As many who read The John Carter Files know, I live in Burbank and occupy a minor niche in the film industry as an indie screenwriter and filmmaker who has produced and/or directed a dozen films. These films are not remotely on the scale of a project like Disney’s John Carter; they rarely get more than a limited theatrical release, and are most likely to be seen on cable outlets like Showtime or Encore or on DVD/Blu-ray. So, plying my trade at that “indie” level of the industry does not make me an expert on things like the quality of VFX on a $250m film.
But … occasionally my work does provide me oppotunities to hang out with experts, and that’s what happened yesterday as I was in a Burbank VFX and post production facility finalizing deliverables for a film I’m responsible for. We got to the end of our official work, and as the pros were outputting and rendering various delivery elements, the talk turned to the quality of the VFX in John Carter. I mentioned that I’d been spending some time on a few of the movie message boards, and there was some lively debate on this topic. Now, the group I was talking to included two VFX professionals who between them have credits on more than a dozen major features. They were quite surprised to hear that there was actual debate – saying that the “buzz” in their universe was all favorable. ”Well, for starters, people shouldn’t try to judge VFX from compressed Youtube 360 images”……and with the rendering of our official work going on in the background, the boys downloaded the 1080p John Carter trailer from Apple Trailers and then critiqued the VFX shot by shot on a 56″ HD Studio color timing monitor.
I took notes, and at the end of the session prevailed upon them to do PNG screenshots from the 56″ monitor, which went home with me on the hard drive that our official work was saved onto. Those scans were too big to upload here (5mb each), but I’ve saved each of them as a very large, high resolution JPG and uploaded them below.
Take a look: http://johncarterfiles.
James Cameron Forms 3D R&D Group in Australia
(3dtv.com) James Cameron has opened up an office in Australia and started a group designed to push 3D technology forward. This group is called the “Cameron Pace Group.” It has already done work with previous 3D movies, but comes for the first time to Australia.
According to HMH, “The Cameron Pace Group, which opened an office in Melbourne this week, has supplied 3D equipment and technical expertise to such movies as Hugo and the most recent Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean instalments, as well as the Glee, U2 and Justin Bieber concert films. It has also contributed to live TV coverage of American tennis, golf, basketball, baseball, football, boxing, wrestling and motorcycle racing."
Cameron's aim is to expand the broadcast coverage of 3D programming to the TV industry in the Australian market. This is his way of entering this market.
This year we will be able to watch the Summer Olympics in 3D
The head of CPG in Australia, Andrew Wright, was quoted saying in the report,”the next big breakthrough will be the next Olympics in 3D.” This certainly shows his enthusiasm for the medium. He was also paraphrased saying that Australian events ripe for 3D coverage include the Melbourne Cup, Australian Open tennis and Australian Grand Prix.
The report also mentions that Cameron will be shooting the next two Avatar movies in the neighboring island country, New Zealand.
You can find more information about the Cameron Pace Group on the group's website here. The site, and the group in general, seems to be very much centered around stereo 3D technology. The opening statement on the “About Us” section of the site confirms this.
“CAMERON / PACE Group (CPG) is the industry leader in 3D technologies and production services,” it reads.
The section also states that this group has “played a key role in 9 concert films, 27 features and more than 140 spots broadcasts worldwide.” That is quite an impressive resume by Cameron and his group if the statement is truthful.
Police Called To 'The Hobbit' Casting Call
(starpulse.com) The Hobbit: An Unexpected JourneyAn open audition for Peter Jackson's new The Hobbit movie had to be shut down on Saturday after more than 3,000 hopefuls turned up.
The director is currently in New Zealand filming the two-part Lord of the Rings prequel, which stars Martin Freeman, and a casting call for a part in the film attracted thousands of applicants over the weekend.
Producers expected around 1,000 wannabes to turn out for the auditions in Lower Hutt, near the capital city of Wellington, but they were overrun when more than 3,000 arrived.
