(smh.com.au) IF THE Screen Actors Guild award nominations are any indication, Hollywood's acting community isn't ready to honour work in the performance-capture format.
Despite a push by Fox Studios for his role as a hyper-intelligent chimp named Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Andy Serkis was omitted from the guild's supporting actor category.
Serkis has been an ad-hoc spokesman for performance capture, or motion capture, a technique in which the actions of human actors are recorded and used to animate digital character models. He appears in performance-capture roles in two films this year - as Caesar and as Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin, which opens on Boxing Day.
Fox has been running ''for your consideration'' trade advertisements in which an image of Serkis in his motion-capture suit is juxtaposed with the finished shot in Apes, where he has been rendered an ape by artists at Weta Digital. ''The Time is Now,'' the ad says in bold type, with a quote from Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss that reads: ''Serkis gives a performance so nuanced and powerful it may challenge the Academy to give an Oscar to an actor who is never seen in the film.''
The guild nominations both cleared and muddied the Oscars picture in one swoop.
"Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" Looks For $65M Open
(thecelebritycafe.com)
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, is expected to easily top the box office with as much as $65 million, The Associated Press predicts. However, both Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter predict more modest numbers. Both predict between $40 and $54 million. Guy Ritchie’s first Holmes film, released in 2009, opened to the tune of $62.3 million on Christmas weekend. The film hasn’t received as much critical acclaim as the first and cost Warner Bros. $125 million to make.
Game Environments No Longer Need to be Made Out of Polygons
(blog.tekmaster.co.uk)"Euclideon" was formed in May of 2010 in Brisbane Australia. It’s Unlimited Detail method can supposedly show unlimited point cloud data in real time — meaning that game environments would no longer need to be made out of polygons, but could be made out of tiny atoms, dramatically improving the level of detail in a game. The following video, narrated by Euclideon CEO Bruce Robert Dell, describes the process rather well. We’d don’t know much more about this technology at this time. Does this really work as well as it looks like it does? Or is Euclideon putting us all on a bit? We can’t wait to find out.
VIDEO - Take a look: http://blog.tekmaster.co.uk/can-games-look-real-today- computer-graphics-identical- to-real-life-pure-midget-news/
Eureka! The Secrets of Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Joe Letteri Headshot 300x196 Eureka! The secrets of Rise of the Planet of the ApesJoe Letteri is the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital Studios in Wellington, New Zealand. The CGI big cheese. He’s been working effects magic on movies like Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings and more. Most recently, he was instrumental in bringing digital apes to life in the new-to-Blu-ray Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring Andy Serkis as Caesar, the ape with souped-up intelligence. Just before the launch, in Weta’s Wellington HQ, Letteri talked exclusively to the Independent about making the movie.
Can you start by telling me how motion capture works?
The idea with motion capture is you want to take what the actor’s doing and record it in three dimensions so you can put it on to a new and unique character and have that character express the same performance, the same emotions.
For the body we have the actor wear a skintight suit and put reflective dots glued all over the suit that we’re then able to record via a number of cameras. By looking at what the dots are doing we get a sense of the movement of the actor’s body and the underlying skeleton. That gives us the performance of the body that we can then use to drive the muscles and the skin and so forth in the animation.
We also want to record the performance of the face, for dialogue and emotions and expressions, and that’s a little trickier to do and so we rely on a small video camera mounted in front of the actor’s face from a helmet. Once you understand what the muscles are doing you can understand the emotion that the actor was making.
ROA 585 300x168 Eureka! The secrets of Rise of the Planet of the ApesSo although humans’ and chimps’ faces are different shapes, the actor’s face is so closely mapped that you know what each movement means?
That’s right. So we all recognise a smile when we see another human do it – we don’t necessarily recognise a smile when we see a chimp do it. In a chimp, sometimes a smile can mean nervousness, sometimes happiness is shown with more of a grimace which might actually look threatening to us. And so we take what the actor is doing and then adjust it so that we can understand that emotion but in the context of the new character. So it’s not a one-to-one mapping of say Andy Serkis’s face to the chimp’s face but it’s a one-to-one mapping of Andy’s emotion.
There’s a bit of science that goes into it, there’s also quite a bit of artistry which in the end just comes down to a gut feeling. You look at it, you look at Andy and you say do I feel the same way, is this the same performance? And if not you go back and refine it. So the technology is a tool to help us achieve that translation, that expression.
