Jurassic Park 4: "They’re Talking About It."

(collider.com)               

   Rumors of a Jurassic Park 4 have swirled for years, so when asked what it’s going to take to finally get the film off the ground, Kennedy sensibly answered that it all boils down to the script:

    “A great script is what it’s gonna take to get a fourth Jurassic Park. We have a very high bar for ourselves because we’re just like the audience, we don’t wanna make the movie if there’s not a reason to make the movie. So we’ve kinda created the dilemma ourselves because it was never intended to be a franchise, so there’s an argument to be made ‘Why are you doing a fourth Jurassic Park?’ So we’ve gotta find a good reason for why we’re doing a fourth Jurassic Park and we’re in the midst of working on that right now.”

It’s definitely good to hear that a fourth entry in the Jurassic Park franchise isn’t being rushed at the expense of a good story. Kennedy revealed that while a script isn’t currently being written, they’re “talking about it.” Given the recent success re-releasing older films in 3D, Kennedy confirmed that Universal has approached them about post-converting Jurassic Park to 3D. Whether or not they actually go forward with it depends on whether Spielberg has the time to revisit the pic:



AAFCA Honoring George Lucas At 3rd Annual Awards

(theurbandaily.com)                   The African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) will honor the special achievements of iconic actors Richard Roundtree and Hattie Winston, legendary filmmaker George Lucas and Sony Pictures Entertainment, during its 3rd live AAFCA Awards ceremony on Sunday, January 8, 2012, at Light Space Studios, located at the historic Helm Bakery in Culver City California. The organization will announce its complete list of winners during a special press conference at the Universal Hilton on Monday, December 12th.



Animated Films May Emerge as Visual Effects Oscar Contenders

(hollywoodreporter.com)              There's no longer an ocean of difference between animation and VFX, and that could mean stiffer competition for the visual effects category.

For most of Academy Awards history, animation and visual effects have competed in separate categories. But as the line between VFX and animation gets increasingly blurry, animated films like Kung Fu Panda 2 or Puss in Boots -- as well as the performance-capture-based The Adventures of Tintin -- could emerge as contenders in the VFX category.

The VFX branch made a loud statement about what constitutes a visual effect in 2007 when it put CG-animated Ratatouille and motion-capture-based Beowulf on its list of 15 Oscar contenders.

So what's the difference between animation and VFX? "It's ambiguous," admits DreamWorks Animation's Alex Parkinson, VFX supervisor on Kung Fu Panda 2. "Everything you see in an animated movie is a visual effect."

One notoriously tough effect to render in live action is computer-generated water -- which is also tough to animate. "The tools and techniques are exactly the same," says Parkinson. "The difference is that on a traditional live-action movie, you are matching a plate, which has its own complications, and on an animated movie, you are creating the world from scratch and defining the rules of the world a lot more."

That may amount to no difference at all in the animation-acclimated eyes of VFX branch voters. The CG water in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 could be judged alongside the CG water created for Tintin and Panda.

Not since Tim Burton's 1993 stop-motion classic The Nightmare Before Christmas has animation earned a VFX Oscar nomination. This time, 2012 could be the year.




Revisiting Super 8 VFX

(billdesowitz.com)                  Last week, Paramount Home Ent. hosted a screening of Super 8 at the Academy in honor of its Blu-ray release. It’s worth looking again at ILM’s retro VFX as the J.J. Abrams coming of age monster movie winds its way into the bakeoff.

“Our visual effects strategy was to use as few bluescreens as possible, plenty of roto, lots of image-based lighting, which everybody does nowadays,” explains production VFX supervisor Kim Libreri. “J.J. wanted to keep the nature of the creature [designed by Neville Page] quite secret to the very end, so when we were shooting the creature scenes there was no maquette — there was only a pole for how big the creature was to make sure we shot everything correctly. But other than that, it was a lot of make believe for the kids.”

For Dennis Muren, it was more of a homecoming since he worked at ILM during this period on Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. He was brought in toward the end as a cinematic reality check.” Everything went through me to make sure it had the right kind of look that J.J. was after for that period,” he explains. “It was quite a gamut and each one offered its opportunities to be nostalgic in the look of it. One of the things of the period is that the colors were stronger and the shots lasted longer — there was more time to digest it. It’s a matter of specifying at the start of the shot here is how the lights have to be; here is how the dust has to be; here’s how the size of the debris has to be. The whole thing was played by what I call ‘peek-a-boo.’ That it’s not terribly clear at the beginning of the shot what you’re seeing, but by the time it’s done you’ve figured it out and it’s gone somewhere emotionally.”

