Brad Bird Meets Real People, Ripley Exits Aliens, & VFX: Advice To The Producer...

Brad Bird Switching To Live Action

(cinemablend.com)              Brad Bird Switching To Live Action Genius, Oscar winning animation director Brad Bird, the mind behind such masterpieces as The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, is about make the jump from cartoons to live action movies. Slashfilm says he may make his live action directorial debut with something called 1906.

1906 is based on a same named book by James Dalessandro about the famous 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The book is supposed to be about more than just a natural disaster though. It's described as a tale of political intrigue, corruption, romance, rescue, revenge, and murder based on actual historical facts.

Bird should have no problem with the effects, after anything more than a fender bender is usually done with computer animation these days anyway. I have a hard time imagining him tackling politics and intrigue, but he's been so good at everything else he's done the thought of him attempting it is nothing short of fascinating. This is clearly a guy not afraid to step out of his element. I  follow Brad Bird anywhere, until he does something to convince me otherwise my default position on his work is that it will be brilliant. His commitment to story and character first should work just as well with real actors as it does with computer generated ones.

James Cameron's Avatar Gets a Date

(comingsoon.net)                  Avatar, James Cameron's long-awaited non-doc follow-up to his 1997 Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic, has claimed its date of release, and it's going to be hitting theatres on Memorial Day weekend in 2009. That's in just 27 short months for those who want to start standing in line.

With a cast that includes Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver, Cameron's sci-fi epic is about a wounded ex-marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in bio-diversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival.

VFX Production Supervision or Creative Baby Sitting?

(p3.com.au)            In a recent production estimate review, we noticed that the agency producer had allowed an extraordinatry amount of supervision hours on the project. There was a large post production, visual effects component spanning several weeks, but we thought “surely they do not intent to sit in a darkened effects suite day in and day out watching the effects being developed?”

How wrong we were.

It turns out that not only was the agency producer sitting through five long weeks of post, so was the creative team. This was 600 head hours of time. 3 people x 5 weeks x 40 hours per week. Perversely the creative head hours were covered in the retainer, so it was not costing anymore to have the writer and art director sitting through the whole process.

Not that they had to, as the best practice is to brief the visual effetcs company and then attend daily or twice daily work in progress meetings instead to review the work done and discuss the next step. This is how it is done in feature films. And it reduces the time from 40 hours per person per week to around 10 hours per person per week.
But back to the agency producer, who was charged out at a relatively high $240 per hour, this meant that having them sit through every hour of the visual effects added $48,000 to the production cost. This is on top of a senior copywriter and senior art director also attending. We asked the agency producer why were they attending as well and they said “Because the creatives cannot be trusted to nt blow the budget”. In anyone’s terms that is a very expensive baby sitter. Luckily that does not happen every day.

Source:   http://www.p3.com.au/blog/?p=85

Area 52 Comes To the Big Screen

(hollywoodreporter.com)             Benderspink has acquired rights to "Area 52," a comic book by Brian Haberlin.

The story follows a group of misfit soldiers stationed at a remote military base in Antarctica who learn that they are guarding a storage facility in which top-secret, otherworldly technologies and weapons are kept and analyzed. A murderous alien, hatched from something believed to be an artifact, stalks the soldiers, who must team to defeat it.

Chris Bender and JC Spink will produce with Quattro partner Jim Strader. Haberlin will executive produce.

Oscar Screener "Flushed Away" Upoaded

(news.toonzone.net)            A man who put Flushed Away online may himself go up the river, the Associated Press reports. Salvador Nunez Jr. has been charged with copyright infringement after uploading an Oscar screener of the animated film to the internet.

Visual Effects, What A Producer Needs To Know

(flippant.net)              Last week, I had the pleasure of going to a event sponsored by the Producer Guild of American East.
The talk focused on getting the most of your visual effects budget. Some of the key points where.

Once you have the script, go talk to a VFX (visual effects) house to see what is possible and viable. They can give you a real budget on what it would cost for the effects in your script.

Give them visual queues, what videos you like, what looks you like so the VFX people could have a point of reference.

The earlier you get the VFX house involved, the earlier they can set up time-lines for deliveries. Make sure the company you’re using follows the schedule. This way you can resolve issues at the beginning stages.

“…The only thing worst than having a deadline is not having a deadline…”

If you’re doing a heavy effects film, make sure you have somebody from the VFX house at the set to let you know if the set ups of the shots are going to work in Post. Other wise, you going to be shooting yourself in the foot and losing money. What if the great tracking shot you got, can’t be used because the green screen wasn’t covering the lead actors.

The five main steps to the Visual Effects Process are:

Research - understand what you’re trying to achieve.
Design - All must sign off on the look and feel of the sets, mattes, creatures and so on.
Build - The process of making the designs.
Animation - creating the shots for your film or adding the composites
Finishing - Blending in all the effects to make it look ideal.

Warners Announces "Justice League" Feature Film Project

(toonzone.net)              Warner Bros. is planning to bring the Justice League of America to the big screen in a feature film adaptation of the long-running DC Comics franchise, Variety reports.

The studio has tapped Kieran and Michel Mulroney, who are best known for a rewrite of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, to pen a script.

The studio has made no decisions on which members of the League will show up in the new film.

