(comingsoon.net) Nominations for the 84th Academy Awards® were be announced today, Tuesday, January 24, by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak and Academy member and Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence.
Animated Feature Film
A Cat in Paris (GKIDS), Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli
Chico & Rita (GKIDS), Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal
Kung Fu Panda 2 (DreamWorks Animation), Jennifer Yuh Nelson
Puss In Boots (DreamWorks Animation), Chris Miller
Rango (Paramount Pictures), Gore Verbinski
Makeup
Albert Nobbs, Martial Corneville, Lynn Johnston and Matthew W. Mungle
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2, Nick Dudman, Amanda Knight and Lisa Tomblin
The Iron Lady, Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland
Visual Effects
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2, Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler and John Richardson
Hugo, Rob Legato, Joss Williams, Ben Grossman and Alex Henning
Real Steel, Erik Nash, John Rosengrant, Dan Taylor and Swen Gillberg
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, R. Christopher White and Daniel Barrett
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Matthew Butler and John Frazier
Short Film (Animated)
Dimanche/Sunday, Patrick Doyon
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg
La Luna, Enrico Casarosa
A Morning Stroll, Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe
Wild Life, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby
Full Listing: http://www.comingsoon.net/
Patton Oswalt To Host the Annie Animation Awards
(geek-news.mtv.com)
The Young Adult and Ratatouille star will head the February 4th event celebrating the best in animation from the last year.
One of my favorite bits from Patton Oswalt is from his standup album, My Weakness Is Strong, where he details precisely how his critically acclaimed performance in Pixar's Ratatouille ruined his favorite holiday, Halloween, for him. I won't go into it here, but you should check it out, and really, I only mention it because of the straight-as-a-line connection between Oswalt's role in Ratatouille, and the fact that the movie was the winner of the 35th Annie Awards for 2007.
This year's Annie's has a pretty eclectic selection of nominees across film and TV, including Archer, The Adventures of Tintin, the extended trailer for the upcoming FPS, Prey 2, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Tickets are still available for the event, which will be held the night of February 4th at UCLA Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Head over to the event's site and snag a couple (or just find out more about this year's nominees).
The Growing Influence of Videogames on Movies
(denofgeek.com) Forty years ago, a series of mysterious objects appeared in bars across America. These brown, wood-effect cabinets were home to Pong, a crude simulation of tennis that played out on flickering black-and-white screens. Like the dark monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey, these blocks of chipboard ushered in a new cultural era: that of videogames.
The game industry’s growth since 1972 has been stratospheric, and something that was once regarded as a strange, passing fad has grown into a lucrative strand of popular culture.
It’s easy to see the effect that movies have had on the evolution of games. When creating what would become the seminal Space Invaders, designer Tomohiro Nishikado was inspired to switch tanks and planes for aliens after reading a magazine article about Star Wars. His invaders, meanwhile, were partly inspired by the Martians in the 1953 adaptation of The War Of The Worlds.
Along with Star Wars, classic films such as Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Blade Runner and Aliens have all had a clear influence on game designers over the past 30 years. There are obvious parallels between Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft and Indiana Jones, for example, while the influence of Aliens can be seen in games such as Contra, Halo and Gears Of War. But as videogames have themselves grown in popularity and influence, we’re beginning to see filmmakers take inspiration from the medium. Movies may have inspired videogames for years, but it seems that this transaction isn’t a one-way street.
Of course, Hollywood was quick to hop on the videogame craze, with Tron (1982) and WarGames (1983) and The Last Starfighter (1984) arriving around the peak of the medium’s first golden age. Really, though, those movies weren’t influenced by the look and conventions of videogames, but merely used them as a topic for fairly traditional fantasy adventures (or high-tech thriller, in the case of WarGames).
It’s only over the last decade or so, particularly with the increased use of CG in films, that the influence of videogames has become more apparent. The Matrix’s virtual environments and outlandish violence appear to owe a certain debt to games, as well as anime and the wire-fu of Hong Kong cinema. It was perhaps the first film that tried to emulate the hectic thrill-ride of a particular type of videogame – all action and extraordinary, physics-defying athleticism.
For an example of a rather more subtle example of videogames influencing filmmaking, take a look at Alfonso Cuaron’s Children Of Men. A bleak, intense and stark sci-fi film, it’s story is told from the perspective of Theo, played by Clive Owen. Cuaron’s approach to shooting Children Of Men – handheld cameras, long takes – has been described as being like a documentary, but it also looks, at times, uncannily like a third-person action game.
