(comingsoon.net) Vin Diesel has updated his Facebook with word that Universal is going with an R rating for Riddick and the actor revealed new artwork as well. He wrote:
I hear you...
While I was working on character, the Director and his team of artists have been creating the world and style of this picture. We all know how much I enjoy concept art and storyboards, haha, I am like a kid in a candy shop.
Seeing the early stage of CGI is always fascinating to me, it is a element that usually comes together long after the filming process, so you look forward to seeing it fully realized.
First stop for the Riddick production is Canada, which is where we shot a large part of Chronicles...
P.s. I am grateful to have Universal in such support of this complex character's journey... not many studios would back an "R" rating. Very cool.
Back in May, Diesel had said that he would have to work for scale upfront if the film was to carry an R rating:
However, there is a catch...in order for us to make a true R-rated film, I must work for scale upfront. Not unlike the Find me Guilty experience (which I wouldn't have changed for the world). Money is always second to art, integrity and spirit...but the real issue is deeper. Can I suspend my life, to momentarily venture to that dark place...called Riddick. Now, I need to hear from Our collective...you.
Filming is expected to start soon.
United States Loses Video Game Jobs to Quebec
MONTREAL (Reuters) - Outside, the sun is shining, but it is dark in the production room where more than 150 Ubisoft artists, animators and engineers are racing to finish the latest edition of "Assassin's Creed," one of this holiday's hotly anticipated games.
They are working not from Ubisoft's headquarters in Paris or California, but in Montreal, Quebec. And they aren't alone. Quebec has become the preferred place for some of the biggest names in video games to set up shop.
According to the economic development agency Invest Quebec, 86 companies and 8,236 jobs have migrated to Quebec as a result of a government program under which 37.5 percent of a video game company's payroll is subsidized by the majority French-speaking province in the form of a refundable tax credit.
Put another way, for every dollar a video game company spends on paying its development staff, it receives 37.5 cents from the Quebec government.
The incentives, which include extra credits for companies that make French versions of their games, have enticed heavyweights such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard to open major operations in Quebec.
"There's a buzz right now, just like how Hollywood was the place to make movies in the 1920s," said Charles Jolicoeur, a coordinator at Invest Quebec.
Last year, Quebec spent $100 million on the program, up from $83 million in 2009 and significantly more than some U.S. states with similar programs such as Texas and Louisiana.
The province first set aside money for video games in 1996 after starting a program to jumpstart the film industry a year earlier. According to Jolicoeur, the aim was to move Quebec from a manufacturing economy to a "new economy" by creating artistic jobs for young people.
Animators Versus Special Effects Artists
(academy-filmschools.com)
There is nothing worse than boring film. As my favorite animation instructor (who was a creative director in the Disney Studio) had said, “You can’t save a film with special effects!” He and I had many discussions around the subject of the use of special effects within a film and the circumstances in which a special effect furthered or dragged the advancement of a storyline within a film.
The Role of an Animator: An animator can be many things as well as the writer, producer and director of a film. If an animator is working for a studio, the role can become more defined and limited. There are character animators, where the task is to design and animate one or more characters on a project. This also means that the look, the walk and the mannerisms of the character are in the hands of the animator. A key animator takes the character and basically defines the poses for the action of the character. The in-between artist or animator takes those poses and literally does the in-between drawings of the motion. If the production is CG based, then this is achieved using animation software.
Let us go on with this post. The Role of a Special Effects Artist: A special effect artist creates the look or what I call the universe of the film. This includes things like lighting effects, water effects, reflections, flames, lightning, as well as the motion of smoke, clouds, grass, hair, fabric and clothing. It’s very detailed and patience challenging work. You really have to understand photography and the behavior of light and materials. In the old days, special effects involved a lot of miniatures, fireworks and wires. With the advancement of CG and the extra special effect programming a lot of that wonderful art went away except in the tradition of films like “Caroline” and “Nightmare Before Christmas”.