VFX & Makeup Oscars Shorted Two Slots

Clooney, Blanchett Go Stop Motion

(news.toonzone.net)           George Clooney and Cate Blanchett are negotiating to lend their voices to the stop-motion feature The Fantastic Mr. Fox, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film, an adaptation of a Roald Dahl children's story, would cast Clooney in the title role and Blanchett would play his wife.

Wes Anderson is set to direct, and Twentieth Century Fox is expected to distribute the film.

Jobs, Gates To Take Stage Together

(macnn.com)             Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will make a rare joint appearance at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference this May. The two seminal figures in the development of the personal computer will jointly discuss the history and future of the digital revolution in an unrehearsed, unscripted, onstage conversation on May 30 with D co-producers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Both executives have made multiple individual appearances at the conference, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year (and thus called 'D5'); however, this will be their first joint session at D, and a "highly unusual event," according to the WSJ press release.

In addition to participating in the joint session with Microsoft's founder Gates, Jobs will appear on his own in a separate segment at D5 to discuss the latest developments at Apple, including new ventures such as the iPhone and Apple TV. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will also appear at the conference in his own segment, to discuss Windows, Office, the Xbox, Zune, and other topics.

More:  http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/02/20/jobs.gates.at.d5.in.may/

Time To Rethink The Function Of Digital Visual Effects

(mitpress.mit.edu)                Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the strength of the technology. In Digital Storytelling, Shilo McClean shows how digital visual effects can be a tool of storytelling in film, adding narrative power as do sound, color, and "experimental" camera angles--other innovative film technologies that were once criticized for being distractions from the story. It is time, she says, to rethink the function of digital visual effects.

Effects artists say--contrary to the critics--that effects always derive from story. Digital effects are a part of production, not post-production; they are becoming part of the story development process. Digital Storytelling is grounded in filmmaking, the scriptwriting process in particular. McClean considers crucial questions about digital visual effects-- whether they undermine classical storytelling structure, if they always call attention to themselves, whether their use is limited to certain genres--and looks at contemporary films (including a chapter-long analysis of Steven Spielberg's use of computer-generated effects) and contemporary film theory to find the answers. McClean argues that to consider digital visual effects as simply contributing the "wow" factor underestimates them. They are, she writes, the legitimate inheritors of film storycraft.

Shilo T. McClean is a consultant in storybuilding and digital visual effects. She has worked as a writer, producer, director, and script editor.

Order today:    http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10772

Weaver Says No More "Alien", "Ghostbusters"

(Entertainment Weekly)          Talking with Entertainment Weekly, actress Sigourney Weaver says that despite teaming up with James Cameron again for his "Avatar" project, don't expect anymore "Alien" films.

"I love the character, but I think the monster, once they did the other film (Alien vs. Predator), which I never saw, but that really maxes our monster out" says Weaver.

As for "Ghostbusters", and despite Dan Aykroyd's recently announced plans of a CG animated flick, Weaver says "I think all of us are busy doing so many things and it's wonderful all the films are so well loved and they certainly were fun to do. But I think if you do it right the first time, sometime it's better to move on to something else."

Digital Artists Close The Gap On Reality

(news.ninemsn.com.au)           In 1986, a two-and-a-half-minute animation involving desk lamps gave the cinematic world a glimpse of just how close computer-generated (CG) images could come to mimicking real life.

Pixar Animation's film, Luxo Jr, was incredibly simple in story concept but took three-dimensional animation to a level of realism previous attempts had failed to approach.

The Oscar-nominated short showing two desk lamps kicking a small rubber ball across a workstation broke new ground on several fronts.

It gave vivid expression to otherwise mundane office objects and dramatically enhanced the degree of detail through richly textured surfaces and, for the first time in a computer generated (CG) animation, the use of animated lighting and shadows.

Twenty-one years later, CG specialists have remarkably broadened the scope of what they can achieve.

Such technology is an almost ubiquitous part of the production process today, even in movies that are not known for CG effects, such as Bridget Jones's Diary.

Artists were once restricted to representing man-made objects such as aircraft and cars.

But breakthroughs in computing algorithms in the past decade have put images of trickier items like hair, water and fire onto the 3D stage.

John Dietz worked with Australian group Rising Sun Pictures on the 2006 adaption of Charlotte's Web.

One of the biggest challenges in that film was creating a realistic spider web, given a lack of off-the-shelf programs that even came close to helping the artists achieve their goal.

"We had to write our own dynamic simulation package," Dietz says.

"All the different lines interact differently together and it becomes really complex.

"No matter how close we got, there's still a certain amount where you just had to go in and animate some of it by hand.

"It's just something in your backyard but it's super complex and it was basically what the movie was about."

Rising Sun Pictures also worked on some of the CG effects in Superman Returns, which is nominated for an Oscar for best visual effects this year.

Dietz says another complicated part of the trade is getting real-life human actors and CG objects to interact in a seamless manner.

Getting a human actor to battle a CG troll or ride on a digital dragon, for example, provides considerable technical challenges.

"Any time these things have to interact closely, there's always a super high level of complexity that ends up getting added on top of just doing the character themselves," Dietz says.

"Getting that live action person to sit on a digital creature is pretty complicated and it's only been pulled off successfully a limited number of times."

The industry has made significant advances since early 3D animation blockbusters such as Toy Story, with the digital artist's toolset expanding considerably.

Everything from the way the light of dawn bounces off a lion's mane to the physics of an 70-year-old man's wobbling jowls, has been factored into animation.

But the holy grