Rango Tops Visual Effects Society Awards with Four

(comingsoon.net)             

  The Visual Effects Society announced the winners of the 10th Annual VES Awards last at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. The annual event recognizes outstanding visual effects artistry in 23 categories of film, animation, television, commercials, special venues and video games. Here is the full press release with the winners:

The Visual Effects Society (VES) announced the winners of its 10th Annual VES Awards tonight at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. The annual event recognizes outstanding visual effects artistry in 23 categories of film, animation, television, commercials, special venues and video games.

More than a thousand attendees -- filmmakers, producers, directors and members of the visual effects community-- gathered to recognize the year's best work and the artists who created it. Rango was the evening's most honored project with four awards, including Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature Motion Picture, and Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in an Animated Feature Motion Picture. Hugo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Transformers: Dark of the Moon all took home two awards in the Feature Motion Picture categories, while Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones each garnered a pair of awards in the Television categories.

Stan Lee received the Lifetime Achievement Award and visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull received the Georges Méliès Award at the show, which was hosted by Patton Oswalt. Antonio Banderas, Lou Ferrigno, directors Chris Miller, Marc Webb and Jennifer Yuh Nelson, and a host of luminaries were on hand to present awards. A surprise appearance by Martin Scorsese, whose film Hugo received two awards, was one of the evening's highlights.

The complete list of winners of the 10th Annual VES Awards is as follows:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Dan Lemmon, Joe Letteri, Cyndi Ochs, Kurt Williams

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature Motion Picture
Hugo: Ben Grossmann, Alex Henning, Rob Legato, Karen Murphy

Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature Motion Picture
Rango: Tim Alexander, Hal Hickel, Jacqui Lopez, Katie Lynch

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie, or Special
Inside the Human Body: Phil Dobree, Sophie Orde, Dan Upton

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series
Terra Nova - Occupation & Resistance: Kevin Blank, Colin Brady, Adica Manis, Jason Zimmerman

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program
Game of Thrones - Winter is Coming: Lucy Ainsworth-Taylor, Angela Barson, Ed Bruce, Adam McInnes

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Live Action Commercial
Dior J'adore: Pascal Giroux, Julien Meesters, Stephane Pivron, Manuel Souillac

Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Commercial or Video Game Trailer
Diablo III: The Black Soulstone: Nicholas S. Carpenter, Graham Cunningham, Chris Thunig, Taka Yasuda

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project
Transformers the Ride: The Ultimate 3D Battle: Lori Arnold, Yanick Dusseault, Delio Tramontozzi, Jeff White

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture
Rise of the Planet of the Apes - Caesar: Daniel Barrett, Florian Fernandez, Matthew Muntean, Eric Reynolds

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture
Rango - Rango: Frank Gravatt, Kevin Martel, Brian Paik, Steve Walton

Outstanding Animated Character in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
Canal + The Bear: Laurent Creusot, Guillaume Ho, Olivier Mitonneau, Michal Nauzin

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture
Transformers: Dark of the Moon - 155 Wacker Drive: Giles Hancock, John Hanson, Tom Martinek, Scott Younkin

Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature Motion Picture
Rango - Main Street Dirt: John Bell, Polly Ing, Martin Murphy, Russell Paul

Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
Game of Thrones - The Icewall: Markus Kuha, Dante Harbridge Robinson, Damien Mac, Fani Vassiadi

Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture
Hugo: Martin Chamney, Rob Legato, Adam Watkins, Fabio Zangla

Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in an Animated Feature Motion Picture
Rango - The Dirt Saloon: Colin Benoit, Philippe Rebours, Nelson Sepulveda, Nick Walker

Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
Gears of War 3 - Dust to Dust: Niles Heckman, Richard Morton, Vernon Wilbert Jr.

Outstanding Models in a Feature Motion Picture
Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Driller: Tim Brakensiek, Kelvin Chu, David Fogler, Rene Garcia

Outstanding Models in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
Boardwalk Empire - Georgia Peaches: Matthew Conner, Eran Dinur, David Reynolds, Szymon Weglarski

Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture
Captain America: The First Avenger - Skinny Steve: Casey Allen, Trent Claus, Brian Hajek, Cliff Welsh

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
Boardwalk Empire - Gimcrack & Bunkum: Anton Dawson. Eran Dinur, Austin Meyers, David Reynolds

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Student Project
a.maize: Roman Kaelin, Falko Paeper, Florian Wittmann

The 10th Annual VES Awards will air exclusively on REELZCHANNEL Sunday, February 19 at 10pm ET/7pm PT with encore presentations throughout February. For more information on the VES Awards and the Visual Effects Society please visit www.visualeffectssociety.com




Maxon UK Opens Satellite Office in London

(3dworldmag.com)                   The new Pall Mall office will provide Maxon’s London-based customers with benefits: now you can get face-to-face technical support and same-day deliveries of Cinema 4D

Maxon Computer Ltd., the UK subsidiary of the leading developer of professional 3D modelling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, has opened a satellite office in London.

Based at the Institute of Directors’ (IoD) headquarters in Pall Mall, London, Maxon UK’s new office provides the company with outstanding facilities and a base of operations in the heart of the West End to better support its growing number of customers based in the City.

Maxon UK’s managing director, Liam Stacy, states: “With more and more of our customers being based in London, it makes a lot of sense for us to support our London customers locally.”

According to Maxon, the number of London-based design companies now offering 3D motion graphics to their clients has risen substantially, and Maxon’s role as the 3D motion graphics leader has seen sales of its Cinema 4D animation software rise in the City.




Hollywood VFX Tentpoles Bomb During The Super Bowl

(fitperez.com)              According to DVR data from TiVo of what commercials were watched and re-watched, the public's favorite spots were Doritos' "Man's Best Friend" (1st) and "Sling Baby" (3rd), with M&M's "Ms. Brown" coming in second!

You know what commercials people didn't latch onto? Anything from Hollywood!

The trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator ranked 24th amongst all the ads, while others didn't even come close to the top.

Even expected blockbusters like The Avengers and G.I. Joe: Retaliation didn't fare to well amongst viewers. Each television spot only came in at 43rd and 53rd, respectively!

Either people didn't care because they were able to watch the commercials online in advance or they aren't to psyched for the movies Hollywood is releasing in 2012.

Here are the rest of the lackluster results for the Hollywood promos: Star Wars in 3D (No. 48), Battleship (No. 61), Act Of Valor (No. 66), Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (No. 68), John Carter (No. 75), and Safe House (No. 100).



3D "Star Wars" Looks For $21m Weekend

(comingsoon.net)                    George Lucas finally brings his series of 3D "Star Wars" rereleases to theaters starting at "the beginning" with Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace 3D (20th Century Fox), unquestionably the worst movie in the six-film series, but also the one that's the most kid-friendly, which certainly will help it bring in the same avid fans that flocked to see the movie originally, making "Phantom Menace" the highest-grossing movie in the series (not including rereleases). Lucasfilm has done this before with the Star Wars: Special Edition rerelease in 1997, which grossed $137 million, but for better or worse, this is the first time "Episode I" has been re-released in theaters since its original release in 1999. One imagines many fathers will want to experience this with their boys who were probably too young to see it in theaters 13 years ago, which should help give Lucas' franchise new life. If one takes into account the added cost of 3D tickets, this could end up doing better than normal even though if does have competition both for guys and family audiences, which will likely keep it somewhere between $21 to 24 million for the weekend and somewhere around $70 million total.




Feeling Creatively Drained?... Let This Letter From Pixar Inspire You

(blodgettsblognstuff.com)                 Words of wisdom from the animation industry... KCRW's The Business, talks about the Animator Letters Project and airs a reading of the 'Persist' letter contributed by Pixar animator, Austin Madison, read by Austin himself.


Letter Transcript:

    PIXAR

    May 17, 2011

    To Whom it May Inspire,
       I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. The first (and far more preferable of the two) is white-hot, "in the zone" seat-of-the-pants, firing on all cylinders creative mode. This is when you lay your pen down and the ideas pour out like wine from a royal chalice! This happens about 3% of the time.
       The other 97% of the time I am in the frustrated, struggling, office-corner-full-of-crumpled-up-paper mode. The important thing is to slog diligently through this quagmire of discouragement and despair. Put on some audio commentary and listen to the stories of professionals who have been making films for decades going through the same slings and arrows of outrageous production problems.
       In a word: PERSIST.

       PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision. Remember what Peter Jackson said, "Pain is temporary. Film is forever." And he of all people should know.
       So next time you hit writer's block, or your computer crashes and you lose an entire night's work because you didn't hit save (always hit save), just remember: you're never far from that next burst of divine creativity. Work through that 97% of murky abyssmal mediocrity to get to that 3% which everyone will remember you for!
       I guarantee you, the art will be well worth the work!

    Your friend and mine,

    Austin Madison

    "ADVENTURE IS OUT THERE!"




‘Army of the Dead’ is Dead

(latino-review.com)                    Movie Hole spoke with director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr while he was doing press for the Blu-ray release of The Thing, his prequel to John Carpenter’s horror classic. During the interview van Heijningen spoke to a few different topics.

First, he didn’t want to use “The Thing” as the title for his prequel, but he couldn’t come up with anything better so he acquiesced to the studio. Second, he is not a fan of making sequels and, if there is a third film in The Thing series, he has already said he will not direct it. Third, his planned followup to Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, titled Army of the Dead, will most likely not happen.

From van Heijningen:

    “I don’t know if that’s going to happen – it was really expensive, because it was going to have to shoot in Las Vegas.

    “They didn’t really want us to shoot in Las Vegas – because of the expense of shooting in Las Vegas. I really don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Army of the Dead‘s plot followed a father as he fights through hoards of zombies in Las Vegas on a search for his daughter.

I was one of the many people who scoffed at Snyder’s remake, but then I saw the movie and actually enjoyed it. A follow up would have been nice, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, at least not anytime soon.





How The Muppets Film was Boosted by CGI

(bbc.co.uk)                "We have a saying around here - it's not easy doing green," says Look Effects' director of marketing Pam Hogarth as she prepares to introduce her colleagues.

When The Muppets opens at cinemas in the UK later this week, the film will contain about 350 shots created by the Los Angeles-based special effects team.

However, audiences not in the know will be hard pushed to spot more than a few dozen.

Take for instance Kermit's rousing speech to his fellow performers as he tries to inspire them to save their theatre.

"I don't care what anybody says," implores the long-suffering stage manager. "I believe in you."

His audience looks him straight in the eyes... except it is all an illusion.
Publicity still from The Muppets Most of the special effects in the film are designed to go unnoticed

When the puppeteers filmed the scene, Kermit was facing a blue screen, the colour chosen instead of the traditional green to accommodate the character's colour.

The 60-odd puppets facing him were added with painstaking care - and state-of-the-art graphics processors - some time later.
Digitally removed

Working this way involved extra effort, but it had its rewards.

"When they first came to talk to us about doing the movie I was a little curious what we would do on it," says Anthony "Max" Ivins, Look's visual effects supervisor.

"I thought we're not going to do CG Muppets, that just wouldn't be right. But it wasn't that, they wanted to give the writers and the director the freedom to just shoot the movie that they wanted to shoot.

"So we did a lot of head-to-toe puppets that were shot on a full blue-screen stage with puppeteers in blue suits.

"Some of the characters have up to four puppeteers running them. And it unleashes them if they don't have to hide from the camera."