In several key scenes, the camera lingers somewhere over Theo’s shoulder, tracking his movements as chaos erupts all around him. Some have also pointed out similarities between Children Of Men’s production design and Half-Life 2’s gloomy vision of the future.
Last year, director Joe Cornish was quite open about the way videogames had influenced his debut feature, Attack The Block. In an interview with Official Nintendo Magazine, Cornish revealed that the look of the film’s distinctive aliens, with their jet-black silhouettes and luminous teeth, was taken from the classic Another World.
“The monsters were kind of inspired by a SNES game called Another World, which was one of the first games to use motion capture,” Cornish said. “It had some terrific creatures that were made out of silhouettes.”
The idea of staging Attack The Block’s events in a single location was something else that, Cornish maintains, came from the realm of videogames. It was, he said, a “unified space”– something commonly seen in first-person shooters.
“There was a level in Perfect Dark set in a tower block that I used to love,” Cornish said. “And there were a lot of instances in GoldenEye 007 on the N64 where you had one location. It’s something that first-person shooters do well, and some movies do well, where you have one environment and you turn it into a playground. You reinvent these otherwise banal places as an action-adventure environment.”
What’s significant about Cornish’s eagerness to discuss his influences is that, although videogames are clearly having a growing impact film, so few directors openly talk about it. This is due in part, perhaps, to the mainstream media’s apparent distrust of videogames as a whole – although positive news stories about the medium are sometimes reported, stories about violent games and their impact on behaviour are far more common. And when movies like Transformers appear in cinemas, with their reliance on CG triggering cries of “It looks like a videogame!” from critics, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some filmmakers don’t talk openly about the influence of games on their work.
It seems to be the younger generation of filmmakers, including Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright, who are keen to openly reference videogames in both their conversations and their work. Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World served as a joyous love letter to game culture, with everything from its fight scenes to its music and sound effects taken straight from the medium.
The current and upcoming generation of filmmakers have grown up on videogames, and are finding ways of using CG to tell their stories in new and surprising ways. Neill Blomkamp, for example, was well known for his adverts and short films, which fused computer graphics and live-action footage almost seamlessly. His first feature was supposed to be a movie based on Halo, but when that project collapsed, he made District 9 instead. That film concluded with a gleefully violent shoot-out, featuring sci-fi weaponry that could have easily come from a videogame – not least the Halo series.
The documentary style and gritty look of District 9 has had a profound influence on other filmmakers since, including the alien invasion flick, Battle Los Angeles. Its attempt to present an immediate, soldier’s eye view of combat was very like District 9, and its action scenes looked uncannily like a squad-based shooting game, with dozens of almost identical soldiers shooting at robotic invaders.
It could be argued, in fact, that the recent wave of alien invasion and zombie movies is indirectly due to videogames. Both alien invasion and zombie offer up an army of faceless monsters that can be killed without remorse by their heroes – allowing for the kind of violence that can get past the censors with a PG-13 rating, in the case of Battle LA.
This was a notion director David Cronenberg brilliantly summed up in John Landis’ book, Monsters In The Movies. Speaking of the newfound popularity of zombies in film, Cronenberg said the following:
“I think that’s about videogames, frankly. In the early days of videogames, the way that you could get around parental fear of having children enjoying killing people, was to have them not be people exactly. If they’re anonymous creatures, it’s okay to kill them. And really, part of the fun of those movies and TV series is just the many different ways you can kill a zombie.”
Perhaps threatened by the increased realism and relentless action of some videogames, it seems that Hollywood, with films like Battle Los Angeles and Transformers, is attempting to lure younger viewers back into cinemas with films that offer a similar roller-coaster experience.
And as the graphics in videogames are beginning to approach those seen in cinema, a new kind of convergence appears to be emerging. Games like Heavy Rain are prized for their realism and cinematic approach to storytelling, while on TV, the makers of Sherlock use that game’s idea of displaying captions on the screen to illustrate what its characters are thinking.
And with directors such as Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro turning their hand to producing videogames as well as film, it seems that, 40 years after the first Pong cabinet loomed over unsuspecting drinkers in a US bar, the two mediums are becoming ever more intertwined.
OSCARS: Paramount Re-Releasing ‘Rango’
(Deadline Hollywood) HOLLYWOOD, CA (January 24, 2012) – The now Academy Award-nominated Rango, from director Gore Verbinski and starring the voice of Johnny Depp, saddles up for a one week limited engagement at the ArcLight Hollywood beginning this Friday, January 27th. The original animated comedy-adventure from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies a Blind Wing/GK Films Production was this morning nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.
