(Film) Following up on a story we posted earlier today about Transformers 4, director Michael Bay added the following confirmation on his official site:
There has been a lot of speculation about what I'm going to do next and when or if I will do another Transformers. So let me set the record straight.
I have just concluded a deal with Paramount to do two movies, but it won't be two Transformers.
I will first do 'Pain & Gain' with Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson.
Then I will do the next Transformers for release on June 29, 2014.
-Michael Bay
To reiterate, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura told us earlier that "we're going to try to do a hybrid there where there will be some characters that come forward--we think, we're still in the process of figuring it out--and some characters that don't, but it will definitely be a different story."
Peter Jackson Tackling Tintin 2 Immediately After The Hobbit
(cinemablend.com)
So much for Peter Jackson ever taking a vacation. As soon as the Oscar-winning director puts the finishing touches on his two-part Hobbit epic, he’ll dive right into Tintin 2, according to Steven Spielberg (and the scribes over at Total Film).
“Peter [Jackson]’s doing it. I wanted to do it, but Peter has to because we made a deal. I said, ‘I’ll direct the first one, you direct the second one,’” Spielberg explained. “And Peter, of course, is going to do it right after he finishes photography on The Hobbit. He’ll go right into the 31, 21 days of performance capture.”
Spielberg stops short of confirming which Herge books they’ll use as inspiration for the plot of a second Tintin, though the end of the first film makes it pretty clear that Tintin (Jamie Bell) and drunken Capt. Haddock (Andy Serkis) would be heading to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve a fortune in pirate gold. Unless, of course, they don’t. Nothing’s set in stone.
A sequel was set in stone, however, given the fact that Tintin banked more than $370 million at the global box office. Granted, only $75.8M of that came from the U.S., but Herge’s adventurer always came with a built-in international audience, and it’s that demographic Jackson and Spielberg will aim to satisfy when they embark on another journey.
I, for one, can’t wait. The original Tintin drew comparisons to Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a snappy pace and massive action set pieces. But Jackson doesn’t direct like that (unless you count The Frighteners, which you should). The second Tintin should have a different tone to reflect its storyteller, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Jackson – a huge Herge fan – does in this world.
Battleship: The Movie Powered By Biofuels
(cleantechnica.com)The new green economy sure is heading into some strange territory these days. Just consider Battleship: The Movie, a summer blockbuster due for release in May. The slam-bang Hollywood actioner features the U.S. Navy battling some rather aggressive seagoing critters and, if it’s a hit, audiences around the world won’t just be rooting for the Navy — they’ll be cheering for the Navy and biofuels all summer long. Say, what?
The U.S. Navy and Biofuels
The makers of Battleship: The Movie might not have envisioned the biofuel scenario when the movie went into production a few years ago, but the U.S. Navy has been thoroughly engaged in a rapid transition to alternative energy, including solar power at Navy bases as well as biofuels at sea. As a sea-based service, the Navy has been straightforward about expressing the effects of global warming on its operations, including humanitarian missions. That goes right to the top: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has been a prominent, cut-to-the-chase spokesperson for the science of climate change.
Shouting out the Green Biofuel Message
The Navy is also not shy about broadcasting the impact of a precarious and dwindling supply of fossil fuels on national security. Its one-pager on energy security goals states:
“The United States Navy and Marine Corps rely far too much on petroleum, a dependency that degrades the strategic position of our country and the tactical performance of our forces. The global supply of oil is finite, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find and exploit, and over time cost continues to rise.”
The Navy’s Green Strike Group
The one-pager outlines five goals, one of which is to float an entire “Green Fleet” powered by alternative energy by 2016. As an interim step, this year the Navy has been testing biofuels on enough fighter jets, helicopters and ships to send a Green Strike Group out to sea. Though the group will be anchored by a nuclear-powered carrier, every member of the fleet will be powered with the help of non-petroleum fuels.
This is where it starts to get really interesting. The setting for Battleship: The Movie is RIMPAC itself—you can catch it right at the beginning of the Battleship trailer. The movie even features footage from film that was shot during RIMPAC 2010. That’s right, the real-life international showcase for the Navy’s alternative energy program is the setting for a movie that aims to reach millions of viewers all over the world.
Mainstreaming the New Green Economy
The display of green firepower in Battleship: The Movie is a bit off-message from the ideal of a sustainable future, and for that matter, most movie-goers won’t be aware that they’re seeing a time-shifted version of the Navy’s Green Strike Group. However, the underlying fact is clear: the new green economy…
Best of 2011 Visual Effects - Top Three
(blog.nicksflickpicks.com)
THREE TOP BEST VISUAL EFFECTS CONTENDERS:
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (RUSSELL EARL, ET AL.)
