(IGN) The bad news for fans eagerly anticipating the live action "Star Wars" series is that not much has changed since word broke last June that the massive production is currently on hold, awaiting costs to drop to a point that will make the FX-heavy undertaking financially feasible. Producer Rick McCallum is hoping that won't be too far off, however, and today told IGN that the show even has a working title: "Star Wars: Underworld."
"It's underneath what's going on," he reiterated about the series' focus, "It's the criminals and the gangs. The guys who are running Wall Street, basically. The guys who are running the United States."
Even if the series is a few more years away, McCallum says there's no risk in the scripts become dating and that the delay can only make the show stronger.
"They're timeless," he explains. "They take place between Episode III and Episode IV. That 20 year period when Luke is growing up. It's not about Luke, but it's about that period when the Empire is trying to take things [over]."
Digital Domain's State and Local Incentives Up to $135.1 Million
(sunshinestatenews.com)
Digital Domain Media Group (NYSE: DDMG) has received an extra $11 million in tax credits from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.
The latest credit, announced Thursday by the company, brings to $135.1 million the sum that the digital production company has received in incentives from the state, Port St. Lucie and West Palm Beach.
"As we deliver on the job creation promises we have made to the communities that support our growth, we benefit from a unique business model that utilizes these grants and economic incentives to greatly minimize the financial risk of such growth,” John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain Media Group, stated in a release.
The latest credit will be used to develop the studio’s first film in Florida, “The Legend of Tembo.”
Digital Domain Media Group has contributed to films such as “Thor,” “TRON: Legacy,” “Transformers,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Apollo 13” and “Titanic.”
The company is set to officially open a $40 million, 115,000-square-foot studio in Port St. Lucie Jan. 3, according to TCPalm.
In West Palm Beach, Digital Domain is creating an institute with Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts.
The incentives break down:
State of Florida -- $20 million, cash grants; $19.9 million, tax rebates -- resalable.
City of Port St. Lucie -- $10 million, cash grants; $10.5 million, land (appraised value); $39.9 million, low-interest building and equipment lease financing.
City of West Palm Beach -- $10 million, cash grants; $9.8 million, land (appraised value); $15 million, low-interest financing.
The company has also received an estimated $50 million from its recently announced China joint venture partner, Beijing Galloping Horse Film Co.
"Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" Delayed Nearly a Year
(comingsoon.net)
The film arrives from Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola and stars Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton and Femke Jansen. Set 15 years after the Grimm's Fairy Tale siblings incident at the gingerbread house, the film finds Hansel and Gretel working as bounty hunters, tracking down supernatural beings.
While the Wirkola film is planned for a 3D release, it should not be confused with the also-in-development film Hansel and Gretel in 3D, set to be produced by Michael Bay.
The Un-CGI Rant
(horrorthon.blogspot.com) I just finished watching the Coen brothers' True Grit (which had me bawling like a baby) and thought it was maybe the most perfect Western I've ever seen. While watching the end titles I saw a credit for the digital effects house Luma Pictures (whom I'd actually heard of because of their work on a couple of the Marvel superhero movies). I thought back over the movie and tried to guess what they'd done, and my guesses were correct (all the falling snow, and the extension of the Arkansas town in the top image above).
I'm so tired of reading and hearing people complain about CGI in movies, when (in my opinion) CGI is the best thing to happen to cinema since Technicolor, or maybe even sound. The complaints are universally based on a willfully ignorant point of view and a nonsensical argument.
Pre-digital special effects, almost without exception, look like special effects. They're nearly impossible to miss. The matte paintings of depression-era Chicago in The Sting; the model London rooftops in Murder by Decree; the tilted "out-the-window" backdrops in countless movies: they all look fake. You accept the fakeness; it's part of the "magic of movies."
But CGI changes all that. The four images above are the afforementioned True Grit (in which the long main street of the town is not a static image at all; it's glimpsed in the background of a dozen sweeping shots with people and horses moving in the foreground); Saving Private Ryan (where the Allied fleet off the coast of Normandy, including battleships and dirigibles, is made to match exactly to actual D-Day photographs); Quantum of Solace (which is filled with undetectable CGI like this bell-tower shootout in Siena) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (in which Cate Blanchett's head is attached to a real ballet dancer's body). All flawless, all undetectable, all expedient, showing you things you could never see without twenty times the budget (which is why something like Heaven's Gate was so expensive; Michael Cimino had to build the town of Casper, Wyoming circa 1890).
The only time people realize they're seeing CGI is when the image depicts something clearly impossible (like Asgard, or the starship Enterprise, or Iron Man flying around). Suddenly the audience realizes that it's got to be a trick, and they say, "Oh -- CGI." And then they complain about what they're seeing as if the CGI itself is to blame (rather than the creative decisions that went into determining what the shots would look like). Everyone starts bitching about how CGI intrinsically "looks fake," so why can't they do it the old way (where, as I've said, you can't possibly miss the effects shots; they stand out like a sore thumb even before anything happens in them because the film's been fed through an optical printer and has lost its first-generation crispness). It's bad logic and lazy thinking. If a little light came on next to the screen every time a digital effect was in use, people would realize how unbelievably great CGI is and would stop bitching. But this doesn't happen, so people stare at dozens and dozens of wonderful, difficult, artistic (and cost-saving!) CGI effects, not even realizing it, and then say they "hate" CGI. I wish people would wise up, that's all I'm saying. (I just had to vent.)
Warner Bros. Plans "A Discovery of Witches"
(Variety) Warner Bros. has plans to adapt Deborah Harkness' novel, A Discovery of Witches, into a feature film and, Variety reports, they've brought aboard David Auburn to provide the screenplay.
The first book in the "All Souls Trilogy," "A Discovery of Witches" will receive a sequel this summer with "Shadow of Night." On her site, Harkness describes the first novel as follows:
When historian Diana Bishop opens a bewitched alchemical manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library it represents an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordinary life. Though descended from a long line of witches, she is determined to remain untouched by her family’s legacy. She banishes the manuscript to the stacks, but Diana finds it impossible to hold the world of magic at bay any longer.
For witches are not the only otherworldly creatures living alongside humans. There are also creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires who become interested in the witch’s discovery. They believe that the manuscript contains important clues about the past and the future, and want to know how Diana Bishop has been able to get her hands on the elusive volume.
Chief among the creatures who gather around Diana is vampire Matthew Clairmont, a geneticist with a passion for Darwin. Together, Diana and Matthew embark on a journey to understand the manuscript’s secrets. But the relationship that develops between the ages-old vampire and the spellbound witch threatens to unravel the fragile peace that has long existed between creatures and humans—and will certainly transform Diana’s world as well.
Auburn is best known as the playwright behind "Proof." He also wrote The Lake House and wrote and directed 2007's The Girl in the Park.
Reel FX Acquires ‘Invasion’ Film Pitch from ‘Journey 2’ Director
(latino-review.com)
Cary Granat’s Reel FX has acquired the pitch from Peyton for “Invasion.”
Peyton will produce and direct “Invasion.” The script is written by J. Daniel Shaffer. The project will also be produced by Andrew Adamson under the Strange Weather Films banner.
The plot is about unarmed students in Philadelphia who must battle an attack from a supernatural force.
Variety had described “Invasion” to be in the vein of “Cloverfield.”
Peyton had directed the upcoming “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” which starred Josh Hutcherson, Dwayne Johnson, Vanessa Hudgens and Michael Caine. He also directed 2010’s “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”
“Journey 2” will be in theaters on February 10.