Your animation and effects are so sophisticated now. Do you think one day you’ll be able to manage without actors in the equation at all?
People ask that all the time. In fact you can animate without actors, a lot of films do that, look at for example any of the Pixar films. They do fantastic animation without using actors other than from for the voices. But those are meant to be very different kinds of performance, those are meant to be very broad strokes performances, whereas what we are looking for is more of a nuanced performance. Especially interacting with live action actors. We rely on actors to bring that because it’s a different type of drama, it’s more the drama that you get in theatre and live action and that’s what we’re after. That kind of realism.
In Rise of Planet of the Apes you moved to a new kind of motion capture, with Andy Serkis right there in the shot all the time with the other actors. This enhances everyone’s performance. What’s the next stage?
It really depends on the story. It’s hard not to emphasise that. For example the reason it worked so well for us on this one is that we were doing a story about chimps and chimps are roughly the same size as humans so it wasn’t a big stretch to have actors in there working together and allowing us to capture that in that fashion. If the story had been about something else, an eight-foot long creature with tentacles it would have been harder for an actor to fit in in quite that same way.
In the making of this movie, were there any eureka moments, when things wonderfully, unexpectedly fell into place?
Sure, for me the moment when it all really came together was the shot when we see Caesar in his cell. It’s the morning after he’s administered the drug to the other chimps and you can just see in his eyes following the actions of the other chimps waking up and starting to understand now what he’s wrought. You see that turning point where you can tell he’s been defeated and he’s been caged and yet he’s starting to formulate a plan and he knows that he has to take control of the situation and make it his own. You see all that very clearly in one shot. And if you see Andy’s original performance for that you see that very clearly as well. And so the first time we saw Caesar perform that and got that same sense of that emotion and that realism we knew that we had got to the point where that character would work and would be able to deliver all the rest of the moments we needed for the film.
"Attack of the Puppet People" Actress Susan Gordon Dies At 62
(contactmusic.com)Former child star Susan Gordon has died at the age of 62.
The actress, also known as Susan L. Aviner, passed away on Sunday (11Dec11) in New Jersey after a long battle with cancer, according to Variety.
Gordon made her acting debut as a child in 1958 movie Attack of the Puppet People, which was directed by her father Bert I. Gordon.
She went on to land roles in 1959 film The Five Pennies and hit TV show The Twilight Zone, as well as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke and a TV version of Miracle on 34th Street.
In her later career she worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency in Japan before returning to acting to star in a 2002 Off-Broadway production of A Magic Place in a New Time.
CG Chipmunks Look for $20M Open
(thecelebritycafe.com)The third Alvin and the Chipmunks film. Fox is trying to be conservative about its predictions, believing that the film will make around $20 million, less than half of the $48.9 million that the second film made in 2009. The AP and EW are both predicting that it could make as much as $35 million, even though reviews have been horrendous.
Early Jim Henson Cut-Paper Animation Found
(washingtonpost.com)Before there were the Muppets we know and love today, there was Alexander — the little grape who longed to be a watermelon.
The little piece of fruit is the subject of a cut-paper animated short made by the late muppeteer Jim Henson that was recently unearthed by the Jim Henson Company. Alexander, the puniest grape of them all, works hard to become as big as a watermelon so he can defeat his bully. The unfinished cartoon subs in storyboard stills from Henson’s Red Book, his hand-written journal of ideas.
Take a look: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/early- jim-henson-cut-paper- animation-found/2011/12/14/ gIQAONtwtO_blog.html
Real Time Motion Capture & CGI Included In Avatar Extras Download
(pcmag.com) The studio behind the blockbuster Avatar is offering an unprecedented look into digital filmmaking, with downloadable extras that will allow a viewer to watch the motion capture actors or CGI in real time.
Beginning on Dec. 20, customers can now download a total of eight hours of extras via Apple's iTunes from Twentieth Century Fox, which include the three different views of the movie, plus a number of other extras that offer a real-time look into how the movie was made. The Avatar iTunes Extras Special Edition will cost $19.99 for a high-definition version, and $14.99 for the standard version; both include the movie as well as the extras. Apple will begin accepting preorders at 11 AM PT, a Fox spokeswoman said.
