. Finally! At long last!

The new year has been a bit crazy, but we have drawn a name and chosen a winner for our HD TV giveaway. But we aren’t going to announce it right at this moment. We like our drama. We have that flare for the dramatic you know.

We will be unveiling the winner tonight, live on the podcast. And yes, we are devious enough that we will make you wait until nearly the end of the episode because we want you to listen to the whole thing! You just never know what time that might be so you’ll have to hear us talk about Django Unchained. But that’s alright, we…

J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot has become one of Hollywood’s hottest production companies in a relatively short time. From TV hits (Revolution, Person of Interest, LOST) to blockbuster films (Mission Impossible—Ghost Protocol, Super 8, Star Trek), the award-winning company is known for creating compelling, thought-provoking stories. 

How do they do it? 

Join host Matt Feury, pro video marketing manager at Avid, and the editorial, audio, and VFX teams at Bad Robot for a discussion on the innovative workflows the teams created to help them commandeer the story and action at warp speed for…

Just a reminder to you fine folks, we record The MovieByte Podcast live each week on Wednesday at 6:30 PM. That’s tomorrow and you can tune in here when the time comes:

MovieByte.com/live

Not only do you get to listen to us talk about the film right on the spot as it happens, but there’s a chat room for you to interact with us and other listeners and it’s a lot of fun. When applicable, possible, and appropriate Joseph and I will interact with you there. It’s a great way to bring up points, pose questions and the like.

And of course, if you need something to listen to throughout the…

Yo Mission Impossible fans, and movie geeks, or just geeks in general: this may be relevant to your interests!

Lindsey Stirling teamed up with The Piano Guys to do a Mission Impossible music video. The result is pure geek awesomeness. How could it be anything else when you put together such talented musicians with a flare for the dramatic? The Piano Guys are doing some of the most creative work around these days. And seriously, who doesn’t like Lindsey Stirling? Check it out! And be sure to watch the “deleted scenes” at the end.

This is it. No silly stories, no funny antidotes (to infectious anecdotes). HAL 9000 captivated us when we first read about him and saw him on the screen. And now, we can have the most movie-accurate HAL 9000 replica ever made. We gave it the boring name of HAL 9000 Life-Size Replica, but we can’t waste time with that. Let’s get to the features!

“Captivated” is not the word I would have chosen for any part of that extremely boring and super self-important film, but I have to admit the replica looks pretty cool.

As always, coming up with the release of Monsters University, Pixar will have a new short film to show us before the main feature. This one will be called The Blue Umbrella, and features a very photorealistic look that we’ve never seen from Pixar before. And The Wall Street Journal has a short clip from the upcoming short film.

Pixar’s shorts are always amazing and I’m sure no matter what look they go for, cartoon or photorealistic, it will be really good.

I also love this first comment I saw on the YouTube posting of this video:

34 seconds and still a better love story than…