Asteroids Upgrades, Lightwave 3D Kid Wins Oscar, & Potter Behind the Magic...
Universal Pictures to Fight Asteroids
(The Hollywood Reporter)
Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights
to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids," says The Hollywood
Reporter. Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature
adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
In "Asteroids," initially released as an arcade game in 1979, a player controlled a triangular space ship in an asteroid field. You can play an unofficial version of the game below!
Universal is also developing movies based on Hasbro board game properties such as "Battleship," "Candyland," "Ouija," "Monopoly" and "Clue."
Digital Domain on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
(vfxworld.com) Everyone needs a good supporting cast -- even the Decepticons and ILM. While ILM handled the lion's share of VFX, Digital Domain created new supporting characters including Wheelie, who provides comic relief; a visually intriguing character DD dubbed "Reed Man;" Soundwave, a satellite-infiltrating Bot in the big, bad Decepticon tradition; eight frenetic Kitchenbots; and Alice, AKA The Pretender, who transforms from a sexy coed to a vicious robot. They completed 127 shots overall.
Digital Domain Visual Effects Supervisor Matthew Butler said, "Supporting characters can be tricky. Since they're not leads and they aren't always involved in the most spectacular sequences or plot points they need a real reason for being on the screen. You have to bring a little something extra into their development to keep audiences engaged."
"Reed Man" is made of thousands of tiny, sentient spherical robots called 'Microcons' that form themselves into an insect-shaped collection of razor blades. Butler said, "We had to create the sharpest object in the world out of the bluntest and make it look realistic."
Reed Man's genesis combined hand-based hero animation with proceduralized group behavior based on Houdini and procedural systems. In one sequence we see both a single, full-frame hero Microcon as well as hundreds of thousands of Microcons assembling into Reed Man. "We had to deliver characters that you could go right up close to and yet see thousands of them," said Butler.
And then there's Alice.
"Alice's transformation was our most challenging shot," Butler noted. "She's a robot disguised as a hot chick who tries to seduce Sam into giving her information. She tries to drug him with a metallic tail and strangle him with her enormous mechanical tongue, then transforms to reveal her inner mech skeleton."
"The question was, how do you take a beautiful organic image and turn it into a menacing robot without making her look like she has a skin disease along the way? Michael wanted her to petal out into an infinite number of discrete pieces that were self-organized, deliberate in mechanics, and justified in their erosion."
Lining up a photographic organism and a synthetic creation accurately is a study in integration. "You have to track every little elastic nuance. We combined the inherent animation of the human with the freed-up animation of what the robot would be doing, then sewed it all together using a proceduralized deconstruction pattern."
"We created algorithms that could mechanically erode her outer surface with a clear source and target destination between those disparate animations. We started off tracking a piece of her dress and it had to end on a mechanical piece that moves at a very different rate, with different lighting."
The shot involved many artists and software packages, which created a complex lighting/compositing integration need. "If you break a composite into individual renders you're faced with how it should all come together. You have ultimate freedom but if you get one thing wrong it looks wrong and you have to figure out why. We had to think like photons, "Light should be going from here to here... it would be occluding the reflection of that... " and so on. We worked on that shot from November through May."
Harry Potter VFX Revealed For 'Behind the Magic' TV Special
(the-leaky-cauldron.org) Back in April, we first told you ITV would be airing another special on the making of a Harry Potter film. Host Ben Shepherd is back again with his popular "Behind the Magic" special on the making of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Tidbits include more as the host looks at Weasley Wheezes shop "which has 40,000 props, took 15 people a year to design, 50 people an entire year to build and the crew and cast spent five days filming in it." We also will see "never-seen-before footage of the moment the Millennium Bridge in London is "destroyed" for the film. The Head of Visual Effects describes how he used computer generated images to show the bridge buckling and twisting before breaking free of the steel ropes holding it in place and collapsing into the Thames. And Behind the Magic premieres exclusive footage of three brand new characters: the professor who disguises himself as an armchair, Greyback the terrifying werewolf and little Tom Riddle, the boy from the orphanage who grew up to be the most evil wizard of all "Lord Voldemort."