That includes the mysterious alien: a spidery humanoid that evokes terror and pathos by the end, with the help of animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh and his team.

Source with trailer:    http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=3050




Hugo: A Study of Modern Inventive Visual Effects

(animationpitstop.blogspot.com)                 Martin Scorsese’s Hugo tells the story of an orphan living in a 1930s Paris train station. But it is also a story of the birth of cinema and the film itself used a wide range of inventive solutions to both tell its tale and pay homage to the earliest masters of cinema. To help bring Hugo to life, Scorsese called on long-time collaborator Rob Legato as the film’s visual effects supervisor. “The whole film really is celebrating persistence of vision,” says Legato, “and what it meant to early filmmakers, and the film is so rich with homage and appreciate of that.”

Photo Essay:    http://animationpitstop.blogspot.com/2011/12/making-hugo-study-of-modern-inventive.html




Philip K. Dick's "Now Wait for Last Year" In Development

(Variety)              Lila 9th and Electric Shepherd Productions are planning on adapting the Philip K. Dick story Now Wait for Last Year for the big screen.

The synopsis from PhilipKDick.com:

Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the Male better or to keep him poised just this side of death.

Obviously this is not the first of Dick's writings to be adapted for a feature film. Last year we saw Matt Damon in The Adjustment Bureau, and previously adaptations included Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.

Barry M. Osborne is producing with Cameon Lamb and Dick's daughter Isa Dick Hackett. Ted Kupper is writing the screenplay. Producers are hoping for a start date sometime in late 2012. No word on a director or cast just yet, but then again they don't even have a finished script, so it will be a bit before we hear more.



‘Star Tours’ Among Nominees for 2011 Annie Awards

(stitchkingdom.com)                    The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, today announced its nominations for the 39th Annual Annie Awards, recognizing the year’s best in the field of animation.

Industrial Light and Magic also finds themselves nominated for the ‘Star Tours: The Adventures Continue’ attraction at the Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resorts (as well as Tokyo Disneyland in the near future) in the category of Best Animated Special Production.

Full article:    http://www.stitchkingdom.com/disney-pixar-star-tours-nominees-2011-annie-awards-18736/




Andy Serkis - Andy Serkis Slammed By Animators

(contactmusic.com)             Actor Andy Serkis has been "bombarded" with letters from several movie animators accusing him of taking too much credit for his characters in motion-capture films.

The Brit has found fame with a series of motion-capture performances, playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series and the title character in 2005's King Kong remake. He embraced the technology again this year (11) with roles in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.

But Serkis reveals he has fallen foul of some experts who combined visual effects with his movements and facial expressions to bring his characters to life.

He tells the Hollywood Reporter, "I've been bombarded by hate mail from animators saying, 'How dare you talk about 'your' character when all these people work on it after the fact? We're actors as well.' They are actors in the sense that they create key frames and the computer will join up the dots, carefully choreograph a moment or an expression and accent it with an emotion.

"But that's not what an actor does. An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer."




Mission: Impossible Hitting 200 International IMAX Theaters Early

(IMAX Corporation)                      "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol The IMAX Experience" will begin previews in IMAX on Friday, Dec. 16 , five days in advance of the film's North American wide release on Dec. 21 . Domestically, the film will open in approximately 300 IMAX® theatres and play through the film's run at the box office.

Internationally, the Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol will open on approximately 200 IMAX screens beginning on Dec. 14 , with several markets receiving an early window release in IMAX ahead of their wide release, including six days in the Netherlands, five days in the UK, three days in France and Poland, two days in Korea, Spain and Taiwan, and one day in various other countries worldwide.

In addition to the early window of engagement, the IMAX release of this fourth installment of "Mission: Impossible" features approximately 30 minutes of scenes shot with IMAX® cameras. These specific sequences, including the unbelievable stunt performed by Tom Cruise as he scaled the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, will expand to fill the entire screen, exclusively in IMAX, and further immerse the audience in the explosive action and vast scope of the film.



Dennis Muren Part 1

(youtube.com)              ILM Visual Effects Master Dennis Muren talks about working with Spielberg, his VFX breakthroughs with Cameron and Spielberg, and working on JJ Abrams' Super 8.

VIDEO - Take a look:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hn0m90OOzU



Rango Wins Best Anim Feature Award From The Washington Area Film Critics Association

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tinseltalk/2011/12/reactions-to-wafca-awards/



Star Trek Sequel Hits Setback

(Latino Review)                  It was just over a month ago that it was reported that J.J. Abrams was keen on casting Benicio Del Toro as an undisclosed villain character in his untitled Star Trek sequel. Today, Vulture reports that those negotiations have fallen apart and that the actor has ultimately turned down the role.