Fox's motivation is to encourage consumers to get into "digital collecting" of digital movies, explained Aubrey Freeborn, senior vice president of marketing and product management for PPV, VOD and EST for Twentieth-Century Fox. The extras will be released to the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia on Dec. 20. Avatar is the top-selling Blu-ray disc of all time.
"We strive to develop compelling experiences for every screen whether it's on Blu-ray, VOD or digital download," Freeborn said. "As consumers' entertainment choices expand, it is critical that we deliver the right value proposition to enhance digital ownership and drive increased adoption." Avatar's Blu-ray disc allows users to watch either one of three versions: the theatrical version of the film, a version that tracks the motion capture actors, and the "template," or early CGI rendering. Lightstorm Entertainment, the company founded by Avatar director James Cameron, filmed the extra scenes and supplied them to Fox.
Avatar Extras Views
What the new extras add is the ability to either watch one view or all three views simultaneously, covering 120 minutes each. Users can also divide the film into multiple regions, so that the he or she can see the head and shoulders of the CGI Na'vi in the film, and the legs and torso of the actual motion-capped actor who created the scene below.
"This really allows viewers to engage with the film in a whole new way," Freeborn said.
In addition, Fox has added a "green screen X-ray" with never-seen-before footage. A viewer can mouse over a scene as it plays, and the "radar" will "expose" the part of the scene that used green-screen footage. In one scene, for example, mousing over an actor who moved "weightlessly" in space exposed the hoop harness he used. Fox isn't charging extra for the extras, although the download times and capacity may be daunting: 7 gigabytes for the SD version (4.6 Gbytes for the extras) and 12 gigabytes for the high-def version (with 7 Gbytes for the new extra material). The content includes the 2D version of the film.
"Cloud storage over time will make a lot of sense for this, over time," Freeborn said.
Customers who bought the three-disc Avatar collector's edition version of the film were able to view the theatrical, template, or mo-cap versions of the film, Freeborn explained. But the ability to blend and combine the various versions digitally is new, as is the fact that the entire film is now covered.
While the movie itself was considered a landmark for filmmaking (especially for modern 3D technology, which it helped pioneer, plus CGI) the new extras allow the users to gain an unprecedented look behind the scenes, Freeborn said.
Without the enhancements of the CGI, the sets themselves are sparse, with brooms and other props used as guides for the actors. "It gives you a fuller appreciation for what these actors go through," Freeborn said.
Avatar Extras "Green Screen" Radar
Freeborn said that Fox is taking the same approach to extras to other new releases, including dramas and comedies, but acknowledged that the rich diversity of content (a Na'vi-to-English dictionary is included, for instance) lends itself to rich worlds such as the one created by Avatar.
Apple's iTunes is the leader in the digital space, and the "elegant delivery of extras," Freeborn said. "But we're also strongly encouraging other retailers and platforms to enable this type of interface, because that will expand digital overall."
Self-similar Textures in 3D Computer Graphics
(gurneyjourney.blogspot.com)A property of many natural textures is that they retain their geometric character at various levels of magnification.
Thus, a piece of the object is similar to the whole object. For example, in this photograph, a little piece of Romanesco broccoli has the same “spiral-knobby” character as the whole broccoli.
Much more with pics & video: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/11/self-similar- textures-in-3d-computer.html
Podcast Interview With 'Tintin' Visual Effects Luminary Now Online on Autodesk AREA
(cadcamnews.in) 'The Adventures of Tintin' Virtual Production and Visual Effects Q&A With Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri Available Exclusively Via Autodesk AREA Online Community Site.
Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Autodesk, Inc., presented a screening of Steven Spielberg’s latest 3D film, “The Adventures of Tintin,” followed by a question and answer (Q&A) session with Joe Letteri, senior visual effects (VFX) supervisor at Weta Digital who discussed the virtual production aspects of the new movie.
A podcast of the Q&A is now available to audiences worldwide on Autodesk Media & Entertainment Vice President Marc Petit’s blog. The blog is part of AREA, the Autodesk Media & Entertainment virtual digital entertainment community. Log in to the Q&A to gain insights into the intricate and complex virtual production, performance capture and visual effects used to help immerse viewers in the wonderful world of Tintin.
