(hollywoodreporter.com)
SYDNEY -- Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Productions is to set up an office in Los Angeles in a partnership with New Zealand locations marketing agency Film NZ.
Under the new arrangement, Vicki Jackways, Park Road Post’s head of marketing will also work for Film New Zealand when she takes up a semi-permanent posting to LA in 2012.
Park Road Post Productions, owned by Jackson’s WingNut Films, is a post production facility that’s located alongside a raft of other Jackson related film making companies and infrastructure in Miramar in the New Zealand capital of Wellington. They include Stone Street Studios where The Hobbit shoot s based, Weta Digital and Weta Workshop.
Park Road Post general manager Cameron Harland said having a presence in LA was the best way to extract real value from the North American market.
“We are delighted to be partnering with such a progressive organization as Film New Zealand and grateful for the support of the industry as a whole. We look forward to delivering real benefit through a more focused market push into the States,” Harland said.
The move comes as global competition, through tax and other prodcution incentives, intensifies for production of Hollywood films.
FilmNZ chief executive Gisella Carr said the US is a key market and several of New Zealand’s competitors, including Australia, have long had representation there.
“Thanks to the talents and entrepreneurship of our screen industry across the country, and the backing of successive New Zealand governments, New Zealand has built a remarkable reputation as a film-making culture. New Zealanders would be amazed, and proud, to see how highly New Zealand is rated. Los Angeles-based representation is an important next step in taking full advantage of this reputation,” she said.
The LA office and partnership expertise will also be available to other New Zealand companies and filmmakers to use.
ILM's Dennis Muren Thoughts on Special Effects and Filmmaking
(thehdroom.com) In preparation for Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray and to further preserve props and costumes from the films not designed to withstand the test of time, a select group of extremely fortunate individuals were tasked with documenting the goods in high resolution images and video at the high-tech barn on Skywalker Ranch where they are stored under many locks and keys. Some, but not all of the props and costumes documented appear on discs 7 and 8 in what's being called the "Collection."
The Collection allows you to view a prop, costume, matte painting, model, etc. by spinning around it in 360 degrees (except for paintings, of course), zooming in extremely close to the point where you can see the most minute details, individual brush strokes and fibers, and watch a short video on the piece with commentary from the artisans who made it.
I shot a short video from the Collection that features the AT-AT Walker, my all-time favorite vehicle from the films and one Kenner toy I wanted as a child but never got (that has since been rectified). The video doesn't include the zoom-in, but it does include some of the video elements, turnaround, commentary from ILM's Dennis Muren, and how AT-ATs spend their free time. You'll also get a feel for the menu navigation on the bonus features discs which is broken up by location (takes a little getting used to but is ultimately easy to navigate).
I'm going to jump away from the bonus features and talk for a moment about Mr. Muren. Part of our LucasFilm and ILM tour was spending about a half hour with the legendary effects artist about Star Wars and film in general. Dennis wasn't involved in the making of Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray aside from providing some interview snippets. Doing those brought back all sorts of memories about creating the films in a time when visual effects were mostly practical as opposed to created in a computer.
One neat story Dennis told revolved around the creation of the AT-AT. Conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie based his first design for the imposing Imperial Walker from a commercial still featuring a short, squat mechanical robot with stubby legs and no head. Through many revisions it evolved into looking more like a dog with a defined head, but I can't help but wonder if that original headless, short inspiration robot is where the AT-TE design came from.
It's amazing being in the presence of Dennis. Not only because he's a legend and is seriously tall, but also his knowledge and passion for movies and visual effects is inspiring. He misses the tactile feel of working with models, but embraces the freedom with effects that modern CGI affords. When it comes to 3D, Dennis is a fan only when it's done properly. In his mind, that's been a rarity thus far.
Below is Dennis answering one of the press questions and casually talking about his thoughts on special effects and filmmaking in general. It's a little hard to hear, even though I was sitting literally two seats away from him. Turn up your speakers all the way and enjoy nearly five minutes of a master sharing thoughts and insights on his craft.
VIDEO: http://www.thehdroom.com/news/Star-Wars-Blu-ray-Up-Close-at- LucasFilm-Part-3-of-3/9438
Five Glorious VFX Films to Watch This Fall
(blogs.indiewire.com)Bill Desowitz lists five VFX films to watch this fall and winter season, and the reasons why:
With all due respect to the highly-anticipated The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1 and Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, in which Edward and Bella and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt spiritually go to hell and back, the real VFXy films to look out for this fall/holiday season are Hugo, Real Steel, Immortals, Anonymous, and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. They possess the necessary CG eye candy and potential Oscar prestige, plus there’s not a contemporary story among them.