Police were called to help control the crowds and the auditions were shut down early due to safety concerns.
Local police Senior Sergeant Steve Braybrook tells the NZ Newswire, ''There was enough concern that police attended... (the organizers decided to) call it quits."
"Stretch Armstrong" Moves Forward As Live Action Tentpole
(comingsoon) Relativity Media has announced today that the studio will adapt Hasbro's Stretch Armstrong now that Universal Pictures is no longer in the picture. We assume that they are starting from scratch and that director Rob Letterman and actor Taylor Lautner are no longer involved. They are targeting an April 11, 2014 release:
Relativity Media has partnered with global branded play company Hasbro, Inc. to develop and produce a live-action tent-pole film based on Stretch Armstrong, the iconic action hero figure launched in the 1970s, it was announced today by Relativity’s Co-President, Tucker Tooley and Hasbro’s President and CEO, Brian Goldner.
Relativity will be the domestic distributor and will release the film internationally through its network of foreign output partners. The film is targeted for an April 11, 2014 release date.
The film will be produced by Relativity’s CEO, Ryan Kavanaugh (The Fighter), Hasbro’s Goldner (Transformers) and Bennett Schneir, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Motion Pictures (Battleship). Tooley (Immortals) will serve as executive producer.
Survey – "Star Wars 3D" To Be A Hit
(3dfocus.co.uk)
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D will be released in the UK on February 9th and, according to our survey, is likely to achieve box office success.
review dividing line Survey Star Wars 3D to be a hit plus 3D conversion secrets
pod racing 525 Survey Star Wars 3D to be a hit plus 3D conversion secrets
We published a poll (discoverable on Google via the term “Star Wars 3D” – this was not a poll intended exclusively for 3D Focus readers) asking people if they intended to watch Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D. Out of 675 respondents, 64% said yes, 15% no and 21% were still undecided. The poll closed today.
Although George Lucas recently told The New York Times that he intends to retire from original filmmaking (with the possible exception of Indiana Jones 5) he has said that all 6 Star Wars movies will be converted to 3D and released on a yearly basis if the success of each re-release warrants the conversion of the next.
Comments submitted on 3D Focus were generally positive. Here is a sample of a few of them…
“Yep I'll watch it again. The pod race is worth it the price of admission alone.” Cress
“Can't wait. I'm a massive fan and will watch it in 2D or 3D. Don't have a 3D TV but would well consider buying one if all SW films come out on 3D” Rancordung
“I'll be watching the first day it's released. The pod racing scene should be fantastic in 3D. I hope it's a success and Lucas goes on to convert the other films.” Mike
“I'll be watching once they get to the original trilogy – going to pass on the lesser prequels.” Empirerules
Puss In Boots Passes $500 Million Worldwide
(DreamWorks Animation) The animated hit "Shrek" spin-off Puss In Boot has surpassed $500 million at the global box office:
DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. today announced that its Academy Award® nominated movie, Puss in Boots, has earned approximately $507 million to date at the worldwide box office.
"On behalf of the entire studio, it is my pleasure to congratulate the Puss in Boots creative team on reaching this fantastic milestone," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chief Executive Officer of DreamWorks Animation. "Following the film's recognition by the Academy as nominee for Best Animated Feature Film, we could not be happier with the response to Puss in Boots both critically and commercially across the globe."
"I am so thrilled that people around the world continue to respond to Puss in Boots and I'd like to thank the incredible team of creative talent who worked tirelessly to bring the story of our swashbuckling hero to life!" added the film's Director, Chris Miller.
Both DreamWorks Animation releases from 2011, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots, received 2012 Academy Award® nominations for Best Animated Feature.
Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts /USC Campus Upgrades Mocap Stage
(cgw.com) LOS ANGELES — Motion capture system developer Vicon (www.vicon.com) recently collaborated with the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts to upgrade their motion capture system.