Studios Continue to Release Sickeningly Realistic Animated Movies
(cornellsun.com)When you’re as cool as I am, you don’t spend your precious winter break evenings out partying; you spend them sitting on your couch watching the Doctor Who Christmas Specials. As someone enamored with the British Sci-Fi television show that has been on the air since 1963, I was the first in line to see The Adventures of Tin Tin, which was written by Steven Moffat, the current head writer and executive producer of Doctor Who. Moffat co-wrote the screenplay with comedic geniuses Edgar Write and Joe Cornish (Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).
If I had watched The Adventures of Tin Tin with my eyes closed, I would have thought that the movie was charming, funny and a generally perfect holiday family movie. Moffat, Wright and Cornish did their job well; the problem with the movie was that my eyes were not closed and I was forced to sit for two hours watching a world that closely resembles ours, but just doesn’t.
When I think about how far animation technology has come in my lifetime, I am amazed. The scenes in Tin Tin that take place in the grimy London/Paris/some-European-city streets looked like they could have been taken from the new Sherlock Holmes and the waterfront scenes from a documentary about the ocean on National Geographic. The scenery and attention to detail in the film was wonderful, but at the same time it made me wonder: why? What is the point of laboring to digitally create a world that looks so like ours, but just doesn’t look quite right?
It almost seemed as though the filmmakers were showing off that they had the ability to create a universe so much like our own. The aspect of Tin Tin that chiefly drove my two-hour headache was that the people still looked like cartoons. These caricatures of humans walking and interacting with a world just annoyed me. After doing some more research, I discovered that my annoyance could be legitimized by the theory of the Uncanny Valley.
The Uncanny Valley supposes that when humans are faced with a visual representation of our world that is extremely close, but not quite perfect, we are immediately repulsed. Fans of 30 Rock will recognize the term from the 2008 episode in which Frank uses it to explain to Tracy why it would be impossible to create a pornographic video game.
Fortunately for Tracy, this does not stop him from succeeding and profiting enormously from the idea. Unfortunately for the creators of the film Polar Express, the Uncanny Valley caused many reviewers to strongly dislike the film. As CNN reviewer Paul Clinton said about the movie, “those human characters in the film come across as downright ... well, creepy.”
Despite the generally negative feedback that is given to films like Polar Express, Green Lantern and Avatar: the Last Airbender, studios continue to release sickeningly realistic animated movies, or ones that are so CGI-ed, that they may as well be animated (I’ve the same problem with 3D movies).
But negative feedback has never held movie studios back. And that to me is the crux of the issue in the movie business: once you have paid your 10 dollars to the freckly teenager working at Regal Cinemas, they couldn’t care less if you actually liked it.
What really baffles me about movies like Tin Tin, is that they are much more expensive to make than The Sitter (a truly awful film featuring a pre-weight loss Jonah Hill giving cocaine to children. While Tin Tin cost $135 million to produce, The Sitter’s budget was a mere $25 million.
I would like to make it clear that Tin Tin was not a bad movie. I guess I just wish that sometimes the movie studios would stop showing off so much, and just focus on what really matters: the story. I would hope that occasionally, they would not necessarily create an artificial Sahara desert (which they did in Tin Tin) just because they can, when we have a perfectly fine Sahara desert already.
Did Andy Serkis Deserve an Oscar nomination?
(cbsnews.com) (CBS) Despite all of the campaigning around British actor Andy Serkis' motion-capture performance as a computer-generated ape, Caesar, in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," the actor did not nab a Best Supporting Actor nomination from Academy Award voters.
Pictures: 2012 Oscar nominations
Serkis' nomination at the recent Critics Choice Movie Awards was unique and also controversial, according to the Los Angeles Times, because not once in the movie did the actor's own face or body appear in the film. Although Serkis was nominated, Christopher Plummer ended up walking away with the Critics Choice Award for his performance in "Beginners."
This is not Serkis' first time playing a compute-generated image with motion-capture technology. He also played the giant gorilla in King Kong and Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings."
After the 47-year-old actor's CCMA nomination, he told the LA Times, "I'll tell you what's fantasic is that it shows, at least, a growing understanding of performance capture as not a genre or type of acting but a technology which allows actors to play so many different characters."