In previous Muppet movies, many of the shots had to be designed around the teams operating the puppets, with boxes and pieces of furniture used to obscure them.
Muppet puppeteer in blue suit Puppeteers wore blue suits to make it possible to remove them from shots

This time, the puppeteers did not need to worry where they were standing because they were completely covered in blue suits, allowing them to be digitally removed afterwards.

But in many cases, that was easier said than done.

"Fuzzy Muppets on blue screen is not the funnest work," says Mr Ivins. "The lighting is never completely even on a Muppet."
Accelerated effects

To ensure audiences do not spot that the puppets have effectively been copied and pasted into their scenes, multiple keys - or cutouts - were taken for each frame of the film.

This allowed the visual effects artists to adjust their compositing tools so that different parameters could be applied to the parts of the characters in bright light from the parts in shadow.

Although much of this work still needed to be done manually, recent breakthroughs in GPU (graphics processing unit) technology helped speed up the process.

Computer chip maker Nvidia's Quadro graphics cards are widely used across the special effects industry - the firm claims about 95% of the market - thanks in part to the take-up of its Cuda programming language among key software developers over the past two years.

Effects programs written in the language take advantage of the GPU's skill at solving a problem by processing lots of little chunks of information simultaneously rather than attempting to process a few big chunks at speed.

When applied to appropriate tasks this offers a performance boost over what could be achieved by relying solely on the CPU (central processing unit).

Compositing is only one process that benefits.

"There are certain visual effects applications that are very keen for GPU," says Dominick Spina, Nvidia's senior technology product manager.
Sam the Eagle special effect shot The Muppets' feathers and fur made them tricky to composite, adding to the workload

"Any type of simulation - fire, water, fluids, volumemetrics [for clouds or smoke] - the reason being is that there is a very large computational component to those renders, so you have to physically simulate all of the motion.

"That's very well suited to GPUs as you can send a lot of data to a chip at one time and then get the result back.

"You're optimising your CPU as well by offsetting everything that is better processed on the GPU."
Time to tweak

It may all sound quite technical, but in an industry that works to tight deadlines it can make a huge difference.

In the case of a computer-generated fireworks sequence towards the end of The Muppets film, it allowed the visual effects team to perfect the explosions and see the results nearly instantaneously afterwards.

"We used a lot of lens flare, edge rays and warp effects to create the fireworks," says Look's director of technology, Michael Oliver.

"The artists could sit there with their GPU and deploy these effects and within seconds see the results, versus other workstations that don't have GPUs which would take two minutes to render this on a CPU."

"So they could sit there and tweak the fireworks - they could make them brighter, smaller, flashier.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

    About 10% too much intensity of speed and movement and it's like: 'Uh-oh - they look as if they are all killing each other instead of celebrating'”

End Quote Anthony Ivins Look Effects

"Whatever the director or supervisor wanted, and they could sit with the artist and do it in real time to get the look exactly the way they wanted it."
Killer crowds

The speed gains offered by GPUs become even more apparent in cases where the effects are highly complex.

"Now we can do five iterations in an afternoon where it might have taken a day to an iteration before - so it would have taken a week instead of an afternoon to have done the same amount of testing," said Mr Ivins.

The Muppets' most graphics- intensive shot involves a view from a helicopter on to part of Hollywood Boulevard in front of the historic El Capitan theatre which doubles as the puppets' base in the film.

The shot involved replacing many of the street's advertising hoardings with Disney-approved images - including a poster for its Cars 2 movie - as well as filling the area with a computer-generated crowd.

"That's one of the times when the graphics cards came into play in a big way because the crowd is a bunch of little people, so you get millions of polygrams moving really quickly when you get that many characters in one scene," said Mr Ivins.

"That was a fun shot to do because we ran our own particle system that moves the crowd around. And there was a fine line between an active happy crowd and a riot!
Computer-generated crowd on Hollywood Boulevard, and the shot before the effects were added A computer-generated crowd on Hollywood Boulevard was one of the movie's biggest effects scenes

"About 10% too much intensity of speed and movement and it's like: 'Uh-oh - they look as if they are all killing each other instead of celebrating.'"
Expensive tricks

Look's artists say there is one downside to the speed gains - some producers now push for "crazy schedules" to save costs, despite the firm's philosophy that "more time equates to a better product".

But Mr Ivins adds that being able to have a film's director or visual effects chief come in and see changes made in real time, rather having to wait for the dailies to arrive, can help speed up the decision-making process and avoid unnecessary work.

So when Crazy Harry explodes Abraham Lincoln's face off Mount Rushmore, and when sparks fly out of new character Walter after he is flung into an electric fence, the audience can be assured that the final results closely match the filmmakers' vision.

"The Muppets have always been about artistic integrity, not cheap tricks," says Kermit at one point in the film.

You may not always be able to trust what you see on screen, but the combination of low-tech puppetry and hi-tech graphics that brings Fozzie, Miss Piggy and the rest of the gang back to life helped all those involved live up to their leading frog's standards.




"The Jetsons" Jump-Starts Development

(Variety)                   Two new writers have been brought aboard the long-gestating big screen version of The Jetsons, Variety reports.

Van Robichaux and Evan Susser will tackle the Hanna-Barbera cartoon adaptation. They're best known for their spec script, Chewie, a story about the making of Star Wars, told from the perspective of Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew. The script made the 2011 "Black List" of unproduced screenplays.

Producer Denise Di Novi spoke with ComingSoon.net last summer and offered a update on the film.

"I've been developing that for so many years," she said at the time. "...Part of it is that every couple of years, the genre kind of changes. I really credit Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros. with this. In choosing Chris Nolan to do Batman, he really exploded the expectations on adapting all these kinds of titles, the pressure is on to really make them the coolest movies, not the cornball cartoon movies. Every couple years it's changed what they thought the movie should be and I'm hoping now we're hitting it at the right time. I've never given up on that movie."

Though nothing is certain at this stage, Robichaux and Susser's take could be the one to finally bring The Jetsons to the big screen.




Why Oscar Snubbed Pixar, 'Tintin,' 'Arthur Christmas' for Best Cartoon

(hollywoodreporter.com)                      When the Academy Award nominations were announced Jan. 24, most of Hollywood was waiting to see which films would emerge as best picture contenders. But within the smaller, intensely competitive animation community, the focus was on its own feature nominees, and in that category the results were shocking.

Sure, both of DreamWorks Animation's 2011 entries, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots, made the cut, as did Gore Verbinski's Rango. But where were Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and Pixar's Cars 2, not to mention Sony/Aardman Animations' Arthur Christmas or Fox's Rio? Instead, two obscure, foreign-language, hand-drawn animated movies, Chico & Rita and A Cat in Paris, rounded out the list of nominees.

Insiders at the various companies snubbed were stunned, though none wanted to go on record with their displeasure. By way of explanation, one Academy member says of the voters: "They were sending a message. They are against motion capture and kids' movies, and they want to save hand-drawn animation."

Well, yes and no. Many traditional animators are suspicious of motion capture or, as it's also known, performance capture, in which actors' performances are fed into a computer. In 2010, they succeeded in adding a line to the Oscar rule book that says, "Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique." That doesn't rule out mo-cap movies; it just means that they must prove they include frame-by-frame animation as well.

In addition to Tintin, two other motion-capture movies, Happy Feet 2 and Mars Needs Moms, were entered; all three were judged sufficiently animated to proceed. (The only movie that ran afoul of Academy rules was The Smurfs, a live-action/animation hybrid that was found not to contain enough actual animation.)

But the fact that Tintin didn't receive a nom in the animation or visual effects categories and that Andy Serkis wasn't nominated as a supporting actor for his work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes suggest, as Visual Effects Society chair Jeffrey Okun puts it: "The industry is confused. It comes down to, 'What is animation?' That is something everyone has been struggling with."

The Academy's ani noms aren't just about kinds of animation, though. They are made by a committee of slightly fewer than 100 members -- half of them animators from the Academy's short films and feature animation branch and half from throughout the Academy. Each member rates each movie on a scale of six to 10. Says Jon Bloom, chair of the branch's executive committee, "Part of the instructions the committee is given is to consider the entire achievement as a whole, not just its animation." That means story, characters, music and vocal performances all come into play. He says no larger lesson can be drawn from this year's choices beyond the fact that it was a highly competitive year. "My own ballot had many highly rated films, far more than five," he says.

But the final list does appear to favor films with elements that appeal to adults -- such as Antonio Banderas' comic take on a Latin lover in Puss or the Clint Eastwood allusions of Rango. That put Cars 2, which some critics had complained was driven by merchandising, at a disadvantage -- even though it was a pet project of Pixar's John Lasseter, who sits on the Academy's board of governors. So, too, Tintin: The character may be beloved in Europe, but here the movie may have seemed too much of a boys' adventure tale.

Chico & Rita, on the other hand, is a genuinely adult movie -- it even features female nudity -- charting a tempestuous love affair between a Cuban songwriter and a sexy singer, set against a musical backdrop that includes everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente. "It's a great, beautiful, adult animated film," says Eric Beckman, who heads the New York-based micro-distributor GKids Films, which will release Chico through its adult Luma Films label. He also is handling A Cat in Paris, which follows a cat burglar across the rooftops of Paris. Of the upset, he says, "In all honesty, I expected we'd get one nomination, but I never thought we'd get two."




Journey 2: The Mysterious Island Looks For $16m Weekend

That just leaves the 3D action-adventure Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (New Line/WB), which may be hurt by the presence of the "Star War" re-release, which is targeting the same family audience looking for action adventure. Brendan Fraser is nowhere to be found but Josh Hutcherson is joined by Dwayne Johnson and Michael Caine, the former likely to have the strongest draw, but maybe not enough to convince fathers and young boys to miss the opportunity to see "Star Wars" in theaters in 3D. The original Journey to the Center of the Earth opened with $21 million and went on to gross over $100 million, boosted by the then-original idea of a 3D live action movie, and while this could bring in a mix of boys and girls, it's more likely to be hurt by school being in session Friday and Monday. Like so many family movie sequels, we think this won't do as well as the original, ending up somewhere in the $16 to 18 million range this weekend and probably get up to roughly $60 or 65 million or so by the time it leaves theaters.



Film Industry in Ontario Contributed $1.26-billion to Economy in 2011

(arts.nationalpost.com)                   David Cronenberg, a 19th century police detective and flesh-eating zombies have helped Ontario’s film and television industry reap a record $1.26-billion for the provincial economy last year.

The figures mark a 31% increase or $300 million from the previous year and are the best results recorded since the Ontario Media Development Corporation started gathering data in 1986.

The real success story, Karen Thorne-Stone, president and CEO of the corporation, said Tuesday, is that domestic production accounts for almost 70% of all activity. She cited the success of home-grown television shows such as the police dramas Flashpoint and Murdoch Mysteries.

“It means we have stability in the system and our talents in front and behind the cameras are employed,” she said after delivering a lunch-time speech at The Economic Club of Canada.

The figures, which were released Tuesday, also show a 165% increase in domestic feature film spending, thanks in part to Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Resident Evil: Retribution (its predecessor, Resident Evil: Afterlife, is Canada’s top-grossing film, having taken in $300-million worldwide).

Canada’s film industry has boomed over the last decade or so as foreigner took advantage of the sagging Canadian dollar. But for years, folks in so-called Hollywood North feared that the opportunities would dry up once the dollar came closer to par with the U.S. dollar.

“Ontario is no longer the discount location,” Thorne-Stone said. “People are coming here because we have quality, reliability and world-class talent … Even as we watched the Canadian dollar rise, to notice that the phone is still ringing and projects are still coming, that’s very heartening.”

Toronto competes with Los Angeles, New York, London and Vancouver when attracting large productions. Donna Zuchlinski, the corporation’s film commissioner, said the low dollar helped the develop the infrastructure and the crews in the province. “But as the crews matured and the infrastructure grew, it was the reputation that we had that superseded where the dollar was at,” she added.

She pointed to resources such as Pinewood Toronto Studios, the largest studio complex in the country which accommodates big blockbuster movies, and the province’s leadership in 3D technology; films such as Tron, Harry Potter and Twilight: Breaking Dawn came to Ontario for post-production and visual effects work.

“If you look at A Dangerous Method for example, you might not think there is any CGI element to it at all but we did tons of work here in Toronto on getting the look of that period of Western Europe right through CG enhancements,” said Martin Katz, the Toronto-based producer of Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. “As each part of the industry grows, it helps to shoehorn other parts of the industry.”

In comparison to Ontario’s film industry, Vancouver historically has received more foreign productions than Canadian-based work, making it more vulnerable to the rises and falls of the dollar. However, Susan Croome, BC Film Commissioner, said last year was “a solid year” in B.C. with blockbusters such as the latest Mission Impossible and Superman films being filmed in the province.

“Canada is recognized as being a very stable, safe place to do business,” she said. “Clients want to go with a sure bet with high quality and people who deliver on our promises.”

The B.C. Film Commission will release its numbers later this month.

BY THE NUMBERS

$165.9-million The contribution to the economy from domestic feature film production in 2011 due to co-productions such as Resident Evil: Retribution, Foxfire, Cosmopolis and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D

$231.6-million The amount reaped from foreign feature film production. While the number of foreign feature films dropped slightly, budgets were larger including two of the biggest films ever shot in Ontario: Total Recall and Pacific Rim.

$626.7-million The contribution from domestic television series including Rookie Blue, The Firm and The L.A. Complex, shows which were also picked up by U.S. networks.

25% The Ontario Production Services Tax Credit which includes all eligible Ontario production costs.




Pixar’s Brave Concept Art And Sculptures – Images And Video

(bleedingcool.com)              There’s a rolling exhibition of concept art and development pieces on display at Disney’s Hollywood Studios park at Walt Disney World. They’re in the midst of a changeover right now, as while the signage still tells visitors to expect Winnie the Pooh and Cars 2 works inside, they’ve already brought out the pictures and sculptures for Pixar’s summer movie, Brave.

Denise of Mouse Steps stopped by the exhibit, camera in hand, and has reported back with images and video of what she saw.

Here are some of the images, and at the foot of the post, the video which is more comprehensive and actually features some of the best stuff.

But as you’d expect, it’s all good looking stuff.

Take a look:    http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/02/05/pixars-brave-concept-art-sculptures-images-video/




Why 'Chronicle' Is A Step In The Right Direction For Tentpoles-In-The-Making

(blogs.indiewire.com)                     Let's not get it twisted, Josh Trank's "Chronicle," is neither superhero film, tentpole nor masterpiece. However, it is a model that will soon be adapted by studio tentpole minded projects across the board, even if it's not completely successful at the box-office (read our review here). For those that haven't seen the film yet, don't worry, no major spoilers ahead. We'll discuss the film in broad terms, but much of this is evident from the trailers.

A found footage film, "Chronicle," is about a group of teenagers who inexplicably gain telekinetic powers from a source we won't disclose, but all you need to know is that it's a MacGuffin-like plot device, which almost has no bearing on the story (read: it really could been anything, it doesn't matter).

While "Chronicle," like all films, has its flaws, and carries what is arguably a completely unneccessary found-footage conceit (the parameters of which are often broken for the sake of convenience) and doesn't always have the greatest of executions -- there's a few emotional beats missing along the way with the main character's devolution into "monster" -- what it does possess above most genre and superhero fare are ambitions on its mind far beyond the good vs. evil paradigm. Hell, its aims even go beyond the general boundaries of the modern superhero film, which essentially these days is a moody, brooding self-examining would-be hero who is unconvinced he is worthy of such powers and then is put to the test. And because of that, "Chronicle" is infinitely more interesting than its fellow films in the genre, even if it doesn't always hit its marks.

What "Chronicle" does best is side-step the notion of one-dimensional villains and heroes and asks the simple question: what might happen if teenagers were bestowed with super human powers and how would they behave and respond?

The answer is refreshingly modern (and simple). They would fuck around, abuse their power for their own gain (both in trivial and consequential ways) and essentially take their newfound abilities out for joyrides as often as possible (and yes, they try and impress chicks too, duh). Grounded in that relatable reality, "Chronicle" seems to dwarf the simple concerns of pictures like "Thor," "Green Lantern" and "Captain America" (and possibly "The Avengers," which appears as if it will follow the same boring premise -- heroes trying to save the world from destruction).

In a sense, "Chronicle" is an above average genre film or a very typical drama that happens to have super natural elements. The main conflict isn't quite apparent at first because there is (thankfully) no traditional villain. Instead, as witnessed in the trailers, its about these three teenagers self-policing themselves and one of the more socially-pained and tormented of the trio succumbing to hubris and manifesting his powers through emo tantrums and frustrated rage. And yes, we'll concede, this is arguably where the film misses its mark a few times, even though it attempts to set up this character's emotional issues early on. The transition to pure, uncontrollable anger seems slightly off, but that's a minor issue, a smaller part of our larger point.

The bottom line is "Chronicle" gets more elements right then it does wrong. For one -- and you can bet your ass studios will be paying attention to this just as they did with the relatively inexpensive "District 9" -- Trank's film has thrilling action and aerial sequences and the film didn't cost $150 million. In fact it cost around $12 million, so if it is a hit, it could be very lucrative. Even if it's not a commercial smash, there's a reason Trank is rumored to be the first choice to reboot the "Fantastic Four" franchise: he's produced a picture that's been made for less than half the cost of those cornball films, and it's 10 times as interesting and inventive as either of them. And he's done it with his debut film, proving he can make a quality, engaging and entertaining genre film for a song -- and Hollywood loves that.

Of course they could always make the mistake of throwing millions of unnecessary dollars at him and frontloading his next picture with stars (which one could argue is happening with "Elysium"), but that would be the studios' continuing miscalculation of overspending to try and make a massive profit (see films like "The Lone Ranger" that are major risks as they are either huge hits or huge bombs with no middle ground).

Like "Cloverfield," "District 9" or even "Monsters" demonstrated, a new, more thought-provoking and cost-effective playing field is merging in sci-fi/creature-based, super-powered genre films. Forced to be creative because the budget isn't exorbitant (like Spielberg was way back in the day with "Jaws") and by focusing on things like story and character rather than spectacle, "Chronicle" and films of its ilk tend to look less like scrappy newcomers, and more like seasoned veterans, that still contain an original voice that is loud and clear. With less at stake financially, and with that lowered risk a greater opportunity to play creative rather than worrying about four quadrant marketing, films like "Chronicle" will hopefully lead to a bridging of that gap in the studio system, where virtually every movie is subjected to do-or-die expectations.

But there is one caveat in all this: it's up to audiences to make that happen. Studios only respond where they see dollar signs, and if "Chronicle" fails to impress this weekend, this conversation is pretty much moot. So far, this scrappy, microbudget approach has largely been in the proven domain of horror films (though next month's comedy "Project X" will be another test of a lo-fi production with no stars). That said, if "Chronicle" can develop strong word of mouth and show legs over the next few weeks, you can be sure executives will be paying very close attention, and hopefully begin taking more chances on films that don't require a built-in brand and $100 million dollars to get made.



M Night Shyamalan's  "AfterEarth"  Begins Principle Photography

M Night Shyamalan tweeted: “Superbowl is over. First day of #AfterEarth begins tomorrow. 60 days of production begins. Good luck to the wonderful cast and crew. Day 1. Two firsts. This is the first time I am shooting on a digital camera. The camera I am using is a Sony F65, and I am the first filmmaker to use it. I chose this camera because of its ability to convey naturalism as well as its technical latitude. The jungles and forests are very dark.”

Sony Pictures Imageworks Expands Vancouver VFX and Animation Studio

(btlnews.com)                 Sony Pictures Imageworks announced that it will expand its Vancouver, British Columbia capacity by opening an additional 16,000 square feet of space in the Yaletown area for work on the current productions Men In Black 3, The Amazing-Spider-Man, Oz The Great And Powerful and Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania now underway.

Imageworks’ established its Vancouver office in 2010. Its growing presence builds on the Vancouver studio’s experience with The Smurfs production for Sony Pictures Animation and the successful integration of the Canadian team with Imageworks’ Culver City workforce and infrastructure. The new office effectively doubles the floor space. The two Vancouver locations, two blocks apart, are fully connected to Imageworks’ Culver City data center. Imageworks Canada will occupy a total of 32,000 square feet of office space when the new location comes online in March.

“Vancouver today is a vibrant digital production center that offers a strong talent base and significant government incentives vital to our ability to deliver exceptional quality and value to our clients,” said Randy Lake, executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks.

“Imageworks Canada here in Vancouver is a true extension of the Culver City studio,” says Rick Mischel, Imageworks’ senior vice president of satellite production, who is based in Vancouver. “Video conference, large-screen viewing suites that mirror the set-up in Culver City, and data transfer connect the artists here directly to our home base.”

“To have Sony Pictures Imageworks Canada expand their studio space by an additional 16,000 square feet is a great vote of confidence in Vancouver,” said City of Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson. “We’ve worked hard to make our city a global destination for digital media talent, and are thrilled that Imageworks is putting down deeper roots in Vancouver.”



CGI Dinosaurs Roar to Life on the iPad

(macobserver.com)            

      Inside the World of Dinosaurs is a massive and glorious app for the iPad. It’s far from perfect, and at the price of US$14.95 it is pricey, but M5859 Studios has done a terrific job of creating a compelling and engaging overview of 60 dinosaurs and the world in which they lived. I would consider it a showpiece app for the iPad that really takes advantage of the graphic capabilities and the potential of dynamic audio of the iPad — espcially with some good earphones.

The dinosaurs are rendered in beautiful 3D, and many objects can be horizontally rotated 360º. A great number of graphics can be stretched to full screen and horizontally rotated, though you don’t get the expected stretch animation. Instead the screen re-draws to show the enlarged graphic. Tapping on a button brings you back to where you were.

 When you start, you are presented with a clear instruction screen. This is a great idea since there are so many ways to use the app, many of which can get confusing. Most of what you need to know can be found on this screen:

You are shown how to enable narration, which is also printed, and how to rotate and enlarge graphics. Take note of the tabs on the bottom left and right of the screen. Tapping on the right tab will take you through the entire program starting with articles and going through the 60 dinosaurs and 22 pages of dinosaur hunters. The easiest way to get acquainted with the program is to turn on narration and enable auto-page turning. This allows you to listen to Stephen Fry’s wonderful voice reading the narration written by Alicia Barnes.

While doing this you can twirl objects around on a horizontal axis only, or stretch smaller pictures to full screen and rotate many of them. But herein lies a problem. If you enlarge a graphic and don’t return it to its normal size before the narration is done, everything stops. To continue, you need to tap on an X, return the screen to its original size, re-enable narration and auto page turning, and wait until the page you just heard is re-read to continue on in your journey.