Joe Letteri is a four-time Oscar winner — for his groundbreaking visual effects work on James Cameron’s “Avatar;” the last two “The Lord of the Rings” films: “The Two Towers” and “Return of the King;” and “King Kong,” the latter three films with Peter Jackson. He was also nominated for the visual effects of “I, Robot.”
Source: http://www.cadcamnews.in/2011/12/podcast-interview-with- tintin-visual.html
iStopMotion Brings Stop Motion Animation to iOS
(tuaw.com) Boinx Software is one of my favorite Apple development companies. I use their Boinx TV app to produce TUAW TV Live every week, and all of our onsite video from Macworld Expo 2011 went through Boinx TV. Their Fotomagico software has been a slideshow favorite for years, and their You Gotta See This! iOS app does a cool job of creating photo collages on the iPhone. Now the company is moving the powerful iStopMotion Mac app to the iPad, and has created a new iPhone app (iStopCamera) to act as a remote camera for iStopMotion for iPad.
iStopMotion for iPad (US$4.99) is an app that is designed to get younger iPad users into the thrill of making animated movies through the magic of stop motion animation. When the app is launched, a pair of clay figures are animated to show you how to use iStopMotion. The "star" of the tutorial, a little yellow figure with spiky hair, will be named in a user contest coming up shortly. The app itself is available on Thursday, December 15 -- TUAW was given a preview of both iStopMotion for iPad and the companion iStopCamera app.
Full Article & Video: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/13/daily-ipad-app-boinx- istopmotion-brings-stop- motion-animation-t/
Does Mission: Impossible Prove IMAX Is The Future Of Moviegoing?
(cinemablend.com)For years we've been promised that 3D, the clunky, expensive method of jazzing up images that are usually pretty impressive on their own, was the future of moviegoing. Movie theaters have been suffering declining audiences since the invention of television, but lately things seemed to be getting much worse, with a million other things competing for the attention of people just looking for something to do on a Friday night. For a while, or at least when Avatar came out, 3D seemed like a win for everybody-- moviegoers got to see something spectacular, exhibitors and filmmakers made more money from premium tickets.
As we all know, that hasn't lasted-- 3D has been used badly more often than not, and at a certain point the novelty wears off, leaving you wearing glasses to see something that would probably look great anyway. Studios have clung to 3D as a liferaft of cash in an era of declining audiences, but this week a new contender might have presented itself as the future of moves-- a contender that's more than 40 years old.
If you see even a frame of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol on the largest screen possible, you'll know what I mean-- and if you see it on IMAX, you might be too busy scraping yourself up off the floor to read this. The new film from Pixar veteran Brad Bird, which opens today on IMAX screens and everywhere next Wednesday, is the most spectacular narrative use of the large-screen format maybe ever, and has a power to thrill audiences that comes directly from its enormous screen. The movie isn't shot entirely in IMAX-- we're a long way off from that being a reality thanks to the clunky cameras-- but it switches seamlessly from 35 mm to the IMAX 70 mm for the sake of giant action sequences, and every single one of them pays off. The already famous scene in which Tom Cruise scales Dubai's Burj Khalifa is the pinnacle of the IMAX grandeur, but there's more where that came from, all of them adding up to a moviegoing experience that'd be absolutely impossible to recreate at home.
That's the holy grail that studios and exhibitors have been searching for, and though they may not yet be admitting that 3D isn't it, the very existence of 3D TVs proves it's no longer a "see it exclusively at the movies" kind of experience. But I'm not aware of any TVs claiming to be IMAX, and even if they were they couldn't match the experience of, say, the IMAX theater at Lincoln Square in New York, where I saw Ghost Protocol. A middle seat in that theater, which may be the very best in New York, perches you in the middle of the 8-story screen; when the camera flies over the top of the Burj Khalifa tower, you may instinctively grab the bottom of your seat to keep from pitching into the empty sky. Try getting that effect while wearing 3D glasses.
Obviously not every movie is going to be made in IMAX, and few filmmakers are likely to match the vertiginous effects that Brad Bird accomplished (and in his first live-action film!) But Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is the first non-3D movie in a long, long time that I absolutely insist everyone I know needs to see, on the biggest screen possible (and preferably not on those bullshit fake IMAX screen that practically ruin my argument). IMAX has been around for so long that it's not hard to imagine it outliving the 3D trend, and if anyone puts as much thought and effort into the format as Bird, or Christopher Nolan with The Dark Knight, we might really be able to preserve the age-old tradition of going to the movies to see something spectacular that absolutely cannot be replicated at home.