... because hokey or sleek, quick or sustained, every effect is plausible and each one has genuine personality, like elements of a zippy score;
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (JOE LETTERI, ET AL.)
... because I admire the prodigious technical achievement, staged across a variety of settings, even if I felt a little colder than I expected;
The Tree of Life (DAN GLASS, BRADLEY J. FRIEDMAN, ET AL.)
... because all the mitoses and mitochondria, the cosmos and the corpuscles, feel staggeringly true, thematically vital, and gorgeously abstract.
Runners-Up: I didn't see a lot of the movies that make the strongest plays for this category, so I'm cutting my list off at three, which also feels like the right interval between my top picks and my also-rans. Still, my single favorite effect of the year, in hilarious timing as well as spooky execution, is the sudden evaporation of a key character in Fright Night, which continues to be a fun effect in its later reprisals.
The work in X-Men: First Class was sometimes very impressive, but I admit it bugs me that the films in that franchise always seem stuck in awkward cadences: "Are you ready, we're going to show you an effect now! Here, it's happening! That was an effect!"
Some of the CGI in Immortals feels oppressively heavy-handed, as it does in the very different world of a cinematic immortal in Hugo, but the peaks in both movies are aesthetically impressive, and probably very difficult at the technical level.
The booms, chases, explosions, crashes, stunt coordination, and (I assume) the CGI enhancement of all of this in Fast Five are traditional enough to seem almost unremarkable, but there's no way this is just point-your-camera filmmaking, so to everyone who made such a ridiculous story so engaging, in ways that involved a matte or a mouse-pointer or a digital overlay, congrats for making me believe almost everything you did. As low-fi as they are, the creepy alterations of reality and the impending planet of Melancholia really got to me.
Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: Attack the Block, Bellflower, Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Paranormal Activity 3, Super 8, TrollHunter
Films I "Hated" to Skip Before Posting: Real Steel, Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Guillermo del Toro to Direct Emma Watson in Beauty and the Beast
(Variety) Guillermo del Toro's Beauty and the Beast has landed at Warner Bros. and, according to an update at Variety, del Toro is now planning to direct as well as produce with Andrew Davies (The Three Musketeers, Bridget Jones's Diary) providing the screenplay. They've also confirmed ComingSoon.net's earlier report that Emma Watson (the Harry Potter films) is likely to headline.
Del Toro's next film, Pacific Rim is now in production with a cast that includes Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Max Martini, Willem Dafoe, Robert Kazinsky, Clifton Collins Jr., Diego Klattenhoff and Ron Perlman.
Details on the Beauty and the Beast project are still currently few, but del Toro will provide a treatment that Davies will work from and this version of the story will be a period piece.
All CGI Fan Tribute: Star Tours Original Ride
(wdwdailynews.com)To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the legendary Star Tours ride (opened in 1987 at Disneyland), discover “Star Tours Origins (ST-45 Project)”, a non-official tribute to the “Ultimate Star Wars Adventure”.
This video is a home-made CGI recreation of the original “Endor Express” movie, featured in Star Tours 1, and for the first time in Stereoscopic 3D !
VIDEO - Take a look: http://wdwdailynews.com/wdw-news/dhs/video-of-star-tours- original-ride-using-cgi/
Details for “The Lone Ranger” Open Casting Calls in Colorado and Utah
(onlocationvacations.com)As we recently reported, The Lone Ranger, starring Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, will not only be filming in New Mexico this spring, but they will also be shooting scenes in Colorado and Utah.
Last week Sande Alessi Casting finally announced details for four open casting calls they will be holding in the Greater Utah area next month for those interested in being extras in the movie.
Check out all the details for the casting calls below:
Please choose any audition time listed above and don’t be late. Show up at the mid day audition times to avoid lines.
***There is no experience necessary***
BRING a 3 x 5 current color photo. (Does NOT have to be professional.) No wigs, makeup or sunglasses in photos and please shoot it from the waist up.
BRING a pen or pencil.
You do not need to prepare for an audition, we will be simply meet you, have you fill out a registration card, attach your photo and send you on your way.
You must be 18 years or older, have a social security number and valid ID. You must be legal to work in the U.S.
Though free parking is provided, please bring change for parking meters in the event that the lot is full.
Thank you, and we can’t wait to meet you all!!