It has to be a Blend: One of the biggest obstacles an animated film faces (as do fantasy, horror and sci-fi films) is the temptation to overuse special effects. Since a feature film usually is ninety to 120 minutes in length, for fun just sit with a stop watch and time the length of each special effect in the film as opposed to actual character interaction or dialogue. If you have a film sparse in script you’ll find extended chase scenes, multiple repeated views of explosions, extended panoramic views and so on. In my discussions with my mentor, who was very old school, the script was the foundation of the film. In this I agree that if you do not have a script that has all the key elements of storytelling, you might as well wrap the whole thing in toilet paper and call it “art”. However that said, there are times where you have to show or dress your character in some special effects to communicate the abilities of that character and do advance the story. One of my favorite examples of animators and special effects artists working together well is “Spider Man“. After all what would “Spider Man” be without the web slinging and the gymnastics through the downtown skyline?
Using the Best of Both Worlds – Creative Decisions: Whenever you create an animated film or one heavily loaded with animated special effects, you should always ask yourself as to why you’re using one technique as opposed to the other. It is not just a question of budget. It is not about eye popping experiences. It’s the way you tell the story and how you get into the heads of your audience that makes it really great stuff. Make every frame count because every frame does count.
Vera Saar is a designer, project manager, engineer, visual artist, animator and education facilitator. Her interests extend to gardening, water ponds, martial arts and ways to make our personal environment better.
Digital Domain to Begin Australian Recruitment Drive for "Paradise Lost"
(if.com.au) LA-based effects company Digital Domain will begin recruiting local VFX artists next week to work on Alex Proyas’ Paradise Lost.
The company is in the throes of setting up a local office to support the film, which will spend eight weeks shooting (including motion capture) at Fox Studios Australia before a lengthy 72 weeks for post-production and visual effects work. The film stars Bradley Cooper and is based on John Milton’s poem about heaven and hell.
Digital Domain public relations project manager Tim Enstice did not respond to queries about the planned Australian operations. However, it is understood that a Digital Domain team, including head of production Jody Madden, is expected to arrive in Sydney later this week as part of the recruitment drive.
The company, which has worked on films such as TRON: Legacy and X-Men: First Class, is searching for local candidates with skills in the areas of: animation, creatures, lighting, modelling, pipeline, rigging, texturing, compositing, FX, look development/shading, matte painting, production, and technical direction.
The NSW government first revealed in July that Digital Domain would set up a permanent Australian office to support Paradise Lost. The government expects the production to spend $20 million on visual effects, creating over 200 jobs specifically in the area.
Digital Domain is likely to receive the recently-doubled 30 per cent federal government subsidy for effects and post work conducted in Australia (although Paradise Lost, as an Australian film, would be eligible for the 40 per cent Producer Offset).
Digital Domain will be in direct competition with several local companies which also count the Hollywood studios among their clients such as Rising Sun Pictures, Fuel VFX, and Animal Logic.
Further information about Digital Domain’s Sydney recruitment drive can be found at digitaldomain.com/careers/.
Congratulations Weta Digital – Winner of 2011 AEAF Feature Films-Visual Effects
(intraware.com.au)The team at Intraware Australia would like to congratulate WETA DIGITAL as the 2011 AEAF Winner for Feature Films – VFX for
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
Pic of award: http://www.intraware.com.au/congratulations-weta-digital- winner-of-2011-aeaf-feature- films-visual-effects/
How is the Current Talent Pool in Scotland's Creative Sector?
(thedrum.co.uk) Scotland has enjoyed a proud creative heritage. From ground-breaking animation and forward-thinking PR strategies to a hard-working creative solutions and cutting-edge digital innovation, the Scottish industry has often punched above its weight. In a series of questions, The Drum spoke to a cross-section of agencies north of the border, to find out their views on Scotland, its potential, and how the country’s creative landscape might just continue to change and flourish.
Today's first question is:
How is the talent pool in Scotland?
Steve Mills, managing director, Redhouse Lane Communications
Mixed, and dependent on what skills and experience one is looking for. In some areas we've struggled to find good candidates and there is not always the depth and breadth of experience we'd want.
Ian Ord, business development director, Fifth Ring
It is our policy to recruit and train the very best graduates we can find with the view of progressing them through the company.
Due to the economic climate and resultant reduction in the number of agencies there is a reasonable amount of talent available, and the fact that we are growing puts us in a good position to attract fresh talent.