Designing Fantasy Worlds the Weta Way
(popmatters.com)
Falconer’s interest in design was sparked by films he watched as a boy. “I was profoundly impressed as a child by Jim Henson and everything he touched. His amazing fantasy films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were every bit as influential on me as Star Wars. These movies created deep and rich imaginary worlds that I could believe in and which seemed to live beyond the confines of the screen. I watched ‘making of’ documentaries on television that showed how creature shops designed, built and brought to life these worlds, and I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life.”
During part of the work-experience phase of his coursework, Falconer began to spend holidays working with a studio near his West Auckland home. After a fateful meeting with Weta Workshop founder Richard Taylor, the young artist was invited to see how he liked the Wellington-based company. At the time, Weta was putting together a design team and “seeking enthusiastic young artists ... I spent a week at Weta in Wellington and loved it. Fortunately, they liked me, too, so I returned home, finished up the last handful of weeks of my design degree and moved to Wellington as soon as I was done to start work with Weta at the end of 1996. I have been here ever since.”
Working Where “Cool Stuff” is Made
Although Falconer explains that “Weta is primarily a service-providing physical effects company for other people’s films and TV projects,” he also knows that it was formed “to facilitate Richard Taylor’s insatiable desire to make cool stuff.” Because film audiences only see the results of months, sometimes years of planning and design, they may not realize that Weta does more than develop elaborate creatures for the film industry.
Full Article: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/
'John Carter' FX Will Be Difficult to Pull Off
(digitalspy.com)
The Northern Irish actor appears as Tardos Mors in the science fiction epic alongside Rome co-stars Polly Walker and James Purefoy.
Hinds told Digital Spy that Stanton first approached him to star in the movie after seeing him perform in a stage production of Burnt by the Sun.
"Andrew Stanton came to see a play I was doing three years ago at the National. God love him, he sat through a big Russian epic," he said.
"I met him afterwards and he'd seen [HBO drama] Rome and he wanted to use some of us, because he wanted these people on Mars - Jeddaks - to be almost Roman."
"I [then] realized that this is the Andrew Stanton who did Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Those were two of the most beautiful films I know - they touch adults and children alike."
Hinds confessed that Stanton has a challenge on his hands juggling the movie's huge visual effects demands.
'John Carter' still: Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), John Carter (Taylor Kitsch)
"I think John Carter is going to be a difficult thing to pull off, but he's a very brilliant man," he commented.
"It's moving three different things. It's moving animation with computer digitalisation and real live-action. How you do that seamlessly I've no idea, and then how that reads through this big interplanetary story... it remains to be seen."
Universal Plans Carrey-Led "Almighty" Sequel
(darkhorizons.com)
In the 2003 original, Carrey played TV news reporter Bruce Nolan who is offered the opportunity to be God for a week.
The 2007 sequel/spin-off "Evan Almighty" followed Bruce's former colleague Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) with a Noah's Ark inspired riff.
Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel are penning the follow-up. As the entire project is still in early stages, there's no word if Morgan Freeman would return to play God, or if Jennifer Aniston would reprise her girlfriend role from the original.
Tippett FX Group Takes a Bite Out of The Bakery
(sfgate.com)
Gemenos, France (PRWEB) January 04, 2012
The Bakery (www.bakery3D.com), is proud to confirm that visual effects powerhouse, Tippett Studio has chosen Bakery Relight™ software for its FX group production pipeline.
Bakery Relight is the first product from French-based 3D computer graphics company, The Bakery, founded in 2007 by veteran motion picture artists and technologists, Erwan Maigret and Arnauld Lamorlette. Since its debut at NAB 2011 in Las Vegas in April, Relight has swiftly garnered strong praise and support from industry insiders worldwide.
Tippett's Digital Effects Supervisor, Scott Singer explains, "Our entire FX pipeline is based on The Bakery's advanced VFX specific tool set. We've now completed several of our latest film projects using this technology, including 'Immortals' and 'The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1' , which released last November, as well as our current projects, 'Ted', 'Mirror, Mirror', and 'The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2', which are scheduled for release in 2012."
"We couldn't have completed the work we did on one of our top-secret projects without it," says Singer. "Especially considering the small size of the crew in the FX department, the very short period of time we had to complete it, and the large amount of complexity involved. We completed the FX animation on the project - 25 shots of rigid bodies with 4 FX animators in 6 weeks. We can now do these things because we can quickly build shot independent, data-driven automated processes and efficient interactive processes."
"The Bakery team has been amazing in helping us to solve our pipeline architecture problems, allowing us to work more efficiently. We primarily use their advanced VFX-specific database functionality to describe assets, asset management, VFX processes, process control and farm submission. We can now work far more efficiently with data driven, reproducible results managing hugely complex processes and data. It has become the backbone of our effects pipeline and has replaced most of the traditional Tippett pipeline for the FX Group. We can now describe any pipeline processes as a series of interchangeable and re-useable modular building blocks - like pipeline Legos™ in a way. Thanks to the Bakery, we can now create four times as many wolves, in four times as many shots with two thirds of the crew size and in less time, or describe the complex steps necessary to deliver raw blood data to lighting, as we did in 'Immortals'."
"We're working with the Bakery on an ongoing basis now to build on the asset system to encapsulate more complex, compound asset management for future projects," says Singer.
"We're extremely proud to be able to collaborate at this level with a partner such as Tippett Studio," says Bakery co-founder and CEO, Erwan Maigret, whose credits include Technical Lead on "Shrek 2", "Madagascar" and "Shrek the Third". "Tippett Studio brings an extraordinary level of knowledge and expertise to the table. This partnership is a great validation of both our technology and the work of our team."
Helmers War for Future of Toons - Eye on the Oscars: Animation 2012
(variety.com) While 'The Adventures of Tintin' and 'Rango,' were made by director-driven teams, 'Puss in Boots' emerged from Dreamworks' established culture.
This year's animated feature race is a culture clash.
Live-action helmers Steven Spielberg and Gore Verbinski, working outside established animation studios, built unique creative cultures tailored to their movies.
Those established companies -- Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks -- and their entrenched creative cultures have long been the backbone of the animation business. This year, though, those entrenched cultures have evolved, perhaps reflecting a maturation of the feature animation industry.
At DreamWorks Animation, for example, "Puss in Boots" director Chris Miller describes the studio culture as more filmmaker-driven than it has ever been. "In the early days of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg was really hands-on," says Miller. "Now he's allowing us to find our own way, and even to fall on our faces -- whatever it takes."
Miller cites his "Shrek" spinoff "Puss in Boots" as a good example. "There was a willingness to give this character his own world apart from 'Shrek,' and let the comedy be driven by character, not by satire. Jeffrey let us do that."
Verbinski and his "Rango" team went anti-corporate, creating a cloistered workspace at Verbinski's old house in the hills above Los Angeles. The goal was to insulate those artists from studio or producer notes, and liberate them to take risks. It was a high-wire act from day one.
"None of us had any animation experience," designer Mark "Crash" McCreery admits. "We were under the radar, working in a home, and nobody stopped us."
Verbinski's team spent a year creating a "story reel" -- an early version of the entire picture, albeit with simple art and temporary sound. It fell to Industrial Light & Magic, which had never done an animated feature before, to bring that story reel to life in CG animation. "Gore talked to ILM's animators as if they were actors. He let them embrace a character and own it." ILM learned to think in terms of entire sequences, not just individual shots, but in the end, says McCreery, "nothing changed from the animatic Blind Wink had done to the final product."
Spielberg, who usually works with ILM, instead teamed with Peter Jackson's Weta Digital for the first time on "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn." Each side helped the other.
Spielberg had never had to capture actors in a blank "volume" before, and Weta helped him by providing him with rough CG reference imagery on monitors.