In fact, Hugo (Nov. 23) is the wild card. Martin Scorsese not only directs his first kid-friendly film (based on Brian Seltzer’s bestselling children’s book, Hugo Cabret), but also makes his 3-D debut. Imagine the possibilities for pure cinema: An orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) lives a secret life inside a Paris train station in 1931. He encounters the lonely and forgotten Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), the father of special effects, tinkering with memories of glory and hopes of redemption.
James Cameron’s partner, Vince Pace, built the 3-D rig, and took Scorsese and his crew to stereoscopic film school: “Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative—how to tell a story with a picture,” Scorsese told The Guardian. “It’s literally a Rubik’s Cube every time you go out to design a shot, and work out a camera move, or a crane move. But it has a beauty to it also. People look like… moving statues. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers…”
Hugo also cried out for extra space and dimension, and Scorsese kept pushing the depth in a theatrical way like Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. Rob Legato, the production VFX supervisor, told me that it’s going to be a treat for film lovers: Méliès’s glass house studio, the painted backdrops, and fantastic costumes are sometimes “impossible for the trained eye to see what might have been restored [and] what was recreated,” Legato offered.
As Chloe Moretz’s character suggests, “It’s Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one.”
Meanwhile, Real Steel (Oct. 7) takes virtual production out of the studio and into real world settings, thanks to a collaboration between Digital Domain and Giant Studios. It looks like a futuristic version of The Champ, with Hugh Jackman seeking redemption in and out of the boxing ring, only with 2,000-pound humanoid robots.
To make boxing matches between eight-foot tall CG robots feel visceral and natural, director Shawn Levy called on Digital Domain (Benjamin Button) to design a virtual production process that allowed him to manipulate the CG characters within the actual boxing rings where the plates were shot.
However, long before principal photography, all fight sequences were choreographed and motion-captured on an LA stage. Then, the CG characters created from these sessions were placed in virtual environments that matched the actual locations, for use in the Simul-Cam system made famous on Avatar.
This process enabled Levy and cinematography Mauro Fiore to “see” fighting robots on the Simul-Cam monitor during principal photography in Detroit, and follow the action as they shot each robot fight. The CG action was organically framed with camera moves captured in the moment at real locations.
We go further back in time for the stylish Immortals (Nov. 11), in which Greek warrior Theseus (Man of Steel’s Henry Cavill) battles ruthless King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) and his bloodthirsty hordes. The mythological adventure takes 300 to another dimension in which Titans are digitally slashed at 388 frames-per-second.
Using motion capture for the first time, Tippett Studio worked closely with director Tarsem Singh (The Fall) and the stunt team to mix and match live people with CG characters rather than doing them all in the computer. You’re not supposed to be aware that they’re CG until they die.
Anonymous (Oct. 28) puts us in 16th century London for Roland Emmerich’s prestige film about The Bard’s plays being secretly penned by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), who is the incestuous lover of Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave).
Shot digitally with the new Alexa at the Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany, the VFX challenge was to virtually recreate Elizabethan London. This task fell to Uncharted Territory, headed by Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, who serve as exec producers.
They built the entire city of London in the computer, relying on accurate maps prior to the Great Fire of 1666. They constructed tens of thousands of buildings (which were very crooked by design) in a system they created called OGEL (LEGO spelled backwards). There were three types: half-timbered, stone, and mansions along with one-offs such as The Tower of London and the Globe Theatre. They made basic variations (one floor, two floors with different roof types) and LEGO’d them together.
New projection mapping techniques and moving the assets around in the compositing realm allowed for quicker turnaround. The enormous virtual detail can also be witnessed in wide vistas containing thousands of people, ships on the Thames with flowing sails, cats on roofs, chickens and cows in the street, and laundry blowing in the wind.
Then there’s the return to Victorian London for A Game of Shadows (Dec. 16), as Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) match wits for the first time with arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris).
According to production VFX supervisor Chas Jarrett, the new story takes us not only through the London we saw last time, but also out into the country by train, across the channel by steam boat, to the French countryside, and to Paris—above and below—then to the industrial heartland of Germany, and finally across the snowy Alps to Switzerland.
Baker Street was again shot on a backlot at Leavesden Studios; and a single row of 10 houses was extended into a full city view, across the rooftops. For the first time, we see the North and East views from Baker Street. Holmes and Watson even drive through the streets to a burlesque nightclub by the Thames. Location plates were augmented with nighttime river views, and a stage set was extended in all directions to recreate the grungy docklands environment, where Holmes fights off an acrobatic assassin.
The VFX game’s afoot as we soon head into Oscar season!
Man of Steel Production Headed to Vancouver
(The Canadian Press) Zack Snyder's Superman movie Man of Steel is headed for Vancouver and Vancouver Island. Here are several excerpts from the article:
"Autumn Frost will film in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island from early September through to the end of January 2012," Rino Pace, locations manager for production company Third Act Productions Inc., wrote in a letter to Ucluelet council.
"We have been preparing the film since early spring, which includes building 'sets' in the various 'stages' in and around the Vancouver area..."
While in Ucluelet, filming will take place on land owned by a local First Nation and on a municipal street and the town will play the role of a small, Alaskan fishing village. Filming will also take place on the ocean and at an industrial dock.
The article adds that casting calls for extras have already taken place in Ucluelet and Nanaimo, B.C. They were looking for older men and women with "character faces" and some "commercial fishermen types." It also says that the production is using Ucluelet because it needed something that looked like an Alaskan community.
'Walking Dead' FX Make-Up Artist Greg Nicotero Inks Deal With AMC
(broadcastingcable.com)AMC has signed a first-look deal with make-up effects artist Greg Nicotero, who has also been named co-executive producer of The Walking Dead.
Nicotero will direct an episode of The Walking Dead this season as well as direct a six-part web series on amctv.com exploring the backstory of the "Bicycle Girl" zombie from season one.
"Greg's talent extends well beyond the word of special fx makeup," said Joel Stillerman, AMC's SVP of original programming, production and digital content. "He is also a truly talented director, and has an incredibly comprehensive understanding and appreciation for great storytelling. His knowledge and respect for the genre is unparalleled, and we are looking forward to expanding our relationship with him with an eye towards developing more great original series."
Nicotero premiered his film The United Monster Talent Agency during AMC's Fearfest last year. He also recently won the Emmy for best prosthetic make-up for The Walking Dead at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sept. 10.
FX Legend John Dykstra Brings Reality to Fantasy
(bcconnecticut.com)If there’s a short list of pioneering film artists to be thanked for the moviemaking revolution that resulted in the special effects spectaculars audiences enjoying today, John Dykstra’s name is right near the top.
Dykstra essentially rewrote the rules of how to film models for special effects sequences when he was recruited by George Lucas to head up the FX team for “Star Wars,” and in the earliest days of what would become Industrial Light & Magic, Dykstra kick-started the use of computer controlled cameras that ultimately led to today’s digital dominance. He’d go on to creating similarly eye-popping effects for memorable projects including the original “Battlestar Galactica,” “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Caddyshack,” “Firefox” and “Stuart Little,” and digitally defined modern-day superhero action with his work on the first two “Spider-Man” films.
With the Blu-Ray debuts of one of Dykstra’s earliest works – “Star Wars: The Complete Saga" – and his most recent – “X-Men: First Class” – Dykstra tells PopcornBiz how the job of making the fantastic seem realistic has evolved over the years.
“The way that it's radically different is when we used to have put a subject in front of a camera and take a picture of it to create an element, you spent much more time with the hardware side of things,” says Dykstra. “It was much more time on how you were going to do it, and although you spent plenty amount of time on what it was you were limited significantly by how.”
“With advent of digital imaging the bar has been raised because we can do so much more,” Dykstra continues, “but also you're free to spend much more time thinking about how the visual FX that you're creating integrates into the telling of the story, and how it influences the character in the story around the character. So that's a huge difference. The part that's the same is that they always want to see something unlike they've ever seen before, and that gets harder and harder to do as more and movies come out.”
“The things that I don't like is that we're getting to a point where it's like using curse words too frequently and they lose their impact,” he suggests. “I think the scope and grandeur has to a certain extent in some cases replaced story and character. I think that's what distinguished 'X-Men: First Class.’ There was much more story, much more character development and depth than a lot of other films that are out there.”
The FX guru says that even after all of his experience, he still faces seemingly impossible tasks with every new film, and “X-Men: First Class” was no exception. “The movie itself was a challenge, just because it was so many characters that had to have powers,” he says, “and they had to be different from one another, they had to be the same or similar to ones that had appeared to in other films and they had to be unique enough that you felt like you were seeing a new event or a new interpretation of the same power.”
“The fleet in the ocean off Cuba and how central a component the telling of the story that is in the third act was a real challenge,” he recalls. “That was really a concern because it had to look real. It had to have the right water and smoke, and all that stuff is really hard to do in CG, especially when you're doing such a large quantity of it.”
Kerner Optical: Tales from the Tank - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
VIDEO - Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urvcYSpiwQA
3D CGI Film 'Postman Pat' Gets Tennant & Grint
(indiewire.com) Stephen Mangan and Jim Broadbent Also Involved You might not be familiar with "Postman Pat." The kind of peculiarly eccentric, low-key animation series that could only have come out of Great Britain, it involves the adventures of the titular postal worker, and his black-and-white cat Jess, in the fictional village of Greendale.