Richard Scott, managing director, Axis Animation
The current talent pool in our specialist area of animation just isn’t big enough to feed our requirements. We recruit people from all over the world looking to attract the best talent possible. Axis has had up to 13 different nationalities working for us at any one time. We also support local art schools and are offering internships to the best graduates; we’ve already moved one of those interns into a freelance role on a high profile international project.
How Pixar Founders Made the World's First 3D Computer Special Effects in 1972
(dailymail.co.uk)These days we take CGI for granted, with almost every modern movie and video game full of spectacular effects and animation. Now footage has been discovered that shows where it all began.
Archive film showing possibly the first example of digital rendering, made by Pixar co-founders Ed Catmull and Fred Parke in 1972, was stumbled upon by the son of Robert B Ingebretsen, who also set up the world-famous U.S. studio.
It has been at the very forefront of 3D animation technology, having produced spectacular films such as Toy Story, The Incredibles and Up, which portray animals and humans in amazing detail.
VIDEO - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2034003/ How-Pixar-founders-worlds-3D- graphics.html
Kerner Optical Closes: The End of an Era in SFX
(cgchannel.com)Kerner Optical has closed its doors, putting a full stop to Hollywood’s golden age of practical effects.
The studio, originally a division of Industrial Light & Magic, worked on over 250 movies over its 30-plus-year career, including the original Star Trek and Indiana Jones trilogies.
With the 2000s seeing more and more productions move from miniatures to CG, the physical effects market began to shrink. Although Kerner Optical continued to contribute sequences to movies including Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, work began to dry up.
The company, loss-making since 2006, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year.
In an official letter posted on the company’s home page, managing partner Ed Edmeades pays tribute to the staff, laying the blame for Kerner Optical’s closure on its burden of debt and the behaviour of a key creditor – a sad ending to the story of one of Hollywood’s truly iconic companies.
Kerner Optical’s sister companies, including camera manufacturer Kerner 3D Technologies remain extant.
Another Trip to the Moon with Méliès: Behind the Digital Restoration of VFX Landmark
(blogs.indiewire.com)While waiting for Hugo (Nov. 23), Martin Scorsese’s 3-D valentine to Georges Méliès, TOH columnist Bill Desowitz writes a fascinating account of how digital advances made possible the painstaking restoration of the first movie blockbuster from the father of special effects, A Trip to the Moon (1902).
The new version of the landmark 14-minute short, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, will screen at Telluride this weekend and at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater on Tuesday. What a way to mark the 150th anniversary of Méliès’s birth.
Thompson on Hollywood
In fact, thanks to Lobster Films, the Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, we can now glimpse A Trip to the Moon in all its hand-tinted glory. Because prior to 1993, all color versions were presumed lost. That is, until Lobster’s Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange discovered a severely damaged color print during an element exchange with the Filmoteca de Catalunya.
Then the duo tediously peeled off and unrolled the nitrate elements with their own secret sauce in order to digitize them. It took two years to extract the image fragments. The data obtained was stored on a hard drive for eight years until technology caught up with need.
Cut to 2010, when Groupama and Technicolor came to the rescue with more than 400,000 euros to save A Trip to the Moon, adapted from Jules Verne, whose French title is Le Voyage dans la lune. The digital restoration was performed at Technicolor in L.A. under the supervision of Tom Burton. A black-and-white original nitrate print belonging to the Méliès family and a positive print from the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) were used during the restoration. The digitization of these elements was done by the Archives françaises du film (CNC-AFF) near Paris.
The result is a revelation—a bridge between the past and present—that helps us understand and appreciate just how far the movies have come in nearly 110 years. Méliès was inventing forced perspective with background paintings and using models and miniatures and puppetry and physical effects with water and smoke in combination with stop-motion and running film backwards.
“Because of his background as a magician, Méliès got it instantly,” Burton suggests. “‘If I cover the lens and backline the film, and expose it again with this little section, I could double-expose it. Wait! If I do it again, I could triple expose it.’” He’d get this [intuitively] while everyone else was just trying to figure out how to thread the film through the camera. And he figured out how to do dissolves, and trick editing where things pop in and out of the frame. Nobody else was doing that.”
