My third “Oscar effects” column for Digital Trends put the spotlight on Snow White and the Huntsman, a movie I disliked immensely despite its fantastic visual effects.

Here’s an excerpt from my column:

While the decision to cast full-size actors in the dwarf roles incurred a hefty amount of wrath from small-statured actors, it was no minor achievement to pull off the effect of featuring stars Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth fighting alongside a miniaturized Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, or Nick Frost. Eight different studios were brought in to produce the effects used in Snow White and the Huntsman, with Lola VFX and Rhythm & Hues (which also worked on the Oscar-nominated Life of Pi) leading the charge in crafting the dwarf effects.

“On the surface, the work was very challenging, but we had developed a technique on Social Network that should serve us well,” said Lola visual effects supervisor Edson Williams in a June 2012 interview with fxguide. “We developed the face projection technique on Social Network to project Army Hammer’s facial performance onto the body double’s face, [which] allowed ‘twins’ to interact in new ways and the twins were even able to row a boat together.”

You can read the rest of the column at DigitalTrends.com.