Originally built in the fall of 2006 with 20 cameras, the first classes to use the mocap stage were taught in spring of 2007 by two USC alums, Hollywood filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and Eric Furie, USC manager of digital systems and creative computing. Reently, the facility's mocap system expanded into a 1,700-square-foot stage with 46 cameras.
"A lot has changed in the last year because of the new stage," notes Furie. "We are trying to emulate what is happening on the bleeding edge of the industry so students are exposed to what they need to know. Vicon is the standard in the mocap arena and students must understand how this technology integrates into all facets of the industry — not just simply mocap and body capture for narratives but also for previs, virtual production, virtual cinematography, game development, etc. It's a core part of how work is done and high profile companies need skilled talent."
With a curriculum initially developed to expose students to motion capture, USC has been able to broaden course offerings to include an advanced course building on the fundamentals learned in the intro course. A virtual production and interface design class are just two of many mocap-focused courses currently in development at the school, and a visit to the mocap stage has been integrated into many other areas of academia such as history and science with faculty recognizing the advantages of having such technology at their disposal.
James Cameron Facing New Avatar Lawsuit
(blog.chron.com)Avatar director James Cameron has been hit with a new copyright lawsuit.
Elijah Schkeiban claims he created a fantasy franchise, called Bats & Butterflies, in 1988 – and it closely resembles Cameron’s 2010 blockbuster.
Schkebian’s story chronicled a hero’s travels to a faraway planet, called Altair. In the project, the lead character finds himself lost in a forest and befriends a number of indigenous creatures and partners with a community of butterflies.
On Monday Schkeiban filed suit against Cameron in California, alleging the movie star lifted plot ideas and characters from his book, insisting the similarities between the works simply couldn’t be coincidental, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
This marks the latest legal hurdle for Cameron, who has been plagued by a slew of similar allegations since the movie’s premiere in 2009 – in December he was hit with a $2.5 billion copyright lawsuit by a sci-fi screenwriter and earlier that month another plaintiff filed copyright infringement papers against Cameron, claiming he approached bosses at the director’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment with an idea for an “environmentally themed 3D epic” back in 1999.
Avatar has raked in $2.78 billion worldwide to become the highest-grossing film of all time.
With A Zero VFX Budget, Director Does His Own CGI Dog Fight
(everydaynodaysoff.com)€70,000 to fund the live action portion of the film. There was no money left for visual effects so the director did them all for free over a 6 month period.
Take a look: http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2012/01/30/the-german-a- short-ww2-related-film-with- zero-vfx-budget/
$147m Movie Studio Planned for S. Weymouth
Massachusetts offers a 25 percent tax credit on any spending by production companies, and ISG hopes those incentives will attract tenants to its studios.
Previously, ISG pushed for a bill that would have provided additional tax credits for the construction of movie studios. That legislation was blocked in the state Senate.
Nonetheless, ISG executives said they intend to break ground in November and will proceed with full-scale construction next spring. A spokesman said ISG’s financial partner in the deal is LNR Property Corp., the master developer of the 1,000-plus-acre SouthField project.
"X-Men: First Class" Sequel Moves Forward
(Deadline) Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class prequel was one of the most lauded superhero movies of 2011, and Fox CEO Tom Rothman told us last year that they're doing everything possible to get the director back for a sequel. In a new Deadline story about Fox's President of Production Emma Watts renewing her own contract through 2015, there's a matter-of-fact mention that the company has closed the deal for Vaughn to return to direct the unnamed sequel, working from a script being written by Simon Kinberg (X-Men: The Last Stand, Jumper, Sherlock Holmes) and with Bryan Singer once again producing.