"That at least grounded me," Spielberg has remarked (Daily Variety, Nov. 16). "I was hoping that I could bring some of the filmmaking tools of my trade to a medium that I had never explored before, and that really did the trick."
Weta, on the other hand, had never done stylized characters, and Spielberg wanted to keep the graphic style of Herge's original books. Says Weta partner Joe Letteri: "We had to find a way to honor the source material and still create a unique look on film."
Letteri credits Jackson with getting heavily involved early on. Jackson, whose pictures built New Zealand-based Weta into a world-class vfx studio, eased the path for both Weta and Spielberg.
"He (Jackson) understood the challenge of taking a character design and turning it into a 3D character that you want to see onscreen," Letteri says. Letteri notes that while Spielberg lived a half world away from Weta, he collaborated constantly via videoconferencing. "It was a surprisingly easy way to work."
Arguably the most unusual blended culture this year paired the stop-motion animators at Aardman with the 3D-CG artists at Sony Animation and Imageworks for "Arthur Christmas."
To mesh such different studio cultures, Sony artists worked at Aardman in Britain during story development, and "Aardman West" was set up in L.A. during production.
"We wanted to feel like a joined-up studio and not a vendor," explains director Sarah Smith. "In a small studio like Aardman, you think of the totality of a project. You're always -- in your head -- trading one part of the process against another, in terms of what's important to you.
"It can be hard for people from a visual effects pipeline like Sony's to do that kind of holistic thinking. Had it been a classic 'vendor' relationship, you can imagine all sorts of horse-trading. But having our teams related to each other all the way through, we could to keep that 'big picture' thinking." nPixar's story-driven culture is guided by its famous "brain trust" of collaborators and its policy of inviting comments from everyone in the studio's rank and file. Even John Lasseter, who built that culture, and who could almost certainly ignore such notes with impunity if he so desired, heeded their critiques of "Cars 2," recalls producer Denise Ream.
"There were uncomfortable times when issues were brought up by crew members -- like several instances where people felt that the movie bordered on violence. It's a spy movie, so we definitely had to have stakes. It would not have been believable if we didn't. But John definitely heard what Pixar people had to say, and made changes."
Persistence of Vision's David Dozoretz Recalls Tom Cruise Driving 'Protocol' Previs
(chicagotribune.com)
Dozoretz, who was then with ILM, recalls that on the first "M:I" Cruise and the producers wanted to do a sequence in which a train pulls a helicopter into the Channel Tunnel. "The studio wasn't really sure about it, so we all decided to do a rough computer animation to show what it can look like," said Dozoretz. Since that early application, which Cruise encouraged, previs has been deployed on hundreds of big-budget movies to aid in the decision-making process and -- significantly -- to save money. By the time "M:I4" was in development, Dozoretz had become a previs maven. He's one of the founders of the Previsualization Society, a trade group, and for the past dozen years has been running Persistence of Vision, a previs consulting shingle. Dozoretz was working on the J.J. Abrams-directed "Super 8" when he got word that Abrams was was planning to produce the fourth "Mission" installment. "They didn't have a script yet, only a rough treatment," Dozoretz recalled. "One sequence was going to take place on top of the world's tallest building" -- the 160-floor Burj Khalifa in Dubai. By January 2010, Dozoretz and his team were on board and worked steadily on "M:I4" for the next 12 months. "It was really early on," he said. "We were starting on the Burja previs even as J.J. was first talking with (director) Brad (Bird) in the other room." Production designer James Bissell recalled that pre-production on "M:I4" was "truncated" as a result of protracted negotiations among the major players behind the film. It took some time before a full script was available, "and then we were on three continents, filming second unit in Moscow and first units in Dubai and Prague, and additional locations in Vancouver."
Previs, he added, was particularly useful in such pressured circumstances in order to help Bird -- who had heretofore only helmed animated pics -- visualize difficult and complex live-action sequences. Bissell and others fed data into the previs computers, helping Dozoretz build several "M:I4" scenes -- none more dramatic than the film's signature sequence, in which Cruise climbs up the Burj Khalifa's sleek surface 130 stories above the ground, rappelling from floor to floor in order to access a secure computer room from the outside. More than six months before any shooting took place, Dozoretz created as many as "15 or 20" versions of the sequence for Bird. "We'd show it to Brad, and he'd say, 'This isn't quite working.'?" Bird would then make suggestions for picking up the pace in some areas, slowing it down in others. Then the team would show the previs sequences to the studio and decide how the shooting would take place. At that point the previs also got disseminated to most of the film's department heads. "They'd put the previs on a large monitor and go through whole scenes, one shot at a time," said Dozoretz, "deciding how they were going to get certain shots, what they need to do at certain points during production and how to rig for safety."But there was one factor no one could have predicted. "When we spent those first six months working on the sequence, we thought it was all going to be visual effects work," Dozoretz said. "We figured they'll shoot plates and Tom will be put in digitally."
But Cruise had other plans: He wanted to do his own stunts, and to suspend himself in a harness 130 floors above the ground while helicopters flew around and Imax cameras recorded his vertigo-inducing moves up and down the side of the mirrored tower. "When we were designing the sequence we thought we could do anything because it was going to be all digital," said Dozoretz, "But it turned out to be the real Tom." So instead of creating a virtual world, the vfx artists ended up with the opposite task: They worked on live-action images of Cruise suspended in mid-air and carefully removed wires, cables and reflections of the crew in the building's exterior.
Will CGI Kill the Video Star?
(abdulhalik.wordpress.com)
It was so real that at times you could hardly tell the difference. This made me think of creative destruction and how it might affect the movie industry soon, or later. Actors haven’t taken a real hit from economic forces for a good few decades now. There was the advent of silent film, which put a few radio stars out of business, then there was actual audio in film which probably put a few mute and hoarse voiced actors out of business. But after that, acting was pretty much acting, you dream of it when young, escape a dreary rural existence and go out and become a star ot thereabouts.
Tintin only uses real actors behind the scenes though. The faces are competely artificial; a hybrid of many faces aimed to match the comicbook journalist as closely as possible. If this catches on, soon the movie industry might face a whole new phase of creative destruction, the old being destoyed to give way to the new; real actors giving way to artificial ones. Better looking artificial ones; fitter, more agile and capable of delivering far more camera angles at far lower budgets than can be even dreamt of in the real world. By ‘soon’ i probably mean a good few decades. People were saying the same thing when the first Final Fantasy movie came in too, and motion capture before Tintin only worked properly for non human elements like Gollum, the apes in Planet-of-the and the Navi in Avatar.
The Milennials that is, my generation, have already seen so much creative destruction it should hurt; if we didnt revel in it. There was the CD destroying the tape, then being destroyed in turn by the mp3. Then the internet comes and completely screws over many established industries while they were looking the other way. Most imprtantly the age old book is also undergoing a significant phase of creative destruction the like of which hasnt been seen since Gutenberg. Creative destruction happens when something is replaced in a way that is completely impossible to compete against, the only possible outcome is for the old to gradually and stubbornly give way to the new.
The Real Wizards of Oz Deserve Better Treatment
(ronaldengle9.posterous.com)
While visual effects-driven films are the ones that clean up at the box office, the visual effects artists who make the magic possible often are not adequately compensated or recognized for the contributions that they've made to the final creative product or the financial bottom line. Visual effects artists not only create fantastic visuals, we also aid in the storytelling, providing new possibilities for directors and producers who want to tell stories in compelling ways, never seen before, to actually get on the screen for everyone to enjoy.
But for the artists who create the visuals and help tell the stories we all want to see, life and working conditions are often not a happy Hollywood fantasy. Here's a dirty secret no one in the industry wants to talk about: visual effects artists and professionals are the only major group of entertainment industry workers who are not protected from labor abuses or provided with health insurance and other benefits through collective bargaining. That's just not right.