But it took a bit of digital magic to bring A Trip to the Moon back to life. Burton contends that they rebuilt the film “out of the bucket of digital shards.” That’s because they worked from different resolutions and file formats. Indeed, when Technicolor got a hold of the materials, they had no idea what they were. So they painstakingly pieced it together like a jigsaw puzzle, only with missing pieces, using the black-and-white original nitrate print as a timeline reference.
So they slowly and painstakingly cobbled the pieces back together by matching, sizing, and rotating them. Then the real work began: They had huge gaps to fill, so they took the black-and-white image and digitally hand-tinted to match the look and technique of original.
One of the great discoveries, though, was that the French flag was painted with Spanish colors. No wonder it was found in Barcelona. But the hand-tinting stayed true to the original find at the Filmoteca de Catalunya.
Another revelation about Méliès, thanks to recent 3-D experiments on some of his other films by Lobster, is that he shot separate negatives to combat piracy by placing cameras side by side. Since they match the interocular offset of our vision, Lobster has therefore managed to simulate a 3-D effect.
Which brings us full-circle to Scorsese and Hugo, in which Ben Kingsley portrays a long forgotten Méliès living in seclusion in a Paris train station in 1931. Between “the machines of the trains, the mechanisms of the clocks, and the projectors of the cinema,” the film seemed to “cry out for the extra element of space and depth,” Scorsese recently told The Wall Street Journal.
Burton says his jaded restoration team at Technicolor was in awe of Méliès: “They were amazed at what he was able to accomplish in a very small area. A lot of these sets were nothing more than painted canvas panels strung between a couple posts. If he were alive today, he’d be pushing the boundaries—and I don’t mean to give Cameron the same credit as Méliès—but he’d be inventing camera gear to make 3-D movies like Avatar that had never been done before. He’d be pushing the envelope.”
Source with pics: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2011/09/ 02/another_trip_to_the_moon_ with_melies/#
More Photos Of LucasFilm’s Sandcrawler-Like Singapore Office Design [Gallery]
(slashfilm.com) Back in an April edition of Page 2, Pete posted an image of the proposed design for LucasFilm’s new Singapore office. The concept drawing was notable for the very distinct resemblance the building would bear to the design of the Sandcrawler seen in Star Wars. From the angle shown in the image, the LucasFilm office looks just like a giant Jawa transport sculpted from glass and steel.
A few more images have surfaced, and you’ll see that the resemblance to the transport diminishes somewhat when approaching the building from different angles. But if the project turns out to be quite as smooth and gleaming as seen in these renders, it may be an impressive sight regardless.
While the ‘sandcrawler angle’ is a neat image, it’s the rear of the building, as designed by architectural firm Aedas to feature cascading greenery, that looks quite beautiful.
Announced in October 2010, “the new facility will have eight floors of office space, retail shopping space on the first floor, a public park area, elevated public gardens, a state-of-the-art data center and production capabilities as well as a 100 seat theatre.”
Construction is under way now with completion planned for mid to late 2012. When finished, the office will house extensions of several major LucasFilm divisions, primarily including gaming development, visual effects and TV and feature animation. Production of an as-yet secret animation feature will be centered in this office. In April of this year Micheline Chau, President & COO of Lucasfilm, said,
We are really working out some very, very innovative gaming ideas. We also have a feature animation project that is here, that we’ve talked about, and that project of course is again top secret, but it will be produced in Singapore. So I think that will be a real milestone for the studio.
Take a look: http://www.slashfilm.com/photos-lucasfilms-sandcrawler- building-gallery/
Who Owns The Pixel? Digital Rights And Performance
(gamasutra.com)Will actors and animators share credits according to the balance between free animation and capture-faithful performance animation? What is the performance and final animation can be considered identical? Pascal Langdale, who played Ethan Mars in Heavy Rain, investigates:
I’ve been following the news from GDC, and of course Tameem Antoniades (Ninja Theory) and David Cage (Quantic Dream) are bound to attract my attention. I’m not surprised by what they are saying. The general drift is, that narrative and game can work together either to deliver an immersive emotional experience that adds to the game experience and informs it, or to deliver entirely new experiences. Their talks speak of the convergence of talents and skills that I admire, in an environment that is often hostile to new and convergent approaches.