Lay Off The CGI and Bring Back Prosthetics
(blogs.independent.co.uk)Untitled 124 181x300 Modern horror: Lay off the CGI and bring back prostheticsThe doctor shouts ‘Clear’ and lowers the defibrillators onto his fallen companion’s chest. As he does this, the man’s chest opens into a gaping, jawed mouth and catches the doctor’s hands, ripping them off. The doctor falls to the floor with his arm-stumps gushing blood that’s been made from a cocktail of jam, mayonnaise, gelatin, cream corn and whatever else they used in the good old days. A monstrous head on a spine emerges from the chest, which Kurt Russell duly despatches with his flame-thrower. Meanwhile, the man’s head acquires a life of its own, detaches itself from the burning body and grows a pair of spider legs. Once again, it’s down to Kurt to burn the hell out of the creature.
This is a scene from John Carpenter’s 1982 classic, The Thing; the film that represents the pinnacle of prosthetic and animatronic-based special effects in horror films. What’s inspired me to refer back to this classic was watching its decidedly uninspiring prequel of the same name, which is due out on DVD and Blu-Ray next month. Aside from a solid lead performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the film is an unengaging, CGI-enslaved shambles, and a glaring indicator of some of contemporary American horror’s worst habits.
The first of these bad habits is that much of modern US horror cinema is defined by lazy cash-ins, spin-offs and other defilements of legendary films. The second, and the point of this piece, is the tendency to eschew visceral prosthetic blood and gore for that of the digital variety. Digital Gore? Even the term itself sounds as paradoxical as a salt-loving snail. But then at a time when the country’s run by two seemingly contradictory parties who are cosily tucked up in bed together (Lib Dems are the small spoon), why should such inconsistencies surprise us?
The problem with how digital effects are used in The Thing (2011) comes down to indexicality; the sense of direct connection between the horrifying object depicted, the characters interacting with it, and us out here in the real world. The unnatural smoothness of the effects whenever anyone gets ‘Thing-ed’ (a not-so-technical term for when the titular virus takes hold of its victim and mutilates them into a shrieking monstrosity) distances us from the fact that what we’re watching is a human body come undone. Fusing a real on-screen human with digital effects never seems to do justice to the viscosity and crunchiness of the human body.
The 2011 version of the film makes the malleability of the human body far too fast and fluid for it to disturb us. In one scene, we see someone turn from man to ripped-up tentacular mess in under 15 seconds. In another, the ease with which the Thing sprouts new limbs, tentacles and spider-hands in its victims makes it seem like the digital FX whizzes behind it basically vomited their undeniable skills all over the screen, forgetting that this is essentially supposed to be a horror about the human body. The more a body becomes so obviously and fully digitised on-screen, the harder it is to convert it into a feeling of dread and horror in our own bodies.
In Carpenter’s original, seeing a Thing victim – in all his animatronic glory – be stretched and contorted, with his eyes popping out of his head or his head tearing away from the spine, is delightfully excruciating to watch. The jerky, twitchy movements do look mechanical, but then the human body essentially is mechanical. Our bodies are certainly more comparable to pistons, pulleys and a strawberry-jam-gelatin-mayonnaise mixture than they are to the endless 1’s and 0’s of binary code. By digitising a film which is essentially about the internal vulnerability of the human body, we lose a crucial point of contact with what we’re seeing onscreen.
This is not a general tirade against all digital effects in horror films. Used sparingly, they can serve horror’s purpose to shock. Thinking of the original Ringu (1998), the film contains just one major digital effects set-piece. Most of the film is slow-paced, visually bleak, and creeps us out mainly by showing us glimpses of eerie cursed video-tape footage. Just as we reach the point of near-boredom, we’re treated to one of the most iconic and terrifying scenes in horror history, when the vengeful spirit of a girl slides out of the TV screen into the victim’s lounge. The old horror film cliché of ‘less is more’ fits well with the use of visual effects here.
More recently, Sam Raimi’s semi-comical Drag Me To Hell (2009) is an example of a special-effects-heavy horror that actually works. The man who brought us the cult classic Evil Dead films pulls out all the stops, as we have eyes popping out of heads into other people’s faces, shadowy spirits, demonic digital goats, and people literally getting dragged to hell. Despite its heavy digitisation, however, some of the film’s best moments are a throwback to Raimi’s Evil Dead days, with corpses bouncing into upright positions in coffins, psychotic grannies attacking people with gummy, toothless mouths, and several scenes of projectile vomiting and bleeding. The balance here makes it one of the most entertaining, if not strictly terrifying, horrors of recent years.