Star Wars TV Series in Preproduction?
(scifiwire.com) Our Australian sister site SCI FI TV reports a rumor that preproduction is gearing up for George Lucas' proposed live-action Star Wars series, which is to be shot Down Under.
The site, citing anonymous sources, adds that the show is assembling high-quality writers from the Aussie TV industry, including writers from Love My Way and Secret Life of Us, who have been approached by Lucas' longtime producer Rick McCallum.
The as-yet-untitled series is supposedly set to debut in 2010, though there has been no word of a distributor yet. The series will reportedly be set between the eras of Star Wars: Episode III "Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV" A New Hope and will not feature any major characters from the film series.
Source: http://scifiwire.com/2009/07/rumor-mill-live-action-st.php
Green Hornet Gets Pushed Two Weeks
(BoxOffice) Columbia Pictures has moved director Michel Gondry's comic book adaptation The Green Hornet back two weeks from June 25, 2010 to July 9, 2010. It was a move to make room for the studio's all-star comedy Grown Ups, which was moved from March 12 to June 25, 2010.
While no other film is scheduled for June 25th at this moment, Toy Story 3 is opening the week before and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse just five days later.
Resident Evil 4 Arriving in Late 2010
(ShockTillYouDrop.com) Sony's Screen Gems is eyeing a September 17, 2010 release for the fourth "Resident Evil" installment, to be titled Resident Evil: Afterlife. The ending of the third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, left the door wide open for another sequel.
Paul W.S. Anderson revealed late last year he was indeed writing the next film.
As hinted at the end of "Extinction," the story will shift to Tokyo, Japan.
"Predators" To Visit Home Planet
(comingsoon.net) Ain't it Cool News' Harry Knowles gave a ring to Robert Rodriguez to get confirmation on who's at the helm of Predators, 20th Century Fox's next film in the franchise. And it is Nimrod Antal, the man behind the upcoming action flick Armored and who last dabbled in the thriller genre with Vacancy.
Rodriguez, who is shepherding the project, says the story involves "a very intense group of people stranded on a Predator planet discovering unspeakable horrors - that are not always from outside their group. So like the original movie, the title does have a double meaning. 'Aliens' was a different take on the Alien idea, and an original movie in it's own right, and that's what we want to do with this."
Transformers Up to $448.4 Million Worldwide
(comingsoon.net) Paramount and DreamWorks' Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is close to becoming the highest-grossing film of the year at the worldwide box office in less than two weeks in release.
Through Tuesday, the film's global take was $448.4 million, says Variety. The current No. 1 title, Angels & Demons, which opened in mid-May, has grossed $469 million.
At the domestic box office, the Transformers sequel grossed $14.9 million Monday and $13.5 million Tuesday for a total of $228.4 million.
Overseas, Monday's grosses clocked in at $14 million, while Tuesday came in at $16 million for a foreign total of $220 million.
At that rate, the film should catch up with "Angels" by Friday, even with the day and date entry of 20th Century Fox's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
"Transformers" is also expected to overtake Up ($255 million through Tuesday domestically) this weekend to become the biggest domestic grosser of 2009.
Student Wins Oscar Using LightWave 3D
(Newswire) Brendan Bellomo, director and recent New York University graduate, received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 36th Annual Student Academy Award for his short film, "Bohemibot." Bellomo relied on NewTek award-winning LightWave 3D to create the short film that took home an Oscar in the narrative category.
"I have used LightWave since I was 12-years-old. I love that it gives animators the technical and creative flexibility in a user-friendly package to accomplish shots that usually require the infrastructure of a large visual effects house," said Bellomo. "I like the surfacing system, especially the new node-based editor, and the different volumetric rendering capabilities, like HyperVoxels, which we used a great deal in creating the film."
"NewTek congratulates Brendan Bellomo on his Student Academy Award® for 'Bohemibot.' We are honored to have him in our LightWave community," said Jay Roth, president, 3D division, NewTek Inc. "LightWave enables artists with creative vision to deliver eye-popping results, regardless of project budgets or visual effects expertise level."