Make no mistake -- we want directors, producers and studios to make respectable profits because that means they will create more movies and TV shows that will utilize visual effects artistry and employ our colleagues. Unfortunately, though, a lot of new visual effects work gets outsourced to countries around the world because of tax incentives or lower wage rates. As that trend speeds up, many are wondering if the current industry business model will be sustainable, as visual effects facilities struggle through razor-thin margins while trying to create the cutting edge work that is expected of them.
Full article: http://ronaldengle9.posterous.
VFX Tentpoles & CG Animation Fail To Save US Box Office
(guardian.co.uk)
Ticket revenue in the world's largest movie market fell 3.5% to $10.2bn, while the estimated number of tickets sold dropped 4.4% to 1.28bn, the lowest figure since 1995's 1.26bn, according to box office tracker Hollywood.com. Tentpole movies that provided disappointing returns for studios this year included sci-fi-western mashup Cowboys & Aliens, animated anthropomorphic penguin sequel Happy Feet 2 and Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy thriller Tower Heist.
No animated film or comic book movie topped $200m in 2011, in stark contrast to the previous year when Toy Story 3 broke the $1m mark and Iron Man 2 pulled in more than $600m. "There were a lot of high-profile movies that just ended up being a little less than were hoped for," said Chris Aronson, head of distribution for 20th Century Fox.
All of the top five highest-grossing films in the US were sequels or follow-ups. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the final instalment in the long-running schoolboy wizard saga, was the No 1 film overall with $381m, followed by Transformers: Dark of the Moon with $352m, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 with $271m, The Hangover Part II with $254m and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides with $241m. The highest grossing debutant was Thor at No 8 with $181m, and one has to look as low as No 12's Bridesmaids ($169m) to find a film based on an entirely original screenplay that was not a sequel of some sort.
Growth in other markets such as China may help take some of the strain from the drop in US revenues but experts say studios remain concerned that the glory box office years of the past decade may be gone for good Stateside.
"I'm not prepared to be Chicken Little yet, but if the films coming in 2012 can't reverse this trend, then I think we need to re-evaluate our expectations," said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "We are living in a different world today than we did in the mid-90s in terms of the technology available to deliver media. That may finally be having an impact."
CGI Movie Magic: It’s Wonderful. But Do We Care?
(blog.cheetahdeals.com)
But do you love it? When the movies, thanks to CGI, can depict scenes that defy the laws of gravity or even of mortality – and thereby suspend the consequences of life as you live it — how much do you really care about what happens to the characters who walk through these scenes? Do you follow their fates with the kind of intense identification that generates our passion for the movies – or with a yawn?
This question occurs to some viewers more and more frequently as movies heavily dependent on CGI techniques come to dominate the industry. This summer’s roster of some twenty digital spectacles includes “Super 8,” “X-Men: First Class,” and “Green Lantern.”
Although the first fully computer-generated feature film, “Toy Story,” was released in 1995, CGI really took off in 2002 with George Lucas’ all-digital “Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.” Now CGI is used in a broad array of films and TV shows. Some say the CGI technology is as much a game-changing shift as the move from silent films to talkies, or from black-and-white to color. But is it an improvement?
CGI can produce digital triumphs in the hands of great directors like James Cameron who created in “Avatar” an entire world which, although fantastical, was somehow familiar. In the same way, George Lucas in “Star Wars” drew upon combat footage of WWII fighter plane dogfights to produce space battles that occurred at warp speed but were still recognizable. It’s this combination of the strange yet familiar that engages the viewer.
What happens, however, when CGI in the hands of less imaginative directors produces scenes that are purely fantastical, in which characters are not answerable to the laws of physics or even common sense?
Often, the answer is disengagement on the part of the viewer and boredom. Any plot difficulty can be resolved by having a character morph into a cheetah and sprint out of danger at 60 m.p.h, or having another character blown to bits only to reassemble before your eyes and brush the dust off. After enough of this, it’s hard to care what becomes of people so impervious to real-life consequences. Such emotions as empathy, dread and joy – the feelings traditionally inspired by film characters we care about – simply evaporate, if they ever had a chance to get started.
As one critic notes in a recent “New Yorker” article: movie goers care about characters who make “their way through a world where walls are solid, gravity is unrelenting, and matter is indissoluble. … Can you have a story that means anything halfway serious without gravity’s pull and the threat” of death?
The director of “Super 8”, J.J. Abrams, appears to understand this. Abrams, who directed “Star Trek” (2009), fills his story about a bunch of kids in a small Ohio town making a zombie movie with plenty of CGI: a train wreck is depicted with millions of pixels of computer-generated disaster as cars buckle, spin and shoot high into the air. But along with this sort of thing is an entire world rendered in loving, realistic detail: a small American town in 1979 filled with ranch houses, family dinners, and old cars.
Think of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008), a film directed by Abram’s mentor, Steven Spielberg. That film depicts a small town in 1957 suburban America in such exquisite, realistic detail as to seem autobiographical – one feels that Spielberg is recreating where he grew up. Just as we are settling in to enjoy this trip down memory lane, the entire town is revealed to be an atomic bomb test site inhabited by dummies – and in the next moment is obliterated in a nuclear blast delivered via CGI. Dummies or not, the effect is shocking because of the balance struck between traditional movie realism and CGI magic. Somewhere, the pixels have to meet up with real people for us to care about either.
Digital Domain Ready to Open its Dazzling Tradition Studios
(reuters.com) TRADITION - The red carpet is ready to be rolled out for Digital Domain Media Group's Tradition Studios.
The company is set to open its doors after the first of the year to start a new tradition in feature animation films for children.
Digital Domain Media Group Chairman and CEO John Textor said Tradition Studios is the first complete studio for feature film animation for the digital effects company and is unlike any of its other five locations across North America. Tradition Studios, located off Interstate 95, is the place Digital Domain will film and produce its original animated stories.
Digital artists have begun making the 115,000-square-foot, $40 million studio home, but the official opening isn't until Jan. 3, with public tours expected to begin in February. However, the digital effects company offered a sneak peek into its newest studio and the amenities it plans to offer the community.
From animation studio tours, an outdoor movie amphitheater and soccer fields, Textor said the new building is designed to draw the public in and promote its new venture of telling children's stories. He said the concept of inviting families is vital to the company's new mission.
"We make movies for children and like the idea of children visiting and playing at the facility," Textor said. "It's not only exciting for kids in the community, but it brings artists closer to their audience. They may think they're working for me, but I like to remind them who their audience is."
Tradition Studios' first film, which is in development, will be "The Legend of Tembo" slated for release in fall 2014. The film tells the story of a young African elephant captured and separated from his family and taken to India. To get home, Tembo must transform into a fierce, battle elephant.
EA Being Taken To Court Over Battlefield 3 Vehicles
(cinemablend.com)
According to Game Industry, legal documents have surfaced detailing how Textron wants a cut of the financial action that Battlefield 3 is raking in. Their claim is that EA either needs to remove the three Bell helicopter models from Battlefield 3 or pay up some royalties. EA has responded that none of the helicopters are protected by the First Amendment's Fair Use and that having the AH-1Z Viper, UH-1Y and V-22 Osprey in Battlefield 3 isn't infringing on any rights violations.
According to EA, "The Bell-manufactured helicopters depicted in Battlefield 3 are just a few of countless creative visual, audio, plot and programming elements that make up EA's expressive work, a first-person military combat simulation."
EA's stance is further supported by a 2011 ruling [via GI] that gives video games the same creative First Amendment rights as movies and literature in regards to fair use.