The Thing, however, is very much meant to be a body horror; a term which has lost some of its value in the mainstream, with digital effects skewing it on the one hand, and pointless torture porn films (Hostel, Human Centipede, more recent SAW films) pulling it in the other direction. Body horror, for me, is distinct because it takes an interest in how major human happenings and questions – viruses, television (Videodrome, 1983), the search for God (Martyrs, 2008) – affect our understanding of the limits of our own bodies. Both the aforementioned films rely much more on make-up than digitisation to emphasise their themes.
Until a horror gets made about our increasingly digitalised world’s effect on the human body (note to self), then prosthetics and mechanics should always take precedence as a means of depicting our own physical fragility.
Experimenting with the VFX Bakeoff
(billdesowitz.com)The AMPAS experimented with 10 VFX bakeoff entries on Thursday night, which was met with mixed results. While it made better sense to expand the field from seven to 10, trimming the demos from 15 minutes to 10 was a hard adjustment for some. In addition, for the first time, there was a mix-up when the wrong file was used for the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 demo reel. Fortunately, the error was eventually rectified and the complete reel was screened at the end.
As always, it’s a lot more effective when the VFX is tied to a central character that’s animated and offers an emotional hook. And that’s usually what wins the Oscar. Thus, Weta’s senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri gave an informative and succinct explanation of the extraordinary CG Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the front runner: the new active LEDs for on set motion capture; a new model for the eyes; new fur system; and a new facial muscle system to handle all the dynamic simulations on top of the animation.
However, ILM’s presentation for Transformers: Dark of the Moon was also impressive, as VFX production supervisor Scott Farrar regaled the committee with facts and figures pertaining to the improved animation and the relentless demolition and the challenges of making it all work while shooting in 3-D.
Arguably, the best demo reel was for Real Steel, which involved a breakthrough virtual production system by Digital Domain and Giant Studios. VFX production supervisor Erik Nash explained how the system was instrumental in enabling the production to shoot the movie in 71 days with no second unit. Shooting with the Simulcam on set with MoCap actors resulted in a more visceral viewing experience when replaced with the animation for the boxing bots.
VIDEO for the contenders: http://www.billdesowitz.com/?p=3868
Pacific Rim Monster Roars Scare the World in New Viral Video?
(movieweb.com)A new video has hit the Internet, and various sources, such as Movie Viral, are claiming that it is a viral video for the long awaited Godzilla reboot from director Gareth Edwards. The following footage is quite reminiscent of his previous film Monsters. Our own expert here at the site (yes, we have an expert on monster noises) believes that this is actually a viral video for Guillermo del Toro's currently shooting giant monster thriller Pacific Rim, which is more likely the case since its closer to release.
Either that, or its neither of the above (it should be noted that Pacific Rim and Godzilla are both coming from Legendary Pictures). Its too early for a Cloverfield 2 viral, and the creepy thing about this video is that these same noises were actually heard here in Alhambra, a suburb of Los Angeles, at the same time these noise were captures on film, last week. It certainly scared the dogs, but I didn't think too much of it, passing the roars off as loud machinery passing by outside my window.
The end of Kevin Smith's Red State should also be noted here, as the climax of that film finds the villainous church group being defeated by an old firehouse loud speaker hooked to an iPod. This could just be a video prophesizing the oncoming apocalypse. Whatever it is, you should check it out below. Then tell us what you think it might be. Godzilla? Giant Pacific Rim monsters? The rapture? Mass Effect 3 Reapers? Weather Weapons created by our Government? Did you hear these noises where you live?
Click to watch Strange Sounds' Heard Worldwide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ2ZcmMxehk
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