More: http://www.onlocationvacations.com/2012/ 02/12/details-for-the-lone- ranger-open-casting-calls-in- colorado-and-utah/
Doh! Matt Groening Donates $500K to UCLA
(chicagotribune.com)With the 500th episode of "The Simpsons" set to air later this week, creator Matt Groening will punctuate that legacy with a $500,000 donation to the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television to endow the Matt Groening Chair in Animation.
The endowment will allow visiting master artists to instruct students in the school's animation program.
"With this amazing gift, Matt has given our students enormous support and ensured that we will be able to take our program to even greater levels of excellence. Our animation students will benefit greatly from this endowment," said Teri Schwartz, dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
Groening will donate an additional $50,000 to mark the second installment of the Matt Groening initiative, an annual donation that supports student filmmakers producing animated shorts with socially responsible themes.
Groening will receive a star on the Hollywood walk of fame later this month. The 500th seg of "The Simpsons" airs Sunday on Fox.
A Snarky Analysis - CGI vs Practical Effects
(misterxonline.com)An FX-ladden primer for the next mister X analysis which will debate the pros and cons of modern CGI as well as practical old-school fx techniques (done in my traditional snarky style…but seriously heartfelt)
VIDEO - Take a look: (Warning - May Cause Nostalgia Tear-Up): http://misterxonline.com/archives/305
Animation Companies Squashed & Stretched Over Tax Credits
(how-do.co.uk)The newly formed Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick Entertainment has joined a growing number of animation companies to call on the Government to introduce tax credits to help the industry remain competitive.
Under the Animation UK banner, a host of animation firms are lobbying to get the same production tax breaks as seen in countries including Canada and Ireland.
According to its own research, which was published in September, the multi-million pound UK animation industry is suffering due to "severe (artificial) competitive pressure on UK businesses, making it harder to justify production in the UK." This, it said, had seen Noddy, Bob The Builder and Thomas & Friends produced overseas, while increasing numbers of animation houses are "co-producing with foreign partners to access the benefits of overseas government support."
"When I started this process a year ago I was amazed at how quickly our industry was eroding. We are a small but world class industry that punches high above its weight. This report confirms what we all suspected; our industry has a very unique set of problems which means we are unable to compete on a level playing field with the rest of the world," said Oli Hyatt, chairman Animation UK.
"We urge the government to work with us to find the correct solution for an industry that is ready for growth"
Other supporters of Animation UK include Chapman Entertainment, Studio Liddell, Baby Cow, HIT, Aardman, Astley Baker Davies, Pact and Bectu.
VFX Producers Challenge: The Cost Of A Creating Character
(tngvisualeffects.wordpress.com) You chose visual effects because you know you can create anything, as long as it’s in your budget. Need photorealistic 3D models? Adding in mocap or necessary services needed to make your project come alive may make your budget seem bleaker than you originally thought.
Let’s say you’ve got 10 characters that need to be 3D scanned. You want these in high enough detail so you can start using them for tests, trailers, etc. It already feels like it is going break your budget. We’ve got some suggestions to help you get the data you need.
Partner Up Best case scenario. You’re developing the game while the film is in production. From concept, to post, these projects will maintain fluid replication and you’ve got someone to split the costs with.
Quantity Discount You remember this one, right? The more you spend, the more you save.
Data Storage Not sure exactly what you want in digital? If your production has potential for any possible scene changes just have your 3D scanning service provider scan anything you might possibly need as a cg model. Order the data when you need it.
Head Scans The 3D scanning service provider that specializes in photorealistic heads can give you a good, clean model, quickly. Then, you can take the fraction you’ve saved and use other specialists to finish the work.
Raw Scans This is an option as long as the VFX facility you choose to do clean up and textures has a pipeline compatible with scanned models. Are their costs any less than your 3D scanning service provider?
If none of the options above are beneficial to your project, talk to your 3D scanning service provider to determine how they can customize your order to help you. There could be other bargaining chips out there that you haven’t considered. Get the conversation started and figure out how you will get the best with your budget. Great characters are worth it.
Pixar Co-Founder To Animate Symposium
(huffingtonpost.com)For anyone who has read the new Steve Jobs biography and enjoyed the stories of how he bought and changed the direction of Pixar, this Friday's Digital Media Symposium, or DiMe, should be a real treat.
This year's keynoter is Dr. Alvy Ray Smith, a co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios. A computer graphics pioneer and two-time Academy Award winner, Smith joins a great lineup of other speakers for the annual Boulder event, whichs runs 1 to 6 p.m. at the St. Julien Hotel.