Highly Motivated FX Pros On Kickstarter
(kickstarter.com)MORAV has been in development for over five years with amazing progress. We are so very close; however, we need your help to take this project to the finish line. The objective here is not to lose momentum. Out-of-pocket spending has gotten us this far, but we need additional funding to complete the production.
We are shooting MORAV as a live action series with loads of miniatures and other traditional practical visual effects, doing as much in-camera as we can. If we reach our funding goal of $39,782, these funds will go towards the completion of the 1/6th scale giant robot miniature, the completion of the giant robot interior set, principal photography, miniature effects photography and post production editing and effects.
We are a highly motivated group of renegade professional FX filmmakers, artist and technicians who are passionate about making this happen. We are not only committed to completion, but also to a high standard of quality in story telling and visuals. Our goal, if funding is reached, is to complete a pilot episode of the MORAV: Missions live action series and take it to the next level. We need your help to get us there.
Kickstarter Page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morav/morav-missions- live-action-series-pilot?ref=
A Tour of 'New Deal Studios' - Practical Effects Shop
VIDEO - Take a look: http://www.lynda.com/home/Player.aspx?lpk4=61847& playChapter=False
Animation Studio to Test-Drive Footage in Free Milwaukee Screenings
(jsonline.com)Miracle Studios - local home builder Tom Hignite's long-gestating animated movie studio - is unreeling a rough-cut version of "Miracle Mouse - Cranky's Miracle" this weekend on Milwaukee's northwest side.
Hignite said the first 12 minutes of the animated film, comprising some action and some still images, will be shown continuously at the Miracle Tour of Homes Oak Hill subdivision site at N. 92nd St. and W. Good Hope Road from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and 6 to 8 p.m. Monday. Admission is free.
Former Disney animator Philo Barnhart, who joined Hignite's project five years ago, will be on hand to offer free drawings of some of the characters he's created. Barnhart's Disney credits include "Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore," "The Little Mermaid" and "The Rescuers Down Under."
Launched in 2004 with the idea of reviving the art of hand-drawn animation a la Walt Disney, Miracle Studios hit some speed bumps two years later, when economic conditions forced Hignite to cut staff and rely on freelancers to keep his dream project going.
This weekend's free showings will be the first time any of "Cranky's Miracle" has been shown "outside our studio walls," Hignite said. The filmmakers are hoping for audience feedback to help them fine-tune and complete the picture, he said.
VFX Training, FOR FREE: Online Movie Fx Magazine
(Video Training) A series of video blogs about the special effects in Hollywood films, interviews with creators and directors. A glimpse behind the scenes movie magic. “These Are Our ??Back issues of DVD magazine. For hardcore FANS of Special Effects, These Are sure to Please. Most of the Interviews conducted by Were Movie FX (as Opposed to an on set Electronic presskit Crew) , so much of the content is focused on the effects rather than the star or director, and its exclusive as opposed to the extras found on the movie’s DVD. They also have an abundance of movie trailers on them.
Download listing: http://www.puppin.org/tutorials/movie-fx-magazine- vol-01-05-2/
Star Wars Was Just About the “Special Effects.”, Says William Shatner(avclub.com) The debate of Star Trek versus Star Wars was once the primordial fire that forged the Internet, but it’s long since been doused by years of disappointment with both franchises, its smoldering embers scattered to form burning affections for newer geek devotions. But leave it to William Shatner to come and poke at it with a stick, and start puffing all over it to see if he can get it started again. Readying himself for battle, Shatner donned his very serious Affliction shirt and posted he following video to his YouTube channel, in which he comes out—surprise—firmly on the side of the franchise that’s given him all those designer tees and YouTube channel subscribers in the first place. To wit, to Shat, “Star Trek had relationships and conflict among the relationships, and stories that involved humanity and philosophical questions,” he says, whereas Star Wars was just about the “special effects.” (But what about the trade regulations?!)
Visibly grimacing every time he simply says the words “Star Wars,” he derides its hollowness so deep that he imagines Industrial Light And Magic engineered everything right down to the costumes—and now that J.J. Abrams has been “piling on the special effects” with his take on the franchise, “Star Wars has nothing to stand on.” And while he also says Star Trek has hotter ladies, Shatner does, however, reserve some kind words for Princess Leia, which is to say he gets sort of creepy about the idea of his Captain Kirk and Princess Leia riding off into the sunset and forming “the perfect union,” complete with hand motion, and thereby bringing peace to the imaginary galaxies. So if William Shatner and Carrie Fisher finally do it, we can stop talking about this? Maybe that can be a panel at next year's Comic-Con.
Video - http://www.avclub.com/articles/william-shatner- revives-the-star-trek-vs-star- wars,61837/?utm_medium=RSS& utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source= avclub_rss_daily
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