Motion Capture Kool-Aid For The Uncanny Valley
.(ology.com) As I sat in a conference room on the thirty-somethingth floor of New York's Mandarin Oriental Hotel with Central Park splayed out beneath me, a persistent question plagued my mind.
What the hell is Steven Spielberg talking about?
We had gathered on that crisp December day for the Adventures of Tintin press conference. Before us sat producer Kathleen Kennedy, visual effects artist Joe Letteri, actors Jamie Bell and Nick Frost, and Spielberg himself. To be in the presence of greatness was extremely humbling, until greatness started talking. Almost immediately, Spielberg was asked (essentially) just why the hell he made a movie using that dreaded motion capture technology.
Well, we didn’t even try to avoid [ the uncanny valley] because it wasn’t an issue for any of us. I don’t think that all animation needs to be squashed and stretched. Animation has a thousand defining fathers and this just happens to be the right medium for the proper message. In order to honor the artwork, I didn’t want to shoot a live action movie and have Jamie come in with a big red coiffe and extraordinarily strange clothing, and have to get Andy Serkis to wear a prosthetic nose, chin and ears. Everybody else would have had to have the Dick Tracy, NeverEnding Story, Baron Von Munchausen-type makeup if I really wanted to honor Hergé. The only way to tell the story and still honor the origins of Tintin was to do the whole picture in the medium of digital animation and the pursuit of that, which we call performance capture techniques.
Hold up. I can understand not wanting to bury everyone in makeup, but what on Earth is wrong with traditional 2D animation? Isn't that the perfect method for bringing Hergé's characters to life?
Hell, why not go the Pixar route? You could even release it in 3D and all! I just don't see a single benefit of using performance capture for human characters. Sure, it works great with apes and goblins and such, but people are a whole different ball game. It will never not look weird to me.
We couldn’t have made this movie at all without Joe’s team at Weta Digital. They had just come off of Avatar, where they had taken motion capture animation to its highest form of success and artistic achievement that had ever been achieved, ever since Robert Zemeckis, the Thomas Edison of this art form, invented motion capture to make Polar Express.
Excuse me? Calling Bob Zemeckis the Thomas Edison of motion capture is like calling Arthur Galston the Nikola Tesla of Agent Orange. In the words of Dr. Stanley Goodspeed, "It's one of those things we wish we could disinvent." Poor Zemeckis, that wonderful man who gave us Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he hasn't made a real movie since 2000's Cast Away. It's like he's determined to make mocap work, come hell or high water. I still have nightmares of the dead-eyed tykes who populate The Polar Express.
Spielberg went on to describe the look he was going for as "impossibly inhuman and yet human like," before admitting that he was so moved by Avatar that he shed actual physical tears. I guess that settles it. Someone get Steven another pitcher of mocap kool-aid. He's parched.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol Looking For $10M IMAX-Only Open
(thecelebritycafe.com)Tom Cruise’s fourth Mission: Impossible film, which is also the live-action directorial debut for The Incredibles director Brad Bird, only opens in 300 IMAX theaters across the country and 125 large format screens. It could make $10 million, enough to put it in third place. In 42 of those locations, Batman fans can see the Dark Knight Rises prologue before the film.
Death of Beloved Hungarian Puppeteer Cruelly Overshadowed by Death of More Beloved Czech Cartoonist
(pestiside.hu) In other current events involving Hungary and its regional frenemies, the death of a famous and beloved Hungarian puppeteer yesterday was cruelly overshadowed by the passing on the same day of a far more famous and beloved Czech cartoonist.
Henrik Kemény, who continued the century-plus tradition of his family by designing and carving marionettes for small audiences of restless Hungarian children at traveling puppet shows, died at the age of 87 within hours of the death of Zdeněk Miler, the 90-year-old creator of the cartoon character loved by generations of Hungarians of all ages as "Kisvakond," or "little mole," and millions more around the world, and even beyond, as a stuffed "Krtek" was brought along by an American astronaut on the second to last U.S. space shuttle fight apparently on the urging of his no-doubt-blonde Czech-American wife. Oh, and isn't Prague just soooo much more lovely than Budapest? Grrrr!