DiMe seems to be getting better each year, with other scheduled speakers including Boulder entrepreneur Paul Berberian, CEO of Orbotix, a new startup that's created Sphero, a robotic ball you control from your smartphone; Ben Long, founder of Noise Buffet and 123GuitarTuner.com; and Carla Johnson, CEO of EarthvisionZ, a Boulder company creating interactive 3D geospatial platforms.
The list of speakers goes on with Harris Morris, president of Harris Broadcast Communications; Andres Espineira, CEO, and Melissa Hourigan, v.p. of marketing for Pixorial; Rob Schuham, co-founder of FearLess Revolution; J. Erik Dyce, CEO of In Demand Bands; Micah Baldwin, CEO of Graphicly, another Boulder startup that's brought the printed world of comics online; and Joel Swanson of the University of Colorado/Boulder.
Returning as moderator again this year is Don Hahn, producer of the animated feature films Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas and others.
In 2006, when Disney purchased Pixar in an all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billion, Steve Jobs became the Disney Company's single largest shareholder, owning about 7 percent of the company. I would be surprised if there wasn't some discussion of Jobs' history at Pixar at DiMe.
Lucasfilm / Lego Star Wars Deal Snaps Together
(joystiq.com) Lucasfilm has renewed its licensing deal with the Lego Group for 10 more years, meaning if you have a kid right now he can grow up with a guaranteed supply of Lego Star Wars video games and toys. If you don't have a kid any time soon, look at this as an opportunity to delay growing up for another decade.
Lego is currently developing products based on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and will be following up its most recent Lego Star Wars video game, The Clone Wars, some time during the next 10 years, we'd guess. The Lego Star Wars series has sold more than 30 million units worldwide since its launch in 2005.
Post-Cyberpunk Sci-Fi "Altered Carbon" Backup At Mythology Entertainment
(darkhorizons.com)Mythology Entertainment has acquired feature rights to Richard Morgan's 2002 post-cyberpunk sci-fi novel "Altered Carbon" says Variety.
The story is set in a future where consciousness can be digitized and stored in cortical stacks implanted in the spine. The sacks essentially work as a back-up drive for the mind, allowing humans to survive physical death by having their memories and consciousness "re-sleeved" into new bodies.
The main character is Takeshi Kovacs, a trained soldier downloaded from an off-world prison and into the body of a disgraced cop. The download was done by a highly influential aristocrat who's convinced he was murdered and wants the soldier to find out the truth.
"Shutter Island" scribe Laeta Kalogridis will adapt the novel along with David Goodman. Kalogridis, Brad Fischer and James Vanderbilt will produce. The project was previously setup at Silver Pictures.
Two more novels featuring the anti-hero Kovacs character were published in 2003 and 2005. Author Morgan also penned the 2007 novel "Black Man" (aka. Thirteen), two "Black Widow" comic mini-series, and worked as a writer on the video games "Crysis 2" and the upcoming "Syndicate".
The Case for Eliminating the Best Animated Feature Award
(grantland.com)As I hope I’ve made clear by this point in our Oscar journey, I love awards. I cover them, I handicap them, I tweet them, I do useless math about them, I would happily volunteer to accept them if the actual winners could not attend, and I watch them. On Sunday I got really excited about the complicated, layered irony of Bon Iver winning Best New Artist at the Grammys even though I’m about 80% sure that I don’t know who he is. So when I propose the elimination of an award, please understand that it’s with a heavy heart. That said, when it comes to the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, my strong feeling is, to quote Padma Lakshmi: Please pack your knives and go.
Best Animated Feature is Oscar’s youngest category: It was created in 2001, a decade or so after The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin started the Hollywood animation boom, and not long after Toy Story and its first sequel made it clear to the Academy’s Board of Governors that even great cartoons stood no chance of cracking the five-film Best Picture roster; at the time, Beauty and the Beast was the only animated movie ever to have done so. Since then, the fledgling category has yielded some worthy honorees—mostly from Pixar, which has won the prize 6 out of 10 times—and some that were less impressive (do Happy Feet or Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit really merit the words “Oscar winner” attached to their titles)?
The Academy’s impulse to give an award to cartoons stemmed from both the organization’s best side—a desire to honor underrecognized work—and its worst, which is the unkillable, paranoid belief among some AMPAS overlords that the job of the Oscars should be to nominate the year’s most popular movies (many of which are now animated) and that Academy’s failure to mirror public taste even when public taste blows will eventually doom it to irrelevance. That same impetus led the Board of Governors to expand the roster of Best Picture nominees from five to ten in 2009, a move which promptly solved the problem that the Best Animated Feature category was intended to alleviate. The first year of the expanded roster, Up got a Best Picture nomination. The second year, Toy Story 3 got one. The fact that both movies were also nominated for, and won, Best Animated Feature was, therefore, a foregone conclusion.