The film, which combines live action and computer-generated imagery, follows the story of a cyborg harpist forced to serve as a pilot in the last war on his planet. His encounter with a young enemy captive reveals that even the din of war can never silence the voice of the heart.
In "Asteroids," initially released as an arcade game in 1979, a player controlled a triangular space ship in an asteroid field. You can play an unofficial version of the game below!
Universal is also developing movies based on Hasbro board game properties such as "Battleship," "Candyland," "Ouija," "Monopoly" and "Clue."
Digital Domain on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
(vfxworld.com) Everyone needs a good supporting cast -- even the Decepticons and ILM. While ILM handled the lion's share of VFX, Digital Domain created new supporting characters including Wheelie, who provides comic relief; a visually intriguing character DD dubbed "Reed Man;" Soundwave, a satellite-infiltrating Bot in the big, bad Decepticon tradition; eight frenetic Kitchenbots; and Alice, AKA The Pretender, who transforms from a sexy coed to a vicious robot. They completed 127 shots overall.
Digital Domain Visual Effects Supervisor Matthew Butler said, "Supporting characters can be tricky. Since they're not leads and they aren't always involved in the most spectacular sequences or plot points they need a real reason for being on the screen. You have to bring a little something extra into their development to keep audiences engaged."
"Reed Man" is made of thousands of tiny, sentient spherical robots called 'Microcons' that form themselves into an insect-shaped collection of razor blades. Butler said, "We had to create the sharpest object in the world out of the bluntest and make it look realistic."
Reed Man's genesis combined hand-based hero animation with proceduralized group behavior based on Houdini and procedural systems. In one sequence we see both a single, full-frame hero Microcon as well as hundreds of thousands of Microcons assembling into Reed Man. "We had to deliver characters that you could go right up close to and yet see thousands of them," said Butler.
And then there's Alice.
"Alice's transformation was our most challenging shot," Butler noted. "She's a robot disguised as a hot chick who tries to seduce Sam into giving her information. She tries to drug him with a metallic tail and strangle him with her enormous mechanical tongue, then transforms to reveal her inner mech skeleton."
"The question was, how do you take a beautiful organic image and turn it into a menacing robot without making her look like she has a skin disease along the way? Michael wanted her to petal out into an infinite number of discrete pieces that were self-organized, deliberate in mechanics, and justified in their erosion."
Lining up a photographic organism and a synthetic creation accurately is a study in integration. "You have to track every little elastic nuance. We combined the inherent animation of the human with the freed-up animation of what the robot would be doing, then sewed it all together using a proceduralized deconstruction pattern."
"We created algorithms that could mechanically erode her outer surface with a clear source and target destination between those disparate animations. We started off tracking a piece of her dress and it had to end on a mechanical piece that moves at a very different rate, with different lighting."
The shot involved many artists and software packages, which created a complex lighting/compositing integration need. "If you break a composite into individual renders you're faced with how it should all come together. You have ultimate freedom but if you get one thing wrong it looks wrong and you have to figure out why. We had to think like photons, "Light should be going from here to here... it would be occluding the reflection of that... " and so on. We worked on that shot from November through May."
Harry Potter VFX Revealed For 'Behind the Magic' TV Special
(the-leaky-cauldron.org) Back in April, we first told you ITV would be airing another special on the making of a Harry Potter film. Host Ben Shepherd is back again with his popular "Behind the Magic" special on the making of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Tidbits include more as the host looks at Weasley Wheezes shop "which has 40,000 props, took 15 people a year to design, 50 people an entire year to build and the crew and cast spent five days filming in it." We also will see "never-seen-before footage of the moment the Millennium Bridge in London is "destroyed" for the film. The Head of Visual Effects describes how he used computer generated images to show the bridge buckling and twisting before breaking free of the steel ropes holding it in place and collapsing into the Thames. And Behind the Magic premieres exclusive footage of three brand new characters: the professor who disguises himself as an armchair, Greyback the terrifying werewolf and little Tom Riddle, the boy from the orphanage who grew up to be the most evil wizard of all "Lord Voldemort."
Star Wars TV Series in Preproduction?
(scifiwire.com) Our Australian sister site SCI FI TV reports a rumor that preproduction is gearing up for George Lucas' proposed live-action Star Wars series, which is to be shot Down Under.