Full article with pics:   http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/dinosaurs_roar_to_life_on_the_ipad_with_stephen_fry/




Artists the Key in Building Animation Industry: Canadian Producer
       
(focustaiwan.tw)           Marc Bertrand, who produced the Oscar-nominated short film "Sunday," said Monday that countries could not take shortcuts in building a strong animation industry and had to invest in their artistic talent.

"For me, the way to build the industry is from the ground up, and the ground is the creators, the artists, and the minds of these people," Bertrand, who was in Taipei to speak on the art of storytelling, told CNA in an interview.

He called on the industry to "put the animators at the center of their creations," which is the core philosophy of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), Canada's public film producer and distributor and where Bertrand has been a producer since 1998.

The NFB creates documentaries on social issues, auteur animation, alternative drama and digital content with a Canadian perspective. Since its founding in 1939, it has created over 13,000 productions and won over 5,000 awards, including 12 Oscars.

Its 2011 production "Sunday," about a little boy who tries to escape boredom on a Sunday by placing coins on a train track, has been nominated for an Oscar this year.

When asked about what advice he would give to Taiwan's government and local industries looking to develop the 3D film and animation market, Bertrand stressed that the artists should play a major part in the creation of a work.

"I hope that the industry will not dictate what artists have to do," he said, adding that the best way to inspire creativity is not by instruction but by giving young artists opportunities.

"Creativity is not something we teach, it is doors that we open to young students and workers. It is inspired by telling them you're important and you're imaginative and asking them 'what do you think?'" he said.

Bertrand said companies need to realize that their main resources are creative people and that governments have to be confident that their investment will turn out good.

"That can be frightening. Creative people can be frightening for commercial use. But that's where the gold is," the producer said.

The flourishing animation and gaming industry in Montreal, for example, is a result of talent that emerged not only from the NFB but also from local animation schools, Bertrand said.

Besides funding art schools, the government should also give grants to students after they graduate to help them develop their skills, and fund creative and art communities to encourage artists to create works together, he said.

The NFB has such a program, one that funds independent filmmakers and supports young animators, including giving them technical help, Bertrand noted.

The producer said Taipei National University of the Arts, which invited him to Taiwan, has impressed him as being able to foster creativity.

"I have a sense that people here are very open-minded, artistically-driven and there is a lot of potential," he said.



Universal’s Ill-Fated Hasbro Deal - What Can Hollywood Learn?

(nymag.com)                 Candy Land, Monopoly and Stretch Armstrong were all meant to be Universal movies, but it was not to be.

Last week, news broke that the board game Candy Land had been dumped by Universal Pictures and instead set up at rival Sony Pictures, now as an Adam Sandler vehicle. And with this departure, Universal had unloaded the last of its Hasbro-inspired projects (having washed their hands of Stretch Armstrong, Ouija, and Clue within the last six months); this ends — nearly two years early — the studio's largely unproductive, multi-million-dollar deal with the world's No. 2 toymaker. Signed in 2008, the pact originally anticipated a far-less-costly moviemaking world in which movie stars wouldn't be the attraction, brands would. And yet: Candy Land has now been scooped up by another studio not because of the inherent attraction of the board game, but precisely because it would make a good vehicle for a big star. From this expensive and largely fruitless deal – the jury is still out on whether the $250-plus million adaptation of Battleship with no movie stars will end up like the Costa Concordia or rack up Titanic-size grosses – Hollywood can take a lesson not just about the dangers of relying too much on outside brand names, but also on the dangers of a studio looking for too quick a fix.

When the Hasbro deal with Universal was first announced, it was described in a joint statement as a “six-year partnership” that would produce “at least four feature films” based on “the greatest brands in the world” — games and toys like Monopoly, Battleship, and Stretch Armstrong would be the new tentpoles. The reaction from many in the creative community was scorn, followed by resignation: Had it come to this? A latex rubber doll filled with gelled corn syrup was now what passed for intellectual property?

Thankfully for these despondent types, next to nothing came of the deal. Even some Universal machers knew it was a bad idea at the time. “At least Stretch Armstrong was at one point an action figure," says one former top exec in hindsight, "something you could build a story around. But what else is in the Hasbro catalogue that is iconic and translates to a feature film? Certainly not board games.” The success of DreamWorks and Paramount's Transformers films likely inspired the deal, but there was a mythology behind those robots — or at least a history of kids smashing them into each other, making their own stories. What would the story be behind Ouija? Explains one top talent agent, “Sure, my kids played Battleship — but they didn’t even know what they were playing was 'Battleship.'”

Current Universal execs privately admit the “partnership” that was to have run through 2013 is effectively dead, and besides Battleship, which comes out May 18, not a single Hasbro property mentioned in that 2008 press release remains at Universal in active development. Rather than continue to pay the contractually obligated punitive $5 million fines for each film it dithered on, the studio agreed to pay a single, enormous multi-million-dollar penalty just to get out of business with Hasbro. And as soon as it was finalized, Universal began shedding Hasbro projects like a Siberian Husky sheds fur after emerging from a kiddie pool. Only a day before Candy Land was kicked to the curb, Stretch Armstrong was sent packing, too; it’s now in development at Relativity Media, which is starting over at square one, without Taylor Lautner or super-producer Brian Grazer. Late in August, Universal dropped the Michael Bay–produced and McG-directed Ouija, which even Paramount Pictures — whom Bay has made billions for with Transformers — has passed on acquiring. Three weeks before that, Universal dropped Clue. (Perhaps someone remembered that in 1985 it had already been made as a movie with three possible endings, and that none of them ended well?)

It’d be easy to blame the onerous terms of the deal, and the inherent creative roadblocks. (Battleship is a giant action movie about a battleship officer leading a fight against aliens: Why did they even need a brand name for that? And even if at one point someone coyly utters the catchphrase, "You sunk my Battleship!" isn't that a pop-culture reference that could have been made without paying millions in rights fees?) Yet Universal's biggest underlying error in making the deal at all was trying to reverse a fifteen-year absence from family filmmaking with one single deal. Since the nineties, Universal's attempts at big hits largely came from raiding the B-movie junk closet of horror that they owned. Sometimes it worked (The Mummy); but mostly they were costly misfires (The Wolfman, Van Helsing) that not only failed to spawn new franchises, but severely tarnished the studio's own core brand. “It was an issue for years,” recounts our former Universal-ite. “Ever since [Steven Spielberg’s] Amblin had left the lot, that sort of big, tentpole family entertainment — E.T., Back to the Future — had disappeared from the place. At the time, Paramount had DreamWorks Animation; Disney had Marvel and Pixar — all generators of ‘big idea’ content. The hope was that Hasbro would be that for Universal, which had no existing franchises of its own.”

Yet it’s worth noting that the biggest successes Universal has had of late — the Bourne movies, Despicable Me, Bridesmaids — all came not from toys or games, but from books and original-thinking minds. Just like E.T. and Back to the Future. With Candy Land finally out of its system, here’s hoping Universal will recover from its insulin shock soon and get back to making the meat-and-potatoes entertainment that made it great all those years ago, and only fitfully brilliant of late.



The Biggest VFX Flops Of The Past 12 Years

(screenjunkies.com)               While it’s too early in 2012 to tell what movie is going to suck the hardest (although Big Miracle is certainly on it’s way), we can turn to the past and evaluate the missteps of Hollywood from yesteryear. Compiled below are a list of the biggest flops, spanning from 2000 to 2011. The classification was applied after careful calculations that factored in total box office gross, number of screens, per screen average and other math stuff that you’re just going to have trust. Whatever. Do you really want to be the guy defending The Adventures of Pluto Nash?

Mars Needs Moms (2011)

With a budget of $150 million, 2011′s biggest flop earned $39 million worldwide. Mars Needs Moms tells the story of a boy who takes his mother for granted but then goes to great lengths to save her when she’s abducted by an alien race. Without any real star power attached, the motion-captured feature took a big risk putting all of its fate into a technology that has had a shaky history with moviegoers. As if losing $111 million weren’t bad enough, it must be terrible to admit having any participation in making this film.

Jonah Hex (2010)

Though $10.9 million on a $40 million production budget doesn’t seem like the hugest of losses, a lot was put behind publicity for this comic book adaptation. Planned to be a summer tentpole, the movie crashed in burned in America causing the studio to scrap a large rollout overseas. Word is that the studio lost as much as they typically earn from a Harry Potter film on Hex. But, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I find the film delightful and hilarious. Just not for the reasons filmmakers would have liked me to.

Land of the Lost (2009)

It’s sad to see this one on the list. Budgeted at $100 million, the adaptation of the classic show earned only $35 million at the box office. The reason that it’s a shame for Land of the Lost to wind up on a flop list is because it really was an entertaining movie. Marketed COMPLETELY wrong as a goofy romp for kids that parents would enjoy too, it’s actually anything but that. In fact, it brought back the snarky vibe of an 80′s comedy that has been so missed in film. Give this one a shot. Unless you’re the type to have Will Ferrell fatigue. Then there’s no talking any reason into you.

Speed Racer (2008)

Another fun movie that didn’t deserve to be shunned by audiences. The Wachowskis’ Matrix follow-up was totally awesome. Meaning, watching it makes you full of awe. The visuals are insane and, yes, the story is a little cartoonish but for good, obvious reason. Plus there’s ninjas and ninja-fighting. That’s an element that was sorely missing from the source material. That and sequences so fast-paced they could blind a chicken.

The Invasion (2007)

Still coasting off the success of The Others, flop queen Nicole Kidman couldn’t score another hit with The Invasion. Budgeted at $80 million with a take of half that, audiences cared to see this Invasion of the Body Snatchers retread about as much as they wanted to see The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter, The Golden Compass, Bewitched, Australia, and Nine.
Poseidon (2006)

Talk about a disaster. Designed to be an early summer blockbuster, the movie completely tanked in its first weekend. It made up a good amount of its rumored $180 million overseas where people will watch anything but not enough to turn a profit. Though it does give you the pleasure of seeing Fergie and Kevin Dillon killed in extremely painful ways, the wish fulfillment is not worth the price of admission.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

Total budget: $120 million. Worldwide gross: $7 million. Let’s just let the math do all the explaining here.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

There’s only one thing that audiences find more annoying than Bennifer. Scientology. John Travolta’s love letter to the religion was made for $100 million and earned less than $30 million at the worldwide box office. Perhaps because the film was just unconscionably bad with Travolta and Forest Whitaker looking like Rob Zombie and the bassist from a Klingon reggae roots band while sneering out their lines like Ben Vereen on Zoobilee Zoo. If you’re going to watch this, you either are trying to test yourself abilities of endurance or you really love some Travolta. In which case, stick with Look Who’s Talking Now. That’s the one with the dogs.



Japan's Studio Ghibli Looks to Break Through

(online.wsj.com)               Animated movies from Japan's Studio Ghibli such as "Spirited Away" and "Ponyo" have been blockbusters in foreign markets, but have brought in just middling receipts in the U.S.—despite critical acclaim and strong marketing support from Walt Disney Co. and Pixar's John Lasseter.

'The Secret World of Arrietty' is based on the popular book 'The Borrowers,' giving U.S. distributors more options for marketing the new movie.

Disney hopes to boost Studio Ghibli's box-office punch with the English-language release of "The Secret World of Arrietty," which is based on Mary Norton's much-loved children's book "The Borrowers." The film, which tells the story of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of a house, has already grossed more than $126 million internationally, and will be released in the U.S. on Feb. 17.