This is probably one of the rare times where EA is in the right and I agree with them. Otherwise they (and just about every other video game company out there) would end up paying everyone else and their mother an arm and a leg to have silly stuff in games, like satellite dishes, windows, decorations, and a number of other pointless objects that help create density and atmosphere within a game.
I'm sure Activision is sitting back in their golden-polished chairs laughing their butts off at the news, thinking "It's a good thing Call of Duty no longer has any vehicles".![]()
The latest credit, announced Thursday by the company, brings to $135.1 million the sum that the digital production company has received in incentives from the state, Port St. Lucie and West Palm Beach.
"As we deliver on the job creation promises we have made to the communities that support our growth, we benefit from a unique business model that utilizes these grants and economic incentives to greatly minimize the financial risk of such growth,” John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain Media Group, stated in a release.
The latest credit will be used to develop the studio’s first film in Florida, “The Legend of Tembo.”
Digital Domain Media Group has contributed to films such as “Thor,” “TRON: Legacy,” “Transformers,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Apollo 13” and “Titanic.”
The company is set to officially open a $40 million, 115,000-square-foot studio in Port St. Lucie Jan. 3, according to TCPalm.
In West Palm Beach, Digital Domain is creating an institute with Florida State University's College of Motion Picture Arts.
The incentives break down:
State of Florida -- $20 million, cash grants; $19.9 million, tax rebates -- resalable.
City of Port St. Lucie -- $10 million, cash grants; $10.5 million, land (appraised value); $39.9 million, low-interest building and equipment lease financing.
City of West Palm Beach -- $10 million, cash grants; $9.8 million, land (appraised value); $15 million, low-interest financing.
The company has also received an estimated $50 million from its recently announced China joint venture partner, Beijing Galloping Horse Film Co.
"Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters" Delayed Nearly a Year
(comingsoon.net)
The film arrives from Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola and stars Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton and Femke Jansen. Set 15 years after the Grimm's Fairy Tale siblings incident at the gingerbread house, the film finds Hansel and Gretel working as bounty hunters, tracking down supernatural beings.
While the Wirkola film is planned for a 3D release, it should not be confused with the also-in-development film Hansel and Gretel in 3D, set to be produced by Michael Bay.
The Un-CGI Rant
(horrorthon.blogspot.com) I just finished watching the Coen brothers' True Grit (which had me bawling like a baby) and thought it was maybe the most perfect Western I've ever seen. While watching the end titles I saw a credit for the digital effects house Luma Pictures (whom I'd actually heard of because of their work on a couple of the Marvel superhero movies). I thought back over the movie and tried to guess what they'd done, and my guesses were correct (all the falling snow, and the extension of the Arkansas town in the top image above).
I'm so tired of reading and hearing people complain about CGI in movies, when (in my opinion) CGI is the best thing to happen to cinema since Technicolor, or maybe even sound. The complaints are universally based on a willfully ignorant point of view and a nonsensical argument.
Pre-digital special effects, almost without exception, look like special effects. They're nearly impossible to miss. The matte paintings of depression-era Chicago in The Sting; the model London rooftops in Murder by Decree; the tilted "out-the-window" backdrops in countless movies: they all look fake. You accept the fakeness; it's part of the "magic of movies."
But CGI changes all that. The four images above are the afforementioned True Grit (in which the long main street of the town is not a static image at all; it's glimpsed in the background of a dozen sweeping shots with people and horses moving in the foreground); Saving Private Ryan (where the Allied fleet off the coast of Normandy, including battleships and dirigibles, is made to match exactly to actual D-Day photographs); Quantum of Solace (which is filled with undetectable CGI like this bell-tower shootout in Siena) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (in which Cate Blanchett's head is attached to a real ballet dancer's body). All flawless, all undetectable, all expedient, showing you things you could never see without twenty times the budget (which is why something like Heaven's Gate was so expensive; Michael Cimino had to build the town of Casper, Wyoming circa 1890).
The only time people realize they're seeing CGI is when the image depicts something clearly impossible (like Asgard, or the starship Enterprise, or Iron Man flying around). Suddenly the audience realizes that it's got to be a trick, and they say, "Oh -- CGI." And then they complain about what they're seeing as if the CGI itself is to blame (rather than the creative decisions that went into determining what the shots would look like). Everyone starts bitching about how CGI intrinsically "looks fake," so why can't they do it the old way (where, as I've said, you can't possibly miss the effects shots; they stand out like a sore thumb even before anything happens in them because the film's been fed through an optical printer and has lost its first-generation crispness). It's bad logic and lazy thinking. If a little light came on next to the screen every time a digital effect was in use, people would realize how unbelievably great CGI is and would stop bitching. But this doesn't happen, so people stare at dozens and dozens of wonderful, difficult, artistic (and cost-saving!) CGI effects, not even realizing it, and then say they "hate" CGI. I wish people would wise up, that's all I'm saying. (I just had to vent.)
Warner Bros. Plans "A Discovery of Witches"
(Variety) Warner Bros. has plans to adapt Deborah Harkness' novel, A Discovery of Witches, into a feature film and, Variety reports, they've brought aboard David Auburn to provide the screenplay.
The first book in the "All Souls Trilogy," "A Discovery of Witches" will receive a sequel this summer with "Shadow of Night." On her site, Harkness describes the first novel as follows:
When historian Diana Bishop opens a bewitched alchemical manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library it represents an unwelcome intrusion of magic into her carefully ordinary life. Though descended from a long line of witches, she is determined to remain untouched by her family’s legacy. She banishes the manuscript to the stacks, but Diana finds it impossible to hold the world of magic at bay any longer.
For witches are not the only otherworldly creatures living alongside humans. There are also creative, destructive daemons and long-lived vampires who become interested in the witch’s discovery. They believe that the manuscript contains important clues about the past and the future, and want to know how Diana Bishop has been able to get her hands on the elusive volume.
Chief among the creatures who gather around Diana is vampire Matthew Clairmont, a geneticist with a passion for Darwin. Together, Diana and Matthew embark on a journey to understand the manuscript’s secrets. But the relationship that develops between the ages-old vampire and the spellbound witch threatens to unravel the fragile peace that has long existed between creatures and humans—and will certainly transform Diana’s world as well.
Auburn is best known as the playwright behind "Proof." He also wrote The Lake House and wrote and directed 2007's The Girl in the Park.
Reel FX Acquires ‘Invasion’ Film Pitch from ‘Journey 2’ Director
(latino-review.com)
Cary Granat’s Reel FX has acquired the pitch from Peyton for “Invasion.”
Peyton will produce and direct “Invasion.” The script is written by J. Daniel Shaffer. The project will also be produced by Andrew Adamson under the Strange Weather Films banner.
The plot is about unarmed students in Philadelphia who must battle an attack from a supernatural force.
Variety had described “Invasion” to be in the vein of “Cloverfield.”
Peyton had directed the upcoming “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” which starred Josh Hutcherson, Dwayne Johnson, Vanessa Hudgens and Michael Caine. He also directed 2010’s “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”
“Journey 2” will be in theaters on February 10.
Designing Fantasy Worlds the Weta Way
(popmatters.com)
Falconer’s interest in design was sparked by films he watched as a boy. “I was profoundly impressed as a child by Jim Henson and everything he touched. His amazing fantasy films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth were every bit as influential on me as Star Wars. These movies created deep and rich imaginary worlds that I could believe in and which seemed to live beyond the confines of the screen. I watched ‘making of’ documentaries on television that showed how creature shops designed, built and brought to life these worlds, and I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life.”