These are two great developers, who, in their position, are similar to powerful film directors - head of all departments with the right to the final cut. Something that is less common than you would expect in the film industry. However, their power over what an audience perceives as the actor’s performance will only increase. Capture is approaching film in its ability to capture a performance, and cutting edge animation tools can now work with this material to invisibly alter every moment.
Tameem once said at a conference (Develop 2010) that Andy Serkis (playing Monkey in “Enslaved”) delivered a performance in one scene that Tameem thought wasn’t right. Serkis was his own director in the capture studio, but when the data came through the pipeline, Tameem decided he wanted to change the tone of Monkey’s/Serkis’ reactions and therefore the scene. There was no budget, or perhaps time, to re-capture the scene. So Tameem pulled an old editor’s trick (rarely possible in 2d) by using the contextual freedom available in animation. He pulled expressions from other scenes, or "off-cuts", and edited them into the scene.
In the movie, “Paul”, Arne Kaupang and his team at Double Negative often performed their own versions of the body behaviours of Paul, whilst Seth Rogan’s facial and vocal performance was kept (From Arne's Oslo - "Digital Story telling" presentation). I’ve seen footage of animators, acting to video, for reference to animate those movements, and join them to an Actor’s head and facial behaviour. Pushing this further, Actor's facial performances are sometimes blended with the animator's "reference" performance. This is not all that rare.
In Heavy Rain, I’ve seen moments where I remember a performing a sequence of emotionally driven actions that made truthful sense to me, but (I hope for gameplay reasons) , these were re-ordered - changing my performance and, in my opinion, the truth of the scene.
I love acting. I believe the actors craft, executed at its best, proves itself the most transformative art-forms of interpretation. However, the moment that acting became ‘captured’ rather than ‘live’, the power and success of a performance became shared with talents beyond the moment of capture. The highly collaborative process of Film, for example, can be as transformative and meaningful as the best live theatre, and on some levels, even more so. I hold that it is best to consider the actor’s final performance as inviolate, but in this new era, believing this to be the only perspective is to be damagingly ‘anti-convergent’.
Capture and animation is already pushing this balance between control of the source performance and the end ‘cut’ even further. Capture-based animation means that not only does the developer, and sometimes the player, choose the visual focus of a scene as a director might in film, but now the developer can alter the very fabric of the performance itself. Ownership of that final product is already becoming a point of argument and debate, and more and more people and organizations are even now being required to define their position, or risk losing their voice.
Ownership of a performance
Imagine this: a famous actor is chosen to play a part in a capture based, CG heavy film. This requires his face be animated into that of a gorilla/fox/reptile, but his facial performance will be key-framed to be as identical as possible to the original performance.
As it stands, the moment that an image is turned into data, the image of the performance no longer ‘belongs’ to the actor in the way it would in film. It’s an important point to the actor that his performance is respected, considered inviolate - as it is his/her name that is "attached" to the movie, and they will be judged and criticized for the end performance and possibly even the success of the movie.
Where source performance and final performance can be considered identical, on what basis can it be said that the performance no longer belongs to the performer? It’s a bit like saying that because an image creates a chemical reaction on celluloid that mirrors the image coming in through the lens, that the image now belongs to Fuji or Kodak.
Instead, image rights have become tied to the physical appearance of an actor. In film this is normally an unambiguous definition. When it comes to animation, this no longer works, as the appearance can be altered, whilst the performance is retained, or vice versa, and degrees of variation in between. This manipulation is often necssary to compensate for the difference between the human face and that of the avatar, or to correct what doesn't look "right". Once captured, actors needn’t even be present to be used in a sequence. On Heavy Rain, “Madison” was a composite of two performers, and I myself occasionally ‘moonlighted’ as the body for another character. I accepted this as the nature of the medium I found myself in at the time. I do wonder if I would I accept it now...
My collaboration with Dynamixyz (See MiM Press Release) has made it possible to create a “fingerprint” of an individual’s facial expressive behaviour. Even with their default version (“director”), this can be used to eliminate keyframing almost entirely, enabling the animator to move smoothly from one expression to the next. This same system forms the basis of a realtime capture system, that can achieve a very high quality result, using the “fingerprint” for reference.