Disney teams with Studio Ghibli on its theatrical releases in North America, and has home-video rights to Studio Ghibli films.

Unlike most previous Studio Ghibli films, "Arrietty" isn't directed by Hayao Miyazaki—a legendary filmmaker in his native Japan and the creator of classics such as "Castle in the Sky," and "My Neighbor Totoro." Mr. Miyazaki serves as a co-writer of the original Japanese screenplay of "Arrietty," which was directed by first-time Studio Ghibli director Hiromasa Yonebayashi.

Mr. Lasseter, chief creative officer, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studio, hopes the new film will find a wider audience. Mr. Lasseter served as executive producer on a number of the North American versions of Studio Ghibli films, including "Ponyo," and "Spirited Away," which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2002.

Part of the challenge in building buzz is that Disney doesn't have merchandising rights for Studio Ghibli films. There will be no "Arrietty" dolls or replicas of the dollhouse in the film, for example. But Disney will open "Arrietty" on at least 1200 screens, in what will be its largest Ghibli release in the U.S. As comparison, "Ponyo" opened on about 900 screens, and "Spirited Away" opened on 750 screens.

"I just want to do everything I can to help make sure people can go see them because they're just magnificent films that are very different than any other animated films these days," Mr. Lasseter said in an interview.

When asked why Studio Ghibli films haven't done as well in the U.S. compared with Pixar or Disney animated features, he said, "I don't know and I would like to correct that. I ask that same question all the time....They're beautiful on the big screen."

The 2009 film "Ponyo" grossed $15.1 million in the U.S. compared with $184 million internationally, according to Hollywood.com. In 2002, "Spirited Away" grossed $10 million in the U.S. compared with $264.9 million internationally.

Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, who co-executive produced the North American version of "Ponyo," are returning as co-executive producers of "Arrietty." Mr. Marshall said the film's marketing will be broadened to include readers of "The Borrowers" book, especially young girls, parents and teachers.

"There are obviously Miyazaki fans and Ghibli fans already, but we really think that 'Arrietty' is a universal film," Mr. Marshall said. "People know the book, 'The Borrowers,' and so we're hoping that particularly with our well-known cast, that people will discover the movie."

Mr. Lasseter thinks "Arrietty" will win over moviegoers with its tale of a tiny young girl who goes on her first "borrowing" with her father to forage for food and necessities, and the details of how they make their way—climbing a stairwell made of nails, or scaling a table leg with adhesives. "It's an incredible adventure of just going up into this big house and how they get around, and how they use discarded objects that are really small and insignificant in our world but to them are quite big and meaningful," he said.

The cast includes Bridgit Mendler, the star of Disney's "Good Luck Charlie," Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, and Carol Burnett.

Mr. Marshall said prior Studio Ghibli releases in the U.S. weren't large enough to attract audiences beyond already existing Ghibli fans.

"It all depends on how many theaters you're in, it depends on how much is spent on the marketing," Mr. Marshall said. "I think that it's just a slow building audience now."





George Lucas Talks About Adding a Digital Yoda to 'The Phantom Menace'

(insidemovies.ew.com)                      Moviegoers who head to theaters to see The Phantom Menace when it reopens on Feb. 10 will notice something new besides the fancy 3-D technology. Puppet Yoda is gone, and has been replaced by an all-new digital Yoda, like the one seen in episodes 2 and 3. (Digital Phantom Menace Yoda also appears in the recent Star Wars Blu-ray box set released last September.) While George Lucas has taken some heat for going back and making numerous changes to his original trilogy, he has used a much lighter hand when it comes to his second set of Star Wars films, and in the exclusive clip below, he explains that is because the technology was already in place during filming to fully carry out his vision. Except, it seems, in the case of Yoda. “We were trying desperately to get a digital Yoda into the first film, Phantom Menace,” says Lucas. “We just couldn’t make it work. We came close. We got Jar Jar, and Sebulba, and Watto, and a lot of other characters, but we couldn’t get Yoda because he was much harder to do. And so when we finally did get that accomplished, before the second film, we went back and put the digital Yoda back in the first film as it was intended to be.”

VIDEO - Take a look:   http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/02/03/george-lucas-star-wars-digital-yoda-phantom-menace/




Five Myths of Motion Capture

(animationideas.com)                 By now you would have seen the Academy Award nominations for best animated feature for 2011.

Congratulations to all the Oscar nominees: Une vie de chat (A Cat in Paris), Chico and Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots and Rango.

It’s impossible to say whether a film like The Adventures of Tintin was excluded from the list because it included motion capture as a technique.

But in a recent interview with Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor for Weta Digital, he indicated that he had his own theory on why Tintin was snubbed.

    I think that was a really big oversight… Not to recognise those achievements. The visual effects branch didn’t recognise it, because they thought it was animation, and the animation branch didn’t recognise it because it was using performance capture and visual effects techniques. – Joe Letteri

Whether you agree with the decision or not, it’s probably as good a time as any to dispell some myths about films that use motion capture.

Full disclosure: I worked on Happy Feet 2. In this article, my views are my own, naturally, and do not represent the production team or the studio.

Myth 1: Motion capture artists aren’t animators

Note: that is distinct from saying that motion capture is animation. Obviously the techniques are quite different.

But as far as the people hired to edit motion captured from a live performance, in all cases I’ve seen: studios hire animators.

The animators are hired based on their keyframe animation skills and on their showreels.

Why?

Because studios know that motion editing requires the same set of skills that make good keyframe animators: timing, spacing, strong poses, weight, exaggeration, appeal etc.

Myth 2: Movies that use motion capture look terrible

To be honest, there are some horrible looking films out there that use motion capture. You could probably think of three right now off the top of your head.

You want me to name them?

Ha! Nice try.

But you know what – some keyframe animated films don’t look that hot either, quite frankly.

I’m sure for every beautiful film that uses motion capture, like Avatar or Tintin, you could provide a counter-example, but the technique of motion capture by itself is not to blame for crummy films.

Myth 3: Using motion capture makes it a “motion capture movie”

Speaking from experience, there is no way you could possibly take just take the data from the motion capture floor, clean it up a bit and send it off to be rendered.

For starters, there are often many characters and objects that are not suitable for capture by a person in a suit: four-legged animals, birds, vehicles, sets and props.

Seriously. No-one is going to squeeze into a motion capture suit and flap around like a bird, when you could just as easily keyframe animate it.

No-one stuck reflective balls on a trained dog in order to capture the motion for Snowy in Tintin.

Calling a film a “motion capture movie” is about as accurate as calling something a “special effects movie”.

Myth 4: Motion capture movies have no animation in them

On Happy Feet 2 I had a chance to work with George Miller as my director and Rob Coleman as my animation director. When these directors were in a darkened room looking to improve the shot, they honestly didn’t care whether a scene was captured from a dance, a drama performance or animated by hand.

They just wanted the result they were after.

A lot of the time spent as motion editors was perfecting the already brilliant performances, including adding extra motion, adding spins and new gestures, selling the weight of the characters and adding overlap to the body and limbs.

All of these involved adding motion and frames where there were none previously.

In other words, even the motion editors were animating by hand in many cases. Frame by frame.

Myth 5: Films that use motion capture are ineligible for the Academy Award for Animated Feature

If you want your animated feature film to be eligible for Oscar nominations, the rules read as follows:

    An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of more than 40 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time. – Academy Awards Rules for Best Animated Feature Film (my emphasis added)

I agree.

Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique.

The argument for films like Tintin and Happy Feet 2 is that while they use motion capture as one of their techniques, there is plenty of animation in the film to allow it to qualify.

Happy Feet 2 ran at about 1100 shots, and only around 750 out of those shots contained motion capture. And of those 750 shots, almost all of them would have had some elements animated frame-by-frame: keyframed characters, lip synch, facial expression, moving sets and props.

Honestly, it would be more difficult to find a shot in the film that didn’t contain any keyframed animation.

Whether we like it or not, motion capture is here to stay.

When used intelligently, there’s no reason it shouldn’t compliment frame-by-frame animation as another technique for producing television, videogames and films.




ReelzChannel To Broadcast 10th Annual Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards

(reelz.com)               You can watch the 10th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards here on ReelzChannel... and nowhere else. The VES Awards recognize outstanding artistry in more than 20 categories of movies, animation, television, commercials, and video games. Stand-up comedian and actor Patton Oswalt returns to host the show, which will air on Sunday, February 19th.

Some highlights of the night include Stan Lee (comic-book writer/producer) receiving the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Douglas Trumbull (visual effects pioneer/director) being given the 2012 Georges Méliès Award. Antonio Banderas (the voice of Puss in Puss in Boots) and Lucy Liu (the voice of Viper in Kung Fu Panda 2) are among the celebrity presenters.

Matthew Singerman, SVP Programming, had this to say:

    ReelzChannel is proud to be the exclusive broadcast home for the Visual Effects Awards for the third straight year. We love the VES Awards because they honor one of the biggest reasons we all love movies — incredible visual effects, and as TV About Movies® this is great for our viewers since it gives them an opportunity to see which blockbusters receive awards for their stunning visual effects.

We'll also be there on the VES Awards red carpet, introducing you to the nominees, celebrity presenters, and famous faces in attendance. Then Hollywood Dailies co-host Steve Patterson will be behind-the-scenes, talking with the winners backstage. ReelzChannel is on DirecTV channel 238, Dish Network channel 299, and available on your cable or satellite system.

Encore Presentations for the 10th Annual VES Awards

Monday, February 20
3am ET/ 12am PT

Tuesday, February 21
9am ET/ 6am PT

Wednesday, February 22
2pm ET/ 11am PT

Thursday, February 23
7pm ET/ 4pm PT

Friday, February 24
9am ET/ 6am PT

Saturday, February 25
11am ET/ 8am PT




Separable Subsurface Scattering:  The Future Of Humans

(kotaku.com)                     The Video Game Humans of the Future Should Look This AwesomeThe Video Game Humans of the Future Should Look This Awesome A new console generation is almost upon us, not to mention a new era in PC gaming fidelity. We know better graphics are coming, but just what do those better graphics actually look like?

They'll probably look a lot like this.

This technology is called Separable Subsurface Scattering. It's the product of "hours and hours of research, desperation, excitement, happiness, pride, sadness and extreme dedication" on the part of researchers Jorge Jimenez and Diego Gutierrez, and it's designed specifically to be used for human skin in video games.

Not trailers, not movies, not cartoons, but video games. SSS has been written entirely in DirectX 10, and everything you see is being rendered in real-time. Don't believe them, you can download the original demo here and try it yourself.

If you watch the clip and find yourself a little underwhelmed, that might be because it was designed to run fullscreen at 1080p. So try it out as nature intended for the full effect.

(kotaku.com)                   http://kotaku.com/5882857/the-video-games-of-the-future-could-look-this-awesome



   
Tech Legend Lowry Leaves his Mark

(jam.canoe.ca)                Hollywood tech legend John Lowry was to receive a special Technical Academy Award this week to recognize his work in restoring movies for DVD. (Supplied)

A go-to guy for both NASA and James Cameron -- and an image restorer who had saved scores of classic movies from extinction -- John Lowry still sounded a little sheepish over never finishing high school.

"But I did hire a lot of PhDs," the Canadian-born Hollywood tech legend -- and inventor of the "Lowry Process" -- quipped in a phone interview 11 days before his death Jan. 21 in L.A. at age 79.