The site, citing anonymous sources, adds that the show is assembling high-quality writers from the Aussie TV industry, including writers from Love My Way and Secret Life of Us, who have been approached by Lucas' longtime producer Rick McCallum.
The as-yet-untitled series is supposedly set to debut in 2010, though there has been no word of a distributor yet. The series will reportedly be set between the eras of Star Wars: Episode III "Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV" A New Hope and will not feature any major characters from the film series.
Source: http://scifiwire.com/2009/07/rumor-mill-live-action-st.php
Green Hornet Gets Pushed Two Weeks
(BoxOffice) Columbia Pictures has moved director Michel Gondry's comic book adaptation The Green Hornet back two weeks from June 25, 2010 to July 9, 2010. It was a move to make room for the studio's all-star comedy Grown Ups, which was moved from March 12 to June 25, 2010.
While no other film is scheduled for June 25th at this moment, Toy Story 3 is opening the week before and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse just five days later.
Resident Evil 4 Arriving in Late 2010
(ShockTillYouDrop.com) Sony's Screen Gems is eyeing a September 17, 2010 release for the fourth "Resident Evil" installment, to be titled Resident Evil: Afterlife. The ending of the third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, left the door wide open for another sequel.
Paul W.S. Anderson revealed late last year he was indeed writing the next film.
As hinted at the end of "Extinction," the story will shift to Tokyo, Japan.
"Predators" To Visit Home Planet
(comingsoon.net) Ain't it Cool News' Harry Knowles gave a ring to Robert Rodriguez to get confirmation on who's at the helm of Predators, 20th Century Fox's next film in the franchise. And it is Nimrod Antal, the man behind the upcoming action flick Armored and who last dabbled in the thriller genre with Vacancy.
Rodriguez, who is shepherding the project, says the story involves "a very intense group of people stranded on a Predator planet discovering unspeakable horrors - that are not always from outside their group. So like the original movie, the title does have a double meaning. 'Aliens' was a different take on the Alien idea, and an original movie in it's own right, and that's what we want to do with this."
Transformers Up to $448.4 Million Worldwide
(comingsoon.net) Paramount and DreamWorks' Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is close to becoming the highest-grossing film of the year at the worldwide box office in less than two weeks in release.
Through Tuesday, the film's global take was $448.4 million, says Variety. The current No. 1 title, Angels & Demons, which opened in mid-May, has grossed $469 million.
At the domestic box office, the Transformers sequel grossed $14.9 million Monday and $13.5 million Tuesday for a total of $228.4 million.
Overseas, Monday's grosses clocked in at $14 million, while Tuesday came in at $16 million for a foreign total of $220 million.
At that rate, the film should catch up with "Angels" by Friday, even with the day and date entry of 20th Century Fox's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
"Transformers" is also expected to overtake Up ($255 million through Tuesday domestically) this weekend to become the biggest domestic grosser of 2009.
Student Wins Oscar Using LightWave 3D
(Newswire) Brendan Bellomo, director and recent New York University graduate, received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 36th Annual Student Academy Award for his short film, "Bohemibot." Bellomo relied on NewTek award-winning LightWave 3D to create the short film that took home an Oscar in the narrative category.
"I have used LightWave since I was 12-years-old. I love that it gives animators the technical and creative flexibility in a user-friendly package to accomplish shots that usually require the infrastructure of a large visual effects house," said Bellomo. "I like the surfacing system, especially the new node-based editor, and the different volumetric rendering capabilities, like HyperVoxels, which we used a great deal in creating the film."
"NewTek congratulates Brendan Bellomo on his Student Academy Award® for 'Bohemibot.' We are honored to have him in our LightWave community," said Jay Roth, president, 3D division, NewTek Inc. "LightWave enables artists with creative vision to deliver eye-popping results, regardless of project budgets or visual effects expertise level."
The film, which combines live action and computer-generated imagery, follows the story of a cyborg harpist forced to serve as a pilot in the last war on his planet. His encounter with a young enemy captive reveals that even the din of war can never silence the voice of the heart.