More Details On Pete Docters' Pixar Movie That ‘Takes You Inside The Mind’

(pixartimes.com)                    John Lasseter recently sat down with Charlie Rose for an extensive interview about Pixar, Steve Jobs, and Disney. He speaks at length about the beginnings of Pixar and how George Lucas sold the company to Steve Jobs, how important it is for the studio to focus on quality, and how animation is simply a medium for telling stories (just like in live-action films). Towards the end of the interview, Lasseter briefly describes Pixar’s upcoming slate – Brave, Monsters University, The Untitled Dinosaur Movie, and The Untitled Movie That Takes You Inside The Mind. The most mind-bending of those is easily the Pete Docter-directed Mind film and now we have a few more details on how the film will work.

The official premise, as given by Disney/Pixar is:

    Pixar takes audiences on incredible journeys into extraordinary worlds: from the darkest depths of the ocean to the top of the tepui mountains in South America; from the fictional metropolis of Monstropolis to a futuristic fantasy of outer space. From director Pete Docter (“Up,” “Monsters, Inc.”) and producer Jonas Rivera (“Up”), the inventive new film will take you to a place that everyone knows, but no one has ever seen: the world inside the human mind.

When Pete Docter first announced the project at the D23 Expo in August, he said the driving force of the film was the question, “What is going on in people’s heads?”. In the interview with Charlie Rose, John Lasseter elaborates on that (the video can be seen here, with the following quote starting at 52:29):

    Pete Docter, from Monsters, Inc. and Up, is doing a new film that takes place inside of a girl’s mind and it is about her emotions as characters, and that is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

So now we know that the character whose thoughts we will be privy to is a girl (if she is a main character she would be another big female protagonist for Pixar!) and her emotions will have roles in the film. It sounds like her emotions will be embodied by fully-realized characters and will help to visually and creatively explain how the mind works through acting out their personalities. Still having a difficult time figuring out how this film will function? You’re not alone, but I continue to be fascinated by the premise.

Pete Docter is my favorite director at the studio, and seeing his genius at work in Up, I simply cannot wait for this one to hit the screen. We have a bit of a wait, though, as the film is not scheduled to hit theatres until May 30, 2014.




M. Night Shyamalan's Upcoming Sci-fi Epic "1000 A.E." Moves Forward

(The Hollywood Reporter)                  Zoe Kravitz and Sophie Okonedo are being eyed for roles in M. Night Shyamalan's upcoming sci-fi epic, 1000 A.E., says a story at The Hollywood Reporter.

The film, already set to star Will Smith and his real-life son, Jaden, is set 1,000 years into the future and features a young boy who navigates an abandoned and sometimes scary Earth to save himself and his estranged father after their ship crashes.

Kravitz, who recently appeared in X-Men: First Class, would play Will Smith's daughter and Okonedo (best known for her part in Hotel Rwanda) his wife.

Written by Shyamalan, Gary Whitta and Stephen Gaghan, 1000 A.E. is planning to shoot soon, targeting a June 7, 2013 release.




Peter Jackson Buys Wellington Theatre

(stuff.co.nz)          The iconic Wellington BATS Theatre building has been bought by movie moguls Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh.

The couple purchased 1 Kent Tce, which has been the theatre's home for 22 years in the Courtenay Pl precinct, and granted the company a long term lease.

The three-storey 1923 building was offered for sale earlier this year by its previous owner, the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, for $1.19 million.

Jackson and Walsh plan to refurbish the theatre and enhance the performing space. 

"We are extremely fond of BATS and we're happy to help secure a permanent home for the theatre," Sir Peter said in a statement tonight.

"Wellington has been good to us and we wanted to give something back."

The Royal Antediluvian Order of the Buffaloes decided to sell in the middle of the year.

Walsh said BATS was a stepping stone for talent which was worth protecting.

"BATS has always fostered original Kiwi talent and provides an incredibly supportive environment for up-and-coming writers, directors, musicians and actors. We feel its unique voice is worth preserving and protecting and we look forward to refurbishing the theatre and enhancing the performance space."




So, How Do I Supervise My VFX Company Exactly?

(vfxtalk.com)           

    Hi Guys,
    I am an artist from India having 7 years of experience in the VFX Industry.Me along with some of my friends started a new VFX company here in India.
    I need help from you guys as i had got a chance to work on a high end VFX movie starting this year.
    Seriously it i a rewarding and challenging task for me.
    I have no practical experience on shoot and no prior experience as a supervisor.Can you guys refer to me
    some good books ,DVDS and any online source for VFX supervision.

Offer some help:          http://www.vfxtalk.com/threads/34535-VFX-Supervision-References