Lowry, who was born in Peterborough, Ont., and raised in Toronto's East End, was to receive a special Technical Academy Award this week to recognize his work in restoring movies for DVD.

(Lowry was originally left out from an Academy press release identifying the Canadians being honoured. After seeing that information in the Sun, he phoned to proudly affirm his Canadian-ness).

But it was his sale of a process to "clean up" live Apollo mission video that really launched his legendary career.

Lowry, who started as a CBC stage hand in 1952, absorbed every stage of production and became head of CBC's first effects department (which debuted with a fog machine of his own design).
   

By the end of the '60s, Lowry took his expertise to the private sector, and began experimenting with overlapping image frames to filter out visual "noise," what would become known as the Lowry Process.

"I was doing the installation of the equipment for a company, and I needed some really bad material to demonstrate. And I watched the Apollo 15 moon-landing and the video was really noisy, really, really bad."

Lowry called the Houston Space Centre to ask for footage and, after a runaround, was finally connected to then-Col. James McDivitt, commander of Apollo 9. Lowry explained what he wanted, and a suspicious-but-intrigued McDivitt agreed, demanding to see the finished result himself.

Some weeks later in Houston, Lowry says, he began showing McDivitt the clean-up. "He was a gruff son of a bitch, and half-way through he's on the phone. And I was thinking, that was kind of rude."

Minutes later, Lowry was replaying the video for an audience of NASA officials. After informing him he could process the video live, McDivitt, "turned sweet as pie, and asked, 'How much?' "

The Apollo 16 and 17 missions ended up with crisp live video. (Recently Lowry was re-called into action by NASA, restoring an odd collection of Apollo 11 video -- including shots taken off TV screens -- to replace original footage that had accidentally been erased).

The Lowry Process really flew with the digital revolution. "The more high-quality the camera, the more things go wrong. An excellent example of that was (James Cameron's) Aliens Of The Deep. It was an underwater documentary Jim shot in IMAX about a mile and a half down the Atlantic.

"They came to me because they had a moray pattern on the picture that was very serious. Quite unusable. The pressure down there was causing serious interference.

"I took the material, sat down at a work station, and 20 minutes later I had the solution. That pleased Jim Cameron to no end, because it saved his movie."

In 1998, he started Lowry Digital Systems, to clean up original masters (some of them nearly unsavable) for the then-fledgling DVD market.

"Our first movie was North by Northwest, which delighted me, because Hitchcock was an idol of mine."

In a demonstration similar to his NASA experience, Lowry approached Warner Brothers for a private screening. "When I got home that night, there were three purchase orders, one for North by Northwest, one for the Bette Davis movie Now Voyager, and one for a little movie called Gone with the Wind.

"We went from zero visibility to success with that order."

His company, recently purchased by Reliance Mediaworks, went on to clean up more than 500 movies for DVD. Among them: the James Bond series, the Indiana Jones movies and various Disney classics.

"It's crazy stuff when I look back at it," Lowry said. "It's been 60 years in this business since I started as a stage hand. And I'm still having a ball."

Canadians honoured

Eight Canadians -- including one posthumously -- will receive Academy Awards honours for scientific and technical achievements Saturday night in Beverly Hills.

Unlike the Oscar trophies being given out Feb. 26 during the lavish TV ceremony for acting, directing and the like for 2011 movies alone, these sci-tech awards honour achievements that "demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures."

Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt, of Toronto's Side Effects Software, will receive the lone 2011 Technical Achievement Award -- for their work with Mantra software that allows better rendering of "volumetric effects" such as smoke and clouds with CG objects.

Raigo Alas and Greg Marsden of Burlington, Ont., and Michael Lewis and Michael Vellekoop of Hamilton, Ont., won one of six Scientific and Engineering Awards -- for their concept, design and implementation of the Pictorvision Eclipse, an electronically stabilized aerial camera platform. The Academy says this system "allows cinematographers to capture aerial footage at faster flying speeds with aggressive platform maneuvering."

The late John Lowry, who was born in Peterborough, Ont., and raised in Toronto, headed a five-man team honoured for his "Lowry Process," used to both clean up and enhance film and digital images alike. Examples include everything from old Apollo space-program footage, to upgrading the James Bond archive for Blu-ray, to Avatar. The chief scientist for Lowry Digital, Ian Caven of Burnaby, B.C., is among the team's honourees.




VFX Supe Scott Farrar on Transformers: Dark of the Moon

(studiodaily)        Scott Farrar received his first Oscar nomination for best achievement in visual effects for Cocoon, and went on to win the Oscar in 1996 for his work on that film. At that time, he was a visual effects cameraman at Industrial Light & Magic. Since then, as a visual effects supervisor at ILM, he has stacked up five more Oscar nominations, the sixth for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, an award he shares with Scott Benza of ILM, Matthew E. Butler of Digital Domain, and special effects supervisor John Frazier

F&V: What trends do you see for visual effects artists?

More freedom of expression. I think people are just starting to spread their wings. We’re becoming more nimble and agile in the things we’re trying. Sometimes, you’re stuck with something – if you have a superhero with blue lightning, there aren’t many places you can take that. Fantasy is open to the suggestion and whims of designers. That’s why I like the photoreal stuff where you really fool the audience, where the audience isn’t sure what they’re looking at. That’s fun. I like magic. I like illusion. I like improving and polishing the illusion. That’s the attraction of Transformers for me. There is all kinds of stuff we can do. That’s what makes it great.

F&V: So, you’d do another one?

Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun. It’s fun because of how much creativity we get to utilize.

F&V: This is your sixth visual effects nomination. Do you remember the first?

It was for Cocoon, and we won. Oh, my gosh, it was like a shot out of nowhere. Talk about a bonus on top of everything else. I was just really happy to be in the business doing this crazy job. It was such a thrill. There’s nothing like it. And, it’s wonderful at this stage. It’s very rewarding to be recognized by your own group. It means an awful lot. I look at the array of work and they’re all great looking pieces and that’s cool.

Full Article:           http://www.studiodaily.com/main/news/headlines/VFX-Supervisor-Scott-Farrar-on-Transformers-Dark-of-the-Moon_13659.html



A Visit to Lucasfilm & ILM for Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace 3D

(comingsoon.net)               Twentieth Century Fox recently held a press junket for the re-release of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace 3D Skywalker Ranch in Marin County and to ILM. Not only did they invite press, but they also asked journalists to bring their kids. On this press junket, the kids, from ages 6-18, would serve as the main reporters, doing all the interviews with the various Lucasfilm and "Episode I" talent.

Here is a chronicle of our two day visit to Lucasfilm…

Let me preface this article with the fact that I am a huge "Star Wars" fan. I was 14 in 1977 when the original Star Wars came out - I saw the film opening weekend at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I walked out of that screening in 1977 like many other people, I was blown away. I went home that afternoon and started building my own Darth Vader mask out of paper mache (I still have it). Like many modern day filmmakers who cite "Star Wars" as the creative flashpoint that made them get into what they do today, I was no different! So the idea of being flown up to the land of LUCAS was hard to pass up. The bonus would be that I would spend it with my son, Benjamin!

Day One: We boarded a press shuttle bus from our hotel for the drive up to Marin County, about 40 minutes outside of San Francisco. After almost running over two wild turkeys on Lucas Valley Rd (no relation – the road is named after a turn-of-the-century landowner) we entered the gates at Skywalker Ranch. The ranch has been operating since 1987. It was built by a filmmaker for filmmakers, and is one of the largest, most versatile full-service post-production facilities in the world.

Inside we were greeted by R2D2 and C-3P0, given our special VIP press badges and treated to a nice breakfast featuring various plays on "Star Wars" characters - YODA's Yogurt and NUTE Fruit GUNRAY fresh berries. Inside the rustic lobby and entertainment room, I was in awe of where I was, I was a total geek and found myself reverting back to my 14-year-old self! But we had a job to do, after we took a few photos of the screen-used costumes of Darth Maul, Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala in the lobby. We were given a great tour of the facilities including The Akira Kurosawa Stage, the 300-seat Stag Theater, George Lucas' private screening room, the Scoring Stage decked out with young Anakin's podracer. After the tour, the press were broken up into groups as Benjamin would be reporting for ComingSoon.net. We had prepared a few questions for the talent, and before we knew it he was on the Front Porch overlooking the vineyards and Ewok Lake doing his very first reporter's stand-up, he did great for someone who had never done anything like this before. He did his intro cold and in three takes he was now a real reporter! As a father, I couldn’t be more proud.

After getting his feet wet with his stand-up intro, Ben was off to interview one on one with the various Lucasfilm talent. First up from "Episode I" was Concept Model Artist John Goodman on the scoring stage, then with Matthew Wood, Skywalker’s Sound Editor and voice of General Grievous. Ben kept his cool especially since Grievous is his favorite "Star Wars" character. Next he interviewed CG Supervisor Joel Aron. Aron is responsible for the designs on the animated TV series "The Clone Wars." He was on hand to discuss the addition of Darth Maul to the series; again Ben was awesome, firing off questions like a pro. Ben ended his interview gig with Lightsaber Stunt Coordinator, Shawn 'ObiShawn' Crosby. Dueling it saber to saber with the Jedi Master/cosplayer and dishing out interview questions. You can check out the intro and interviews using the player below!

After all the interviews were completed, our official job now done, we were treated to a Lucasfilm lunch with Bantha Beef sandwiches and Palpatine Pasta Salad. We had free reign to walk around the facilities, our only warning was NO PHOTOS allowed of the priceless vintage film posters that hung throughout the ranch. George Lucas owns one of the largest collections of 'vintage’ movie posters in the world. Most of the huge posters are from the foreign markets with their bold colors and unique designs. They were all beautiful and it was so cool to wander the halls and see posters for everything from Giant to The Crimson Pirate to Singin' in the Rain and countless others.

Ben also got to play the new (in development) 3D Kinect Star Wars podracer game. He was really blown away by the Rancor Rampage level - and scored big smashing the innocent people of Naboo!

Before our day at Skywalker Ranch was over, we headed to the company store. Passing through the vineyard overlooking Ewok Lake we could see the Main House. Lucas no longer lives there. We loaded up on cool Lucasfilm LTD, Skywalker Ranch t-shirts and hats - the only place you can get them!

It was strange how peaceful the place was, surrounded by a 4000 acre working ranch with cows littering the hillsides. Ben was fascinated with finding frogs hiding in the reeds of Ewok Lake, he's 13 and so into reptiles and amphibians!

Day Two: We once again boarded our press shuttle for our trek to ILM (Industrial Light & Magic). Founded in 1975 by George Lucas, ILM is the leading effects facility in the world. ILM relocated from the ranch to the Presidio campus in 2005 called the Letterman Digital Arts Center.

Once off the shuttle we were greeted by Stormtroopers from the legendary 501st, and the famous YODA fountain statue. We were escorted across the campus to the massive dining hall with a spacious view overlooking the famed Palace of Fine arts. We feasted on a Boba Fett breakfast with our gracious host R2D2. He entertained all the guests posing for photos and chirping happily as he patrolled the bacon platter at the buffet.

Once done with our breakfast, we were again broken up into groups for our grand tour of the ILM facilities and offices, and again we were warned NO PHOTOS allowed! The hallways adorned again with more of Lucas' vintage movie poster collection. Walking through the hallways, we saw many of the awards and special gifts presented to Lucas and the crews at ILM. We saw an original E.T., the busts of Davy Jones, Imhotep and Draco from Dragonheart. Every hallway was littered with all manner of geek lore - the mini-subs from Innerspace, the Scoleri Brothers from Ghostbusters 2, Elliot’s bike from E.T., everywhere we turned it was another gush of HOLY COW LOOK AT THAT!