The fusion between actor and animation has now become that much deeper. And whilst capture contracts are made ‘per-project”, the ownership issue remains relatively quiet. However, the questions that this imminent shift of control poses to my role as an actor, and as the director of my company, and as an advocate of convergence, are at the very cutting edge of the future that will face traditional and ‘new’ media alike.
How will Actors retain/share rights over their “expressive behaviour”?
If the software uses an actor’s fingerprint once, it can do so across multiple projects and platforms. The material from one capture based movie/game could be re-used by the owning studio for other movies/games - reducing the actor’s involvement - one day, maybe entirely. However, the prize is the democratisation of quality performances in dramatic content, more professional actors being involved in convergent media, and greater convergence between the industries as a whole.
Perhaps it's worth considering that one day actors and animators will share credits according to the balance between free animation and capture-faithful performance animation?
Animators, and animation teams are often the last to be praised or awarded. This should change as animation will allow another pool of talent to manipulate a performance, requiring discretion and an understanding of acting. Body doubles already exist in film, and Seth Rogan may or may not know who played his Paul’s body (It seems to be easier to successfully mix different bodies to heads). But what if his facial and vocal performance were 20% animator created. How about 50%? I can anticipate that there will be actors who will consider this a corruption of their craft - and animators too for that matter. However, I think that this approach is one of burying your head in the sand. Besides, what’s to say that one form of collaborative performance is better than another - as long as it’s credited as such?
What's coming up...
There is a company in France that is already attempting to draw the lines of engagement - or rather provide a basis upon which to engage. Agence de Doublures Numériques. (Digital Doubles Agency).
Digital Doubles Agency provides a service that can assess just how much of the actor’s performance remains in the final animation - the idea being that within a certain threshold, the actor can be re-assured that they can still put their name on the tin.
This also suggests that there will be scope to blend an actor’s performance with the animators art, whilst being able to apportion just credit, and pay, where it’s due.
Actors, Unions, software developers, animators, film and game studios will all have to hammer out agreements with each other to protect their interests and integrity, whilst also paving the way for new art-forms that will have convergence at their heart. If not, then valuable talent will be excluded or wasted. No industry should believe their worth will be accepted as a given fact, instead it may be more useful to concentrate on the worth of the possible future that can be shared, and prove the worth of each contributors place within it.
‘Star Wars’ Effects Artist Gives Blu-ray a Boost
(homemediamagazine.com)Just because someone worked on “Star Wars” doesn’t mean he can’t be a fan, too, especially with the whole saga due on Blu-ray Sept. 16 from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
“I’m ecstatic to see the whole thing on Blu-ray,” said John Goodson, a digital artist for Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic visual effects house. “I think the transfer quality is gorgeous.”
Goodson joined ILM in 1988 and has served as chief modelmaker, model project supervisor and art director/designer. He worked as a concept modeler on Star Wars: Episode I and Episode II, and as a viewpaint artist on Episode III.
Goodson appears within the Blu-ray’s “Archive Collection,” a series of featurettes that viewers can click on for more information about things in the movies.
“It’s fun to see this stuff all these years later,” Goodson said.
Among the vehicle models Goodson discusses are the Trade Federation battleship, the Republic cruiser, the Queen’s royal starship, Anakin’s podracer, the Sith speeder, and Republic gunship, the Separatist cruiser, the ARC-170 starfighter and the Jedi starfighter.
“We built a tremendous amount of models,” Goodson said. “Most were photographed for digital models.”
The model team also built large miniature landscapes for many of the cities seen in the films, such as those on Naboo.
“That city was a miniature we augmented digitally. It had very intricate rooftops and manicured gardens,” Goodson said. “On a lunch break one day we made a mini-lawnmower and put it in the model, and for the next six weeks they moved the lawnmower around. It’s in every shot of the city in Episode II.”
Goodson said the use of high-definition cameras has had a big impact on visual effects.
“It means there has to be more attention to detail,” Goodson said. “We had to step it up because of what could be seen.”
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