During part of the work-experience phase of his coursework, Falconer began to spend holidays working with a studio near his West Auckland home. After a fateful meeting with Weta Workshop founder Richard Taylor, the young artist was invited to see how he liked the Wellington-based company. At the time, Weta was putting together a design team and “seeking enthusiastic young artists ... I spent a week at Weta in Wellington and loved it. Fortunately, they liked me, too, so I returned home, finished up the last handful of weeks of my design degree and moved to Wellington as soon as I was done to start work with Weta at the end of 1996. I have been here ever since.”
Working Where “Cool Stuff” is Made
Although Falconer explains that “Weta is primarily a service-providing physical effects company for other people’s films and TV projects,” he also knows that it was formed “to facilitate Richard Taylor’s insatiable desire to make cool stuff.” Because film audiences only see the results of months, sometimes years of planning and design, they may not realize that Weta does more than develop elaborate creatures for the film industry.
Full Article: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/
'John Carter' FX Will Be Difficult to Pull Off
(digitalspy.com)
The Northern Irish actor appears as Tardos Mors in the science fiction epic alongside Rome co-stars Polly Walker and James Purefoy.
Hinds told Digital Spy that Stanton first approached him to star in the movie after seeing him perform in a stage production of Burnt by the Sun.
"Andrew Stanton came to see a play I was doing three years ago at the National. God love him, he sat through a big Russian epic," he said.
"I met him afterwards and he'd seen [HBO drama] Rome and he wanted to use some of us, because he wanted these people on Mars - Jeddaks - to be almost Roman."
"I [then] realized that this is the Andrew Stanton who did Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Those were two of the most beautiful films I know - they touch adults and children alike."
Hinds confessed that Stanton has a challenge on his hands juggling the movie's huge visual effects demands.
'John Carter' still: Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), John Carter (Taylor Kitsch)
"I think John Carter is going to be a difficult thing to pull off, but he's a very brilliant man," he commented.
"It's moving three different things. It's moving animation with computer digitalisation and real live-action. How you do that seamlessly I've no idea, and then how that reads through this big interplanetary story... it remains to be seen."
Universal Plans Carrey-Led "Almighty" Sequel
(darkhorizons.com)
In the 2003 original, Carrey played TV news reporter Bruce Nolan who is offered the opportunity to be God for a week.
The 2007 sequel/spin-off "Evan Almighty" followed Bruce's former colleague Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) with a Noah's Ark inspired riff.
Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel are penning the follow-up. As the entire project is still in early stages, there's no word if Morgan Freeman would return to play God, or if Jennifer Aniston would reprise her girlfriend role from the original.
Tippett FX Group Takes a Bite Out of The Bakery
(sfgate.com)
Gemenos, France (PRWEB) January 04, 2012
The Bakery (www.bakery3D.com), is proud to confirm that visual effects powerhouse, Tippett Studio has chosen Bakery Relight™ software for its FX group production pipeline.
Bakery Relight is the first product from French-based 3D computer graphics company, The Bakery, founded in 2007 by veteran motion picture artists and technologists, Erwan Maigret and Arnauld Lamorlette. Since its debut at NAB 2011 in Las Vegas in April, Relight has swiftly garnered strong praise and support from industry insiders worldwide.
Tippett's Digital Effects Supervisor, Scott Singer explains, "Our entire FX pipeline is based on The Bakery's advanced VFX specific tool set. We've now completed several of our latest film projects using this technology, including 'Immortals' and 'The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1' , which released last November, as well as our current projects, 'Ted', 'Mirror, Mirror', and 'The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2', which are scheduled for release in 2012."
"We couldn't have completed the work we did on one of our top-secret projects without it," says Singer. "Especially considering the small size of the crew in the FX department, the very short period of time we had to complete it, and the large amount of complexity involved. We completed the FX animation on the project - 25 shots of rigid bodies with 4 FX animators in 6 weeks. We can now do these things because we can quickly build shot independent, data-driven automated processes and efficient interactive processes."
"The Bakery team has been amazing in helping us to solve our pipeline architecture problems, allowing us to work more efficiently. We primarily use their advanced VFX-specific database functionality to describe assets, asset management, VFX processes, process control and farm submission. We can now work far more efficiently with data driven, reproducible results managing hugely complex processes and data. It has become the backbone of our effects pipeline and has replaced most of the traditional Tippett pipeline for the FX Group. We can now describe any pipeline processes as a series of interchangeable and re-useable modular building blocks - like pipeline Legos™ in a way. Thanks to the Bakery, we can now create four times as many wolves, in four times as many shots with two thirds of the crew size and in less time, or describe the complex steps necessary to deliver raw blood data to lighting, as we did in 'Immortals'."
"We're working with the Bakery on an ongoing basis now to build on the asset system to encapsulate more complex, compound asset management for future projects," says Singer.
"We're extremely proud to be able to collaborate at this level with a partner such as Tippett Studio," says Bakery co-founder and CEO, Erwan Maigret, whose credits include Technical Lead on "Shrek 2", "Madagascar" and "Shrek the Third". "Tippett Studio brings an extraordinary level of knowledge and expertise to the table. This partnership is a great validation of both our technology and the work of our team."
Helmers War for Future of Toons - Eye on the Oscars: Animation 2012
(variety.com) While 'The Adventures of Tintin' and 'Rango,' were made by director-driven teams, 'Puss in Boots' emerged from Dreamworks' established culture.
This year's animated feature race is a culture clash.
Live-action helmers Steven Spielberg and Gore Verbinski, working outside established animation studios, built unique creative cultures tailored to their movies.
Those established companies -- Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks -- and their entrenched creative cultures have long been the backbone of the animation business. This year, though, those entrenched cultures have evolved, perhaps reflecting a maturation of the feature animation industry.
At DreamWorks Animation, for example, "Puss in Boots" director Chris Miller describes the studio culture as more filmmaker-driven than it has ever been. "In the early days of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg was really hands-on," says Miller. "Now he's allowing us to find our own way, and even to fall on our faces -- whatever it takes."
Miller cites his "Shrek" spinoff "Puss in Boots" as a good example. "There was a willingness to give this character his own world apart from 'Shrek,' and let the comedy be driven by character, not by satire. Jeffrey let us do that."
Verbinski and his "Rango" team went anti-corporate, creating a cloistered workspace at Verbinski's old house in the hills above Los Angeles. The goal was to insulate those artists from studio or producer notes, and liberate them to take risks. It was a high-wire act from day one.
"None of us had any animation experience," designer Mark "Crash" McCreery admits. "We were under the radar, working in a home, and nobody stopped us."
Verbinski's team spent a year creating a "story reel" -- an early version of the entire picture, albeit with simple art and temporary sound. It fell to Industrial Light & Magic, which had never done an animated feature before, to bring that story reel to life in CG animation. "Gore talked to ILM's animators as if they were actors. He let them embrace a character and own it." ILM learned to think in terms of entire sequences, not just individual shots, but in the end, says McCreery, "nothing changed from the animatic Blind Wink had done to the final product."
Spielberg, who usually works with ILM, instead teamed with Peter Jackson's Weta Digital for the first time on "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn." Each side helped the other.
Spielberg had never had to capture actors in a blank "volume" before, and Weta helped him by providing him with rough CG reference imagery on monitors.
"That at least grounded me," Spielberg has remarked (Daily Variety, Nov. 16). "I was hoping that I could bring some of the filmmaking tools of my trade to a medium that I had never explored before, and that really did the trick."
Weta, on the other hand, had never done stylized characters, and Spielberg wanted to keep the graphic style of Herge's original books. Says Weta partner Joe Letteri: "We had to find a way to honor the source material and still create a unique look on film."
Letteri credits Jackson with getting heavily involved early on. Jackson, whose pictures built New Zealand-based Weta into a world-class vfx studio, eased the path for both Weta and Spielberg.