In the main lobby desk we saw the original YODA puppet from The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo in carbonite flanked by a Jar-Jar in carbonite. Apparently George Lucas saw this at a "Star Wars" convention and had to have it - who says the man doesn't have a sense of humor? A wall lined with original matte paintings was particularly stunning. It was sad just knowing that these massive paintings on glass have now been replaced by digital rendering, but knowing they were presented not only as beautiful works of art but also a window into special effects history now considered old-technology.

Once our tour was completed we were all ushered into the main lobby of ILM, where we saw Boba Fett and one of the original Darth Vader costumes. Then it was time for the 3D screening...

With our special digital 3D glasses in hand, we took a seat in the Premier Theater. Our host and master of ceremonies ObiShawn would remind us that there was no better venue to see this film than in this theater in the very location that the film was made! A slight chill ran up our spines, the kids in the theater all cheered and raised their lightsabers as the lights dimmed and the curtain raised to transport us to "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Say what you will about "Star Wars: Episode I," it is what it is, a film as Lucas says was made for children. Certainly the film has its share of flaws which have been documented and blogged about to infinitum since the film's 1999 release. I saw it opening day like many other fans in May of '99, and while I haven’t seen it on the big screen since, it was great to share it for the first time with my son (who was one at the time) in digital 3D on the big screen. I leave the reviews to others, but I was blown away by the 3D. I never thought it interfered with the film, I didn't have a headache 20 minutes into it and there were no HEY THIS IS 3D IN YOUR FACE moments. The film is presented as it was in 1999, with the exception of the new digital Yoda, added last year for the Blu-ray release. I found myself enjoying the film with only a mild disappointment of what it could have been, but overall we really enjoined the film in all its 3D glory!

As we heading to the airport, I couldn’t help but think back on the weekend. I had been to the Holy Land of all "Star Wars" fans, LUCASFILM! It will be a time that I know Benjamin and I will not soon forget.

Special thanks to Samara Malkis and the fine staff at Twentieth Century Fox, and to the gang at Lucasfilm and Skywalker Ranch for their spectacular hospitality.




'Chronicle' Effects Supe Builds "The Wheel of Death"

(mtv.com)                This weekend, the teenage superheroes of "Chronicle" edged out Harry Potter himself at the box office with their amazing abilities. Made on a relatively tight budget of $12 million, the found-footage superhero movie made almost twice its budget back in domestic ticket sales alone.

Part of the reason for the success, no doubt, was due to the work of visual-effects supervisor Simon Hansen and his team in South Africa. They created all the usual sights of a superhero flick but with a fraction of the budget.

MTV News spoke with Hansen to find out how he did so much with so little. (There are minor spoilers ahead.)

MTV: Where does work begin when trying to tackle something like "Chronicle" on such a low budget?

Simon Hansen: That was obviously the challenge of the film and one of the reasons that I was keen to get involved with the project from the beginning. I get to play with commercially viable films that are also cost-effective to make. Having read the script, it was a small film. It's supposed to be low-budget, relatively. I started making notes when we read the script, noting down all the effects. By the time I got to the third act, I put my pen down because it got so hectic that making notes at that point was a bit of a waste of time. There was clearly a hell of a lot more work that needed to be done. From that point of view, it was a really big film for a low budget, and that was what excited me and what excited everyone on the project. This was the little film that we were going to push further than smaller films normally go.

MTV: What's your approach for doing what the big-budget movies do but with a fraction of the money?

Hansen: My background was actually pursuing that as a goal from a very early age in the industry, trying to make things that looked great but didn't cost a lot. It wasn't a new idea from that point of view. It wasn't daunting or hindering; it was actually the most exhilarating part of the process. The superhero genre is a good comparison, which I think has too much money. Having these large budgets is removing the innovation from the project. Capping the budget is a way to force that ingenuity and innovation into the project, which I think does come across. I think "Chronicle" has that feel of being a higher-budget film than it is, but it always has a kind of edginess to it at the same time.

MTV: Was there a question of "Can we do everything that's in the script?"

Hansen: Yes, the first question is, "Read the script and tell us how much of it we can do and what you think we can't do." My pitch that [producer] Adam [Schroeder] and [director] Josh [Trank] bought on "Chronicle" was that the first thing I was going to try to do was reduce the number of visual-effects shots in the film, because even though my background is visual effects, I like to think of myself as a filmmaker first. I'm not in love with CGI for its own sake. I'd rather do things in camera, and I think most directors would. I think audiences really appreciate the grittiness and edginess of stuff that's real. If you're forced to do CGI, try to do it in a way that's really minimalist, where most of what you're doing is real.

MTV: What was the most challenging shot on the film?

Hansen: The most important and the one I considered the biggest challenge was any kind of flying. What ended up happening was we ended up designing brand-new rigs to actually make people fly that worked out really well. It's probably my favorite part of the process. It's weird in effects how some shots start out one way and they don't seem that difficult, and they end up being really difficult. The most difficult sequence was where Andrew beats up the thugs and tosses them around the street because we had to shoot that all in one day and all those different people were on wires and rigs. We had to do it in different parts and put it all together. You get tripped up by the sun moving during the day when you have to shoot it all in one day. The light's changing all the time, and you're shooting different elements together. For the level of complexity of that shot and the time we had to do it, that was definitely the most difficult.

MTV: How did you come up with the solution for making the characters fly?

Hansen: I'd been very frustrated, even with big-budget films and how they've done flying. Some of the bad examples, not to knock anyone, "Armageddon" 's weightless sequence, for example, was a movie that had a lot of money and didn't get it right. Lots of films don't get it right. I knew it wasn't necessarily about the budget. It was about the technique to get flying to work. I spent a lot of time analyzing footage of sky diving and looking how bodies move in free motion. As a result, I ended up designing a big hamster-wheel rig that the subject would be strapped to in the center and he could be spun within this rig, which could turn itself. You'd get two axes out of it. The actors called it the Wheel of Death because you actually get strapped into this thing and a motor spins you around while the wheel is actually turning. You can do full-on McTwist-type movements. What I tried to get away from was a situation where you pick someone up on wires and move them from one side of a soundstage to another in front of a green screen.

MTV: Was there anything you simply couldn't accomplish with the budget?

Hansen: I think we pretty much did just about everything that we wanted to in the script. There were some shots that didn't work out the way that we wanted them to, where we had to reshoot them or come up with another way to do them. The closest we came to cutting things — we didn't in the end — but the closest we came was not the kind of effect that you'd even be aware of. When Andrew films himself in the mirror and we're using a considerably larger camera than the one he's using, we needed to shoot with one camera and replace it and Andrew in the mirror with the smaller camera. Those turned out to be really difficult shots to plan and get right. No one will really pay them any attention. It's amazing how that always happens.



Walt Disney Would Have Loved The Guys At Pixar

(huffingtonpost.com)                 Diane Disney Miller, Walt's daughter, is the founder and head of the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. To celebrate the DVD re-release of "The Lady and the Tramp" and mark the 57th anniversary of the opening of Disneyland, she spoke to the Huffington Post about her father, the secret apartment and life with the world's most famous surname.

What was his favorite ride?

They were all favorites to him, and he was always tweaking them, but he really was into Tomorrowland. The Monsanto House of the Future he thought was very interesting, he took my husband and I there and said you might want to get some ideas here for a home, and I'd never want to live in a house like that, but again, he got into all the animatronics when they did the New York World's Fair in 1963, they did the Tiki Bird room around that time in Disneyland.

And he was delighted with the new audio animatronics; that, for a while was definitely his favorite. And then they did another audio animatronics, and I don't think they have it any more, the Country Bear Jamboree, he was very excited about that, and then he was very excited about the haunted house, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and none of those things were completed until after his death. But he was always looking to the thing he was doing to be the furthest thing.

Speaking of progress, some of the best animated movies today are computer animated. What do you think he would think of that?

Oh, he'd be delighted. Anything that he could use in any way, he would reach out and grab it. He'd love all these guys at Pixar, he'd love it.

Full article:           http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/walt-disneys-secret-disneyland-apartment-diane-disney-miller_n_1259421.html

RANGO Receives Best Animated Feature Award At 39th Annual Annie Awards

(wearemoviegeeks.com)        

          Paramount Pictures ‘Rango‘ took top honors as the Best Animated Feature at the 39th Annual Annie Awards, Saturday, February 4, at UCLA’s Royce Hall. With the expanded list of categories from 25 to 28, and the addition of two new categories – Editing and Best Animated Special Production - this year’s show honored more nominees than in the past.  Also new to the ceremony was the live streaming of the event at www.annieawards.org/watch-it-live. The complete list of winners can be viewed at www.annieawards.org. The newly created ‘Member’s Favorite’ award voted on by the entire ASIFA-Hollywood community also went to ‘Rango.’



FX Heavy 'Chronicle' Earns a Super Powerful $22 Million on Super Bowl weekend

(insidemovies.ew.com)              Chronicle sacked The Woman in Black at the box office on Super Bowl weekend, but both modestly-budgeted films exceeded industry expectations and brought in strong grosses for their respective studios.

Fox’s $15 million found footage film Chronicle, a thriller directed by newcomer Josh Trank about a trio of teenage boys who acquire super powers, soared into first place with $22 million in its first three days. That gave the film a potent $7,568 per theater average — the best in the Top 20. Awareness for Chronicle appeared disconcertingly low a few weeks ago, but thanks to an aggressive TV marketing push, a viral video advertisement (“Flying People in New York City”), and, perhaps most notably, the film’s zeitgeist-y found footage appeal, the adventure managed to bring young people to the theater in droves.

The surprise hit received an average “B” CinemaScore grade, with generations divided on the found footage factor: Audiences under 18 gave the movie a “B+”, while audiences above 50 issued it a “D+”. Thankfully for Fox, older moviegoers don’t make up Chronicle‘s target demographic. Despite the average grade, with  reviews so much stronger than most films aimed at teens, and an encouraging 18 percent bump on Saturday (which suggests positive word-of-mouth), Chronicle might not plummet at the box office the way “F” graded The Devil Inside did a few weeks ago. There’s no telling how high Chronicle will end up flying at the box office just yet, but with its impressive debut frame, the film is already a big hit.



'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' In 3D Screens This Thursday

(clickthecity.com)                A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Twenty-two years ago, these words first flashed across movie theater screens around the world, and a modern legend was born. Hundreds of millions of people would be introduced to a saga that would touch their lives in ways then unimaginable. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the Special Editions of all three films, became defining events for two generations. The fast-paced action adventures, set in a new and exciting universe, featured grand design and boundless fun. The films inspired countless of viewers with themes that are universal and timeless: the conflict between good and evil and between technology and humanity, the celebration of heroism, and the limitless potential of the individual.

Now, with Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace converted into 3D, Lucas takes us back to the beginning, in which Darth Vader is a hopeful nine-year-old boy named Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi is a determined young Jedi knight. This first chapter, which is rich in art, design, costumes, architecture and technology, follows Anakin’s journey as he pursues his dreams and confronts his fears in the midst of a galaxy in turmoil.

George Lucas, the pioneering and brilliant filmmaker behind STAR WARS, has overseen the process with his renowned attention to detail. John Knoll, the visual effects supervisor for Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was responsible for the actual conversion. He served as Visual Effects Supervisor on all three of the Star Wars prequels. The remaining five STAR WARS films will be converted to 3D over the coming years.