If Serkis had received an Oscar nomination, it would've been the first time the Academy would have officially regonized a motion-capture performance.
DreamWorks Animation: Why It's the Only Hollywood Firm on Fortune's Best 100 Employers List
(hollywoodreporter.com)The studio ranks 14th on the annual list after coming in 10th a year ago, with employees citing the role of CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.
NEW YORK - DreamWorks Animation is the only entertainment industry company on this year's annual Fortune list of 100 Best Companies to Work for, ranking 14th after taking the 10th spot a year earlier.
What makes the company such an attractive employer? "What animates the animators here is the accessibility of CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who welcomes new hires and sends a daily update to the staff," Fortune said. "He makes it feel like 200 people work here, not 2,000," the magazine quoted one staffer as saying.
DWA has 2,151 employees in the U.S. and 10 outside the country, according to Fortune, which added that the firm created 154 new jobs over the past year. Voluntary employee turnover stands at only 5 percent, it pointed out.
"Once again we are honored to get this prestigious recognition," said Katzenberg of the ranking. "Creating the best possible place in the world to make CG animated movies is invaluable to DreamWorks Animation. Having our employees love their work and love coming to work is the highest priority for our company."
There were about 28,000 job applicants with only 90 job openings as of the start of the new year, according to Fortune, which listed such benefits and offers as an onsite fitness center, subsidized gym membership, a job sharing program, telecommuting and fully paid sabbaticals.
Google took the top spot in this year's Fortune ranking after coming in fourth on last year's list.
Professor Earns Six-Figure Payoff For Object Tracking Software
(sacbee.com)UC Merced assistant professor Ming-Hsuan Yang points over his student's shoulder at a computer screen playing a video of a rock concert. Around a guitar player's head are several colored rectangles that follow him as he moves across the stage. As lights flash and the musician moves more erratically some of the rectangles lose him and attach themselves to other objects.
"All the trackers fail at some point," Yang said. "People have been working on this for decades, but they just have problems. They just could not handle a lot of things."
The rectangles follow the object based on a computer algorithm, each one developed by software engineers from around the world. Each represents an attempt to solve the intractable problem of having a computer track an object being viewed by a camera, something Yang has been working on for more than six years.
This research has broad applications, Yang said, including assistive technology for the visually impaired, in medicine, computer generated animation and improvements to surveillance technology.
Recently, Yang received the National Science Foundation's Early Career Research Award for his work developing object tracking software. The award is aimed at boosting the progress of the most promising young researchers.
The award, which comes with a grant of $473,797 over five years, will pay for the tuition of two of Yang's graduate students as well as research equipment. Yang and his two students are one team of many around the country that competed for the award.
"I'm thrilled," he said. "I'm very happy. It's good for us. If you look at the track record of the other people (who applied), they've done good work."
Humans can easily track objects in their environment, in part because they continually gather information about objects they view. Yang's research is built on what he calls "online learning," the idea that an effective algorithm also has to continually gather information about the objects it's tracking.
"As humans we often learn things online," he said. "As we speak I look at you. And every time I look at you I get some more information. And then gradually I will refine the model."
Yang hopes online learning will be the secret to avoiding pitfalls that confuse object tracking software, such as lighting changes, object occlusion and pose variation.
People have been using online learning in different fields for decades, Yang said. But he was one of the first to apply it to object tracking software about six years ago when he was working as a research scientist for Honda.
Now, many people in the field have caught on to the self-teaching algorithm technology, but Yang continues to stand out as an innovator.
Since joining UC Merced, Yang has received several awards, including the Google Faculty Award in 2009, the UC Merced Academic Senate's Distinguished Early Career Research Award in 2011 and a research grant from the National Science Foundation Information and Intelligent Systems' Robust Intelligence program.
When asked why he was chosen to receive this award Yang flashed a humble smile.
"We have been working on this for a long time and we have some good results," he said. "So we have a good reputation. But like for anything you also need to have some luck."
DreamWorks Animation Up 6.4% Since Downgraded 7 Days Ago
(fnno.com) DreamWorks Animation was downgraded from Neutral to Sell by Goldman Sachs one week ago. DreamWorks Animation shares are selling at $18.60, 6.4% above the $17.48 price point of one week ago.
DreamWorks Animation (NASDAQ:DWA) has potential upside of 1.6% based on a current price of $18.52 and analysts' consensus price target of $18.82. The stock should find resistance at its 200-day moving average (MA) of $20.46, as well as support at its 50-day MA of $17.53.
DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. develops and produces computer generated animated feature films for a broad movie-going audience.
In the past 52 weeks, DreamWorks Animation share prices have been bracketed by a low of $16.34 and a high of $30.73 and are now at $18.52, 13% above that low price. Over the past week, the 200-day moving average (MA) has gone down 0.7% while the 50-day MA has declined 0.3%.
Lucasfilm’s Repurposed Props for Sale
(petaluma.patch.com)George Lucas’ new film “Red Tails” couldn’t shoot down the fourth installment of the “Underworld” series for top spot in this weekend’s box office, but locals have one reason to applaud the World War II aerial action film about the Tuskeegee Airmen.
Heritage Salvage, a reclaimed building materials business based in South Petaluma, provided various recycled building materials to the props company that built several sets for the move.
Usually sets for motion pictures end up in the landfill. But this time, following shooting, the prop company contacted Heritage Salvage and suggested they repurpose the material, rather than having it discarded. Heritage Salvage retrieved several of their props, re-crafting them for long life.
Their shop craftsmen repurposed ordnance and supply box props to custom-make a table, bench and three-piece lawn chair set which are now available for sale (see photos). Proceeds will go to support a local community farm, Petaluma Bounty, dedicated to providing healthy food.
Source: http://petaluma.patch.com/articles/lucasfilm-s- sustainable-props-for-sale
Oscar Snubs ‘Tintin,’ Rewards Animation Featuring Females
(blog.sfgate.com) This morning, Academy Award nominations were announced and “Adventures of Tintin” was left out of all categories except for best musical score. The snub is significant and surprising. Not only was “Tintin” directed by Hollywood darling Steven Spielberg, but it won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, usually a strong predictor for an Academy Award nomination if not the Oscar itself.
I couldn’t be more thrilled. I’ve written several posts about Herge, the creator of Tintin, and his disturbing thoughts about women. Herge believed that females had no place in Tintin’s imaginary world. What is so offensive and damaging about this sexism is that Hollywood would never allow an animated movie to be made in 2012 for kids where males were almost completely ignored. Yet, leaving females out is just fine, award-worthy even. That’s because the male dominated cast of Tintin is consistent with most animated movies made for kids today. Leaving girls out of kids movies teaches children that males are more important than females.
Not only did “Tintin” not get nominated for best animation, but two foreign movies did. I haven’t seen either but both look as if they feature females in important roles.
“Chico and Rita” summarized on imdb.com:
Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and romantic desire unites them, but their journey – in the tradition of the Latin ballad, the bolero – brings heartache and torment.
Just displaying a female so prominently on the poster is rare in animated films. This movie looks great, though I don’t think its for kids.
“A Cat in Paris:”
Dino is a cat that leads a double life. By day, he lives with Zoe, a little girl whose mother, Jeanne, is a police officer. By night, he works with Nico, a burglar with a big heart. Zoe has plunged herself into silence following her father’s murder at the hands of gangster Costa. One day, Dino the cat brings Zoe a very valuable bracelet. Lucas, Jeanne’s second-in-command, notices this bracelet is part of a jewelery collection that has been stolen. One night, Zoe decides to follow Dino. On the way, she overhears some gangsters and discovers that her nanny is part of the gangsters’ team.
The cat in the title is a male and he is obviously the star of the film, but the little girl Zoe and her single police officer mom look great from the synopsis. I can’t wait to see this movie!
It’s clear that in order to award some diversity in animation, Oscar had to go outside of Hollywood and the male dominated world of kids cartoons. The three other Oscar nominations for animated features go to films that star males and are titled for that male: Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss In Boots, and Rango.
The biggest winner 11 nominations? “Hugo” another kids’ movie about a boy and titled for a boy.
But still, the Tintin snub is progress, right? Do you think Hollywood is reading Reel Girl? Starting to care about girls and the women they’ll become? Maybe not. Internet chatter suggests “Tintin” was left out because the Academy stipulates that motion-capture is not considered legitimate animation.
A Plea to Save the Cartoon Animals From CG Remakes
(cartoonbrew.com)Power Salad, a comedy duo comprised of Chris Mezzolesta and Craig Marks, created this awesomely geeky musical plea demanding that vintage cartoon animals not suffer the ignoble fate of CG remakes.
VIDEO - Take a look: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cartoon-culture/a-plea-to- save-the-cartoon-animals-from- 3d-and-cgi.html
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