"He (Jackson) understood the challenge of taking a character design and turning it into a 3D character that you want to see onscreen," Letteri says. Letteri notes that while Spielberg lived a half world away from Weta, he collaborated constantly via videoconferencing. "It was a surprisingly easy way to work."
Arguably the most unusual blended culture this year paired the stop-motion animators at Aardman with the 3D-CG artists at Sony Animation and Imageworks for "Arthur Christmas."
To mesh such different studio cultures, Sony artists worked at Aardman in Britain during story development, and "Aardman West" was set up in L.A. during production.
"We wanted to feel like a joined-up studio and not a vendor," explains director Sarah Smith. "In a small studio like Aardman, you think of the totality of a project. You're always -- in your head -- trading one part of the process against another, in terms of what's important to you.
"It can be hard for people from a visual effects pipeline like Sony's to do that kind of holistic thinking. Had it been a classic 'vendor' relationship, you can imagine all sorts of horse-trading. But having our teams related to each other all the way through, we could to keep that 'big picture' thinking." nPixar's story-driven culture is guided by its famous "brain trust" of collaborators and its policy of inviting comments from everyone in the studio's rank and file. Even John Lasseter, who built that culture, and who could almost certainly ignore such notes with impunity if he so desired, heeded their critiques of "Cars 2," recalls producer Denise Ream.
"There were uncomfortable times when issues were brought up by crew members -- like several instances where people felt that the movie bordered on violence. It's a spy movie, so we definitely had to have stakes. It would not have been believable if we didn't. But John definitely heard what Pixar people had to say, and made changes."
Persistence of Vision's David Dozoretz Recalls Tom Cruise Driving 'Protocol' Previs
(chicagotribune.com)
Dozoretz, who was then with ILM, recalls that on the first "M:I" Cruise and the producers wanted to do a sequence in which a train pulls a helicopter into the Channel Tunnel. "The studio wasn't really sure about it, so we all decided to do a rough computer animation to show what it can look like," said Dozoretz. Since that early application, which Cruise encouraged, previs has been deployed on hundreds of big-budget movies to aid in the decision-making process and -- significantly -- to save money. By the time "M:I4" was in development, Dozoretz had become a previs maven. He's one of the founders of the Previsualization Society, a trade group, and for the past dozen years has been running Persistence of Vision, a previs consulting shingle. Dozoretz was working on the J.J. Abrams-directed "Super 8" when he got word that Abrams was was planning to produce the fourth "Mission" installment. "They didn't have a script yet, only a rough treatment," Dozoretz recalled. "One sequence was going to take place on top of the world's tallest building" -- the 160-floor Burj Khalifa in Dubai. By January 2010, Dozoretz and his team were on board and worked steadily on "M:I4" for the next 12 months. "It was really early on," he said. "We were starting on the Burja previs even as J.J. was first talking with (director) Brad (Bird) in the other room." Production designer James Bissell recalled that pre-production on "M:I4" was "truncated" as a result of protracted negotiations among the major players behind the film. It took some time before a full script was available, "and then we were on three continents, filming second unit in Moscow and first units in Dubai and Prague, and additional locations in Vancouver."
Previs, he added, was particularly useful in such pressured circumstances in order to help Bird -- who had heretofore only helmed animated pics -- visualize difficult and complex live-action sequences. Bissell and others fed data into the previs computers, helping Dozoretz build several "M:I4" scenes -- none more dramatic than the film's signature sequence, in which Cruise climbs up the Burj Khalifa's sleek surface 130 stories above the ground, rappelling from floor to floor in order to access a secure computer room from the outside. More than six months before any shooting took place, Dozoretz created as many as "15 or 20" versions of the sequence for Bird. "We'd show it to Brad, and he'd say, 'This isn't quite working.'?" Bird would then make suggestions for picking up the pace in some areas, slowing it down in others. Then the team would show the previs sequences to the studio and decide how the shooting would take place. At that point the previs also got disseminated to most of the film's department heads. "They'd put the previs on a large monitor and go through whole scenes, one shot at a time," said Dozoretz, "deciding how they were going to get certain shots, what they need to do at certain points during production and how to rig for safety."But there was one factor no one could have predicted. "When we spent those first six months working on the sequence, we thought it was all going to be visual effects work," Dozoretz said. "We figured they'll shoot plates and Tom will be put in digitally."
But Cruise had other plans: He wanted to do his own stunts, and to suspend himself in a harness 130 floors above the ground while helicopters flew around and Imax cameras recorded his vertigo-inducing moves up and down the side of the mirrored tower. "When we were designing the sequence we thought we could do anything because it was going to be all digital," said Dozoretz, "But it turned out to be the real Tom." So instead of creating a virtual world, the vfx artists ended up with the opposite task: They worked on live-action images of Cruise suspended in mid-air and carefully removed wires, cables and reflections of the crew in the building's exterior.
Will CGI Kill the Video Star?
(abdulhalik.wordpress.com)
It was so real that at times you could hardly tell the difference. This made me think of creative destruction and how it might affect the movie industry soon, or later. Actors haven’t taken a real hit from economic forces for a good few decades now. There was the advent of silent film, which put a few radio stars out of business, then there was actual audio in film which probably put a few mute and hoarse voiced actors out of business. But after that, acting was pretty much acting, you dream of it when young, escape a dreary rural existence and go out and become a star ot thereabouts.
Tintin only uses real actors behind the scenes though. The faces are competely artificial; a hybrid of many faces aimed to match the comicbook journalist as closely as possible. If this catches on, soon the movie industry might face a whole new phase of creative destruction, the old being destoyed to give way to the new; real actors giving way to artificial ones. Better looking artificial ones; fitter, more agile and capable of delivering far more camera angles at far lower budgets than can be even dreamt of in the real world. By ‘soon’ i probably mean a good few decades. People were saying the same thing when the first Final Fantasy movie came in too, and motion capture before Tintin only worked properly for non human elements like Gollum, the apes in Planet-of-the and the Navi in Avatar.
The Milennials that is, my generation, have already seen so much creative destruction it should hurt; if we didnt revel in it. There was the CD destroying the tape, then being destroyed in turn by the mp3. Then the internet comes and completely screws over many established industries while they were looking the other way. Most imprtantly the age old book is also undergoing a significant phase of creative destruction the like of which hasnt been seen since Gutenberg. Creative destruction happens when something is replaced in a way that is completely impossible to compete against, the only possible outcome is for the old to gradually and stubbornly give way to the new.
The Real Wizards of Oz Deserve Better Treatment
(ronaldengle9.posterous.com)
While visual effects-driven films are the ones that clean up at the box office, the visual effects artists who make the magic possible often are not adequately compensated or recognized for the contributions that they've made to the final creative product or the financial bottom line. Visual effects artists not only create fantastic visuals, we also aid in the storytelling, providing new possibilities for directors and producers who want to tell stories in compelling ways, never seen before, to actually get on the screen for everyone to enjoy.
But for the artists who create the visuals and help tell the stories we all want to see, life and working conditions are often not a happy Hollywood fantasy. Here's a dirty secret no one in the industry wants to talk about: visual effects artists and professionals are the only major group of entertainment industry workers who are not protected from labor abuses or provided with health insurance and other benefits through collective bargaining. That's just not right.
Make no mistake -- we want directors, producers and studios to make respectable profits because that means they will create more movies and TV shows that will utilize visual effects artistry and employ our colleagues. Unfortunately, though, a lot of new visual effects work gets outsourced to countries around the world because of tax incentives or lower wage rates. As that trend speeds up, many are wondering if the current industry business model will be sustainable, as visual effects facilities struggle through razor-thin margins while trying to create the cutting edge work that is expected of them.