It was also an unnecessary prize, since the proper reward for an animated movie that is judged one of the year’s best films but not the best should be exactly the same as for any other movie—a Best Picture nomination. A separate award feels redundant in a great year—and, in an off year, worse than that. This year, the nominees for Best Animated Feature are Gore Verbinski’s funny and sharp, if scattershot, Western pastiche Rango, a pair of middling DreamWorks Animation releases, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots, and two hand-drawn, old-school European movies, Spain’s Chico & Rita and France’s A Cat in Paris. The winner will likely be Rango, which is the best movie of the four-and-a-quarter of the nominees I’ve seen. The winner should be none of the above.
Those who say the Best Animated Feature Oscar is necessary because it shines a light on an under-heralded genre often compare it to Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Documentary, two other specialty categories that find themselves at an inherent disadvantage in the Best Picture race. But the analogy doesn’t hold. While the vast majority of foreign-film aspirants never even play in American movie houses, and very few documentaries get a national theatrical release, three of this year’s animation contenders grossed over $120 million. If no animated movie is up for Best Picture this year, it’s because no animated movie was good enough, not because they aren’t noticed or taken seriously.
Moreover, foreign movies and documentaries draw their five nominees from much larger pools—this year, films from more than 60 countries were submitted for the Best Foreign-Language film award, and, even with new, stricter rules set to take effect, at least 60 nonfiction films should end up eligible for Best Documentary a year from now. The five animation nominees were, by contrast, chosen from an eligibility pool of 18 movies. Five out of 18 is a preposterously high percentage of films to nominate—it edges the Oscars dangerously close to the madness of the Tonys, which have sometimes had to honor just about everything that’s eligible in order to keep a category afloat.
And when you factor in the roiling internal politics of the Academy’s animation branch, which was essentially forced to qualify motion-capture movies like The Adventures of Tintin as eligible and then retaliated by refusing to nominate any of them, the category becomes not just ridiculous, but borderline fraudulent. As The Wrap’s Steve Pond reported last fall, the makers of Tintin, Happy Feet Two and Mars Needs Moms—all movies that used performance-capture techniques—had to petition even to be considered as animated. Had the animation branch turned them away, the number of eligible cartoons this year would have dropped to 15, triggering an Academy rule that would have lowered the number of nominees from five to four. So the branch had it both ways—it allowed the movies to qualify, and then chose five nominees from the 15 movies it considered “real” animation.
In some ways, the studios and filmmakers who advocate performance-capture have brought part of this mess on themselves. You can’t argue to the actors’ branch that Andy Serkis deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Rise of the Planet of the Apes because there’s really no difference between what he does and what Christopher Plummer does, and then turn around and tell the animation branch that performance-capture acting work is all in the service of creating cartoon characters. On the other hand, no branch choosing from just 18 films should be in the business of attempting to pre-emptively eliminate anything. And the films they did nominate are, as a group, simply too weak to merit a category of their own. While I’d love to be able to report that Chico & Rita is a masterpiece, it’s actually a just-okay movie whose inclusion seems more an ideological statement about the importance of traditional handcrafted animation than a measure of quality. (Sure, it’s interestingly stylized and grown-up—you don’t often see pubic hair in this category—but as far as character expressiveness, its animation comes uncomfortably close to Aqua Teen Hunger Force.)
It’s not hard to think of reforms for this category: At the very least, the Academy could decide to cap the number of nominees at three, period, end of discussion, to avoid the kind of qualification gamesmanship that came into play this year and also insure that a movie doesn’t have a 1-in-3 chance at a nomination just because it exists. It could also throw the nominating process open to the entire membership—as is the case for Best Picture. Last year, 8 of the 25 highest-grossing movies in the U.S. were animated—does it really take experts to pick the best of them? (Yes, the general membership might overlook small, worthy movies like 2008’s Waltz With Bashir. But so did the animation branch.)
The simplest decision, however, might be to acknowledge that this category needlessly privileges a genre of filmmaking that is now so mainstream it should no longer be accorded what amounts to a consolation prize. As the last two years demonstrated, a truly great animated movie now has a legitimate shot at a Best Picture nomination. As for the rest...well, movies that are merely good can find their rewards at the box office or on DVD. And the bar for an Oscar nomination should be set a lot higher than “It was better than Gnomeo & Juliet.”
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