“I'm really excited about the new big screen release of the film. We’ve worked very hard to get the best quality 3D we could. The big screen experience is so much better than watching it on television. It was designed to put you in the environment and surround you with the sound and the picture. There is nothing like it. I'm so glad that we were able to bring this whole experience to the next generation. This will be the third generation that will be able to see it on the big screen and when you're young, it’s an overwhelming and powerful event,” Lucas shares on converting Episode 1 into 3D.

Lucas further shares on challenges faced on converting the movie to 3D - “Originally, I was not a big fan of 3D. I really thought 3D was a gimmick. Then later on I was trying to get digital projectors into the theaters. I was doing a presentation in Las Vegas. Bob Zemeckis and Jim Cameron came up to me and said: ‘We want to get 3D into the theaters. Would you join us in showing the theater owners that you can do 3D?’ And I said: ‘That’d be good because in order to do 3D you have to have digital theaters. So it would promote my idea of digital theaters.’ Then when I saw the test that we did of STAR WARS in 3D, I realized how great it was and how great it looked. I became fascinated with the idea of converting STAR WARS into 3D, which was easier said than done. It took us a long time to develop a structure in which we could actually do a really good conversion of a 2D film into a 3D film.”

“I don’t like things coming out into the audience. I like everything to be behind the proscenium. I think 3D is an art. You need artists who have a sensibility about where things fit in the frame. It's very subtle but it’s very, very important. We had an advantage because we had experts in visual effects like John Knoll. We had the skill set of ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) and people who had worked in 3D on films, including “Avatar.” So we could get a group of people together that could actually do this,” concludes Lucas.



Harrison Ford in Early Talks for New Blade Runner?

(comingsoon.net)            Could Harrison Ford be returning for Ridley Scott's new Blade Runner film?

Twitch says: "Twitch has learned that Harrison Ford has entered into early talks to join the new Blade Runner. While this is still very early stages and it is quite possible that things won't work out the obvious implication is that what we are looking at is not a reboot but a direct sequel to the original."

But could he be in talks to play a role different from Deckard? The follow-up to Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic is in development at Warner Bros.-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment.

Alcon co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove will produce with Bud Yorkin and Cynthia Sikes Yorkin, along with Scott. Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble, CEO's of Thunderbird Films, will serve as executive producers.



Transformers Takes ‘Animated Effects in a Live Action Production’ Annie Award

(greatnewmovies.com)              Winners among the Annie Awards 2012 include ‘Rio’, ‘The Rise of the Planet of the Apes’, and ‘Transformers: Dark of the Moon’. ‘Rio’ bagged the ‘Character Animation in a Feature Production’ award, while ‘Transformers 3’ won ‘Animated Effects in a Live Action Production’ and ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ won ‘Character Animation in a Live Action Production’.




2 Filmmakers Working with James Cameron Die in Australia Chopper Crash

CANBERRA -- Two award-winning filmmakers working on a documentary with renowned Hollywood director James Cameron were killed in a helicopter crash in Australia on Saturday, according to National Geographic.

American cinematographer Michael deGruy, 60, and Australian TV writer-producer Andrew Wight, 52, were killed when their helicopter crashed shortly after takeoff from an airstrip south of Sydney, the media group said on its website.

Police did not release the victims' identities immediately.

However, National Geographic and Oscar-winning director Cameron confirmed their deaths in a statement released on Sunday.

" ... the deep-sea community lost two of its finest," the statement said.

DeGruy and Wight were long-time colleagues of Cameron. Wight co-produced the feature film "Sanctum 3D" with Cameron after accompanying him on six deep-ocean documentary expeditions.

DeGruy, an Emmy award winner with 30 years' experience in ocean filmmaking, was director of undersea photography for Cameron's "Last Mysteries of the Titanic".

"Mike and Andrew were like family to me," Cameron said in the statement.

"Their deaths are a tremendous loss for the world of underwater exploration, conservation, and filmmaking," he said.




Transformers 3 Dark of the Moon Visual Effects Reel for Oscar's

(seibertron.com)                Love them or not, the Michael Bay Transformers trilogy has been a stunning achievement in visual effects. Creating the most complicated CG models ever made, each movie has continually stepped up the scale of its visual and audio effects. Even forcing ILM to upgrade their render farms just to handle the massive Driller scene! Well this visually driven powerhouse has been nominated for three awards in the 2012 Oscars. As is protocol; a 10 minute reel is submitted to the panel of judges for review, and today, we bring you that exact reel! Straight from Vimeo.com or just check out the hand embed below!

VIDEO - Take a look:    http://www.seibertron.com/transformers/news/transformers-3-dark-of-the-moon-visual-effects-reel-for-oscars/23908/



Classic Hollywood: A Week of Honors for Douglas Trumbull

(latimes.com)                Visual effects visionary, director and producer Douglas Trumbull has a "broad" philosophy of film. He believes that everything in a movie is, in essence, a special effect.

"Movies are all about illusions, whether it is makeup or wardrobe or some location or being in a period of time or being on an alien planet," says Trumbull, 69.

Trumbull has created some of the screen's greatest illusions in such seminal sci-fi films as Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork "2001: A Space Odyssey," his own 1972 cult classic "Silent Running" and Steven Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." His work spans more than four decades, most recently on the lengthy beginning-of-life sequence that opens Terrence Malick's Oscar-nominated "The Tree of Life."

It's a big week for Trumbull. On Tuesday at the Visual Effects Society Awards, he will receive the Georges Méliès Award for his contributions to visual effects. On Friday, the UCLA Film & Television Archive is welcoming Trumbull to the Billy Wilder Theater for a screening and conversation about "Silent Running." And on Saturday at the film academy's Scientific and Technical Awards at the Beverly Wilshire, he will be receiving the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, presented to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry."

"It's getting to be a pretty busy time for me," Trumbull says.

Throughout his illustrious career, Trumbull has created, developed and made improvements on numerous special-effects techniques including slit-scan photography, which he created for the famous "Star Gate" sequence in "2001"; process photography; miniature composition; and motion control photography. In 1992, he won a Scientific and Engineering Award from the academy as part of the design team of the CP-65 Showscan Camera System for 65-millimeter movie photography, which has yet to be used on a feature film.

It was "2001" that put Trumbull on the map. Kubrick hired Con Pederson of Graphic Films in Los Angeles to work on the effects for "2001." Trumbull, who was working for Graphic, got Kubrick's number from Pederson and called him for a job. Kubrick hired the plucky young man.

"He gave me incredible freedom," recalls Trumbull, talking by phone from his home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. "Stanley Kubrick was a very interesting intellect. I think he put a lot of people off, but he didn't me at all. I had an incredibly good, supportive and positive relationship with Stanley because I really admired that he was trying to break new ground and do something new.

"Even though I was kind of young, I was the right guy for the job. I was willing to think outside the box. I didn't have any old habits. We did a lot of unusual photographic things in support of that movie."

Among the innovations was the slit-screen machine. "The shutter of the camera remains open for about a minute," he explains. "We moved various mechanically controlled lights in front of the camera to create what I call a controlled blur. I built this big machine to control very complicated patterns of light in front of the camera."

For Trumbull, the experience was so inspiring, "I thought, 'Count me in if this is the movie business.' Then I became kind of disappointed that the giant palette of the giant screen of Cinerama went away. I was destined to make regular movies for a long time but still trying to break new ground."

Though "Silent Running" wasn't a box-office hit, Trumbull received good reviews for the 1972 film, an environmentally themed sci-fi drama set in the future when all plant life has been destroyed on Earth. "I ended up directing it by default," he says. "I was developing the story and the project. It was obviously very unusual to make a movie that involved a lot of what we call front projection, which is what we used on '2001,' and a lot of visual effects and animation techniques. They said, 'Who can make this movie?' and I said, 'I'll do it.'

He's not a fan of computerized special effects — he still likes to use miniatures and photographic effects because they produce surprising results as they did in "Tree of Life." "You create the opportunity for the unexpected to occur, which was what Terry was after."



Astounding Effects Sequence From Eddie Alcazar's 0000

(twitchfilm.com)                 Ever since the first scraps of information about Alcazar's philosophical science fiction picture 0000 arrived online it has been eagerly anticipated by scifi fans around the globe, even making several critics' wish lists for the just concluded Sundance Film Festival. The only problem being that the film's not done yet. But Alcazar wants people to know he appreciates the attention:

            We are very thankful for all the attention this project has been receiving. Although Sundance 2012 was our main goal we have yet to submit the film to any film festivals. We have been endlessly working to still complete 0000, our goal is to create something special but also extremely unique and this requires a bit of experimenting to get right. Ideas can be so powerful if treated correctly and cared for and this project is one that is led by our hearts in which we are closely paying attention to refining each and every detail. We are striving in every aspect to create a film that will really make an impact in the world and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all as soon as possible.

Now, you may be asking yourself what could be taking so long. And rather than telling you Alcazar wants to show you. The effects in this film are being created entirely practically. If it exists in the film, it exists in real life. And down below you can see a first sample of what Alcazar has been creating along with the very talented Dominic Hailstone. But, first, here's the synopsis again for those who are unfamiliar:

VIDEO - Take a look:      http://twitchfilm.com/news/2012/02/astounding-effects-sequence-from-eddie-alcazars-0000.php



WETA Digital: The Making Of Tintin

(awesome-robo.com)              This raw behind the scenes footage showcases an intimate look at the mocap heavy making of Tintin and the current technology being used for directorial purposes. I found it pretty interesting to see how Steven Spielberg used his handheld system to direct the scenes, and the usage of crude props and sets to give the actors a better sense of immersion to deliver better performances. Following Zemeckis' underwhelming series of mocap movie disasters (Lets not forget Mars Needs Moms), Tintin was a great example of motion capture done correctly for those of you who haven't seen it.

VIDEO - Take a look:   http://www.awesome-robo.com/2012/01/weta-digital-making-of-tintin.html



Movie FX App Blasted by Psychologist

(heraldsun.com.au)                AN iPhone app that lets users simulate blowing up buildings, dropping cars on crowds and even launching carpet bombs on their neighbourhood has been branded insensitive by an Australian psychologist.

The Action Movie FX app allows users to take video footage and add action movie effects from a missile strike to tornadoes.

Launched on the Australian App Store just before Christmas the app also allows users to buy extra effects, including chopper crashes and armed assailants opening fire on the video subject.

But the free inclusion of a car flipping and rolling at the camera touted as "Look like an action star as you evade a massive CAR CRASH!" was yesterday panned as insensitive to victims of road trauma.

Glenn Cupit, senior lecturer in child development at the University of South Australia, warned the app could go beyond a bit of fun when it dabbled with the very real emotions of road trauma survivors.

"My immediate reaction to that is that it's incredibly insensitive," he said.

The app is touted as light hearted and its creators encourage users to post videos on Facebook for a bit of fun.

But the Herald Sun has learned at least one man had to remove a video post from Facebook after his employer saw it.

Others have taken the chance to blow up their children, something Dr Cupit sees as an improvement over physical action taken against a child.

"I'd prefer that than them actually throwing things at the kid," he said.

"I think it would normally be done in a comedic context, and it doesn't concern me greatly.

"If you had a particular situation where a father was spending hours each day blowing his kids up on screen, then I'd raise an eyebrow."

The app carries a 9+ warning for infrequent and mild cartoon or fantasy violence.