Full article: http://ronaldengle9.posterous.
VFX Tentpoles & CG Animation Fail To Save US Box Office
(guardian.co.uk)
Ticket revenue in the world's largest movie market fell 3.5% to $10.2bn, while the estimated number of tickets sold dropped 4.4% to 1.28bn, the lowest figure since 1995's 1.26bn, according to box office tracker Hollywood.com. Tentpole movies that provided disappointing returns for studios this year included sci-fi-western mashup Cowboys & Aliens, animated anthropomorphic penguin sequel Happy Feet 2 and Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy thriller Tower Heist.
No animated film or comic book movie topped $200m in 2011, in stark contrast to the previous year when Toy Story 3 broke the $1m mark and Iron Man 2 pulled in more than $600m. "There were a lot of high-profile movies that just ended up being a little less than were hoped for," said Chris Aronson, head of distribution for 20th Century Fox.
All of the top five highest-grossing films in the US were sequels or follow-ups. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, the final instalment in the long-running schoolboy wizard saga, was the No 1 film overall with $381m, followed by Transformers: Dark of the Moon with $352m, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 with $271m, The Hangover Part II with $254m and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides with $241m. The highest grossing debutant was Thor at No 8 with $181m, and one has to look as low as No 12's Bridesmaids ($169m) to find a film based on an entirely original screenplay that was not a sequel of some sort.
Growth in other markets such as China may help take some of the strain from the drop in US revenues but experts say studios remain concerned that the glory box office years of the past decade may be gone for good Stateside.
"I'm not prepared to be Chicken Little yet, but if the films coming in 2012 can't reverse this trend, then I think we need to re-evaluate our expectations," said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "We are living in a different world today than we did in the mid-90s in terms of the technology available to deliver media. That may finally be having an impact."
CGI Movie Magic: It’s Wonderful. But Do We Care?
(blog.cheetahdeals.com)
But do you love it? When the movies, thanks to CGI, can depict scenes that defy the laws of gravity or even of mortality – and thereby suspend the consequences of life as you live it — how much do you really care about what happens to the characters who walk through these scenes? Do you follow their fates with the kind of intense identification that generates our passion for the movies – or with a yawn?
This question occurs to some viewers more and more frequently as movies heavily dependent on CGI techniques come to dominate the industry. This summer’s roster of some twenty digital spectacles includes “Super 8,” “X-Men: First Class,” and “Green Lantern.”
Although the first fully computer-generated feature film, “Toy Story,” was released in 1995, CGI really took off in 2002 with George Lucas’ all-digital “Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.” Now CGI is used in a broad array of films and TV shows. Some say the CGI technology is as much a game-changing shift as the move from silent films to talkies, or from black-and-white to color. But is it an improvement?
CGI can produce digital triumphs in the hands of great directors like James Cameron who created in “Avatar” an entire world which, although fantastical, was somehow familiar. In the same way, George Lucas in “Star Wars” drew upon combat footage of WWII fighter plane dogfights to produce space battles that occurred at warp speed but were still recognizable. It’s this combination of the strange yet familiar that engages the viewer.
What happens, however, when CGI in the hands of less imaginative directors produces scenes that are purely fantastical, in which characters are not answerable to the laws of physics or even common sense?
Often, the answer is disengagement on the part of the viewer and boredom. Any plot difficulty can be resolved by having a character morph into a cheetah and sprint out of danger at 60 m.p.h, or having another character blown to bits only to reassemble before your eyes and brush the dust off. After enough of this, it’s hard to care what becomes of people so impervious to real-life consequences. Such emotions as empathy, dread and joy – the feelings traditionally inspired by film characters we care about – simply evaporate, if they ever had a chance to get started.
As one critic notes in a recent “New Yorker” article: movie goers care about characters who make “their way through a world where walls are solid, gravity is unrelenting, and matter is indissoluble. … Can you have a story that means anything halfway serious without gravity’s pull and the threat” of death?
The director of “Super 8”, J.J. Abrams, appears to understand this. Abrams, who directed “Star Trek” (2009), fills his story about a bunch of kids in a small Ohio town making a zombie movie with plenty of CGI: a train wreck is depicted with millions of pixels of computer-generated disaster as cars buckle, spin and shoot high into the air. But along with this sort of thing is an entire world rendered in loving, realistic detail: a small American town in 1979 filled with ranch houses, family dinners, and old cars.
Think of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008), a film directed by Abram’s mentor, Steven Spielberg. That film depicts a small town in 1957 suburban America in such exquisite, realistic detail as to seem autobiographical – one feels that Spielberg is recreating where he grew up. Just as we are settling in to enjoy this trip down memory lane, the entire town is revealed to be an atomic bomb test site inhabited by dummies – and in the next moment is obliterated in a nuclear blast delivered via CGI. Dummies or not, the effect is shocking because of the balance struck between traditional movie realism and CGI magic. Somewhere, the pixels have to meet up with real people for us to care about either.
Digital Domain Ready to Open its Dazzling Tradition Studios
(reuters.com) TRADITION - The red carpet is ready to be rolled out for Digital Domain Media Group's Tradition Studios.
The company is set to open its doors after the first of the year to start a new tradition in feature animation films for children.
Digital Domain Media Group Chairman and CEO John Textor said Tradition Studios is the first complete studio for feature film animation for the digital effects company and is unlike any of its other five locations across North America. Tradition Studios, located off Interstate 95, is the place Digital Domain will film and produce its original animated stories.
Digital artists have begun making the 115,000-square-foot, $40 million studio home, but the official opening isn't until Jan. 3, with public tours expected to begin in February. However, the digital effects company offered a sneak peek into its newest studio and the amenities it plans to offer the community.
From animation studio tours, an outdoor movie amphitheater and soccer fields, Textor said the new building is designed to draw the public in and promote its new venture of telling children's stories. He said the concept of inviting families is vital to the company's new mission.
"We make movies for children and like the idea of children visiting and playing at the facility," Textor said. "It's not only exciting for kids in the community, but it brings artists closer to their audience. They may think they're working for me, but I like to remind them who their audience is."
Tradition Studios' first film, which is in development, will be "The Legend of Tembo" slated for release in fall 2014. The film tells the story of a young African elephant captured and separated from his family and taken to India. To get home, Tembo must transform into a fierce, battle elephant.
EA Being Taken To Court Over Battlefield 3 Vehicles
(cinemablend.com)
According to Game Industry, legal documents have surfaced detailing how Textron wants a cut of the financial action that Battlefield 3 is raking in. Their claim is that EA either needs to remove the three Bell helicopter models from Battlefield 3 or pay up some royalties. EA has responded that none of the helicopters are protected by the First Amendment's Fair Use and that having the AH-1Z Viper, UH-1Y and V-22 Osprey in Battlefield 3 isn't infringing on any rights violations.
According to EA, "The Bell-manufactured helicopters depicted in Battlefield 3 are just a few of countless creative visual, audio, plot and programming elements that make up EA's expressive work, a first-person military combat simulation."
EA's stance is further supported by a 2011 ruling [via GI] that gives video games the same creative First Amendment rights as movies and literature in regards to fair use.
This is probably one of the rare times where EA is in the right and I agree with them. Otherwise they (and just about every other video game company out there) would end up paying everyone else and their mother an arm and a leg to have silly stuff in games, like satellite dishes, windows, decorations, and a number of other pointless objects that help create density and atmosphere within a game.
I'm sure Activision is sitting back in their golden-polished chairs laughing their butts off at the news, thinking "It's a good thing Call of Duty no longer has any vehicles".
No comments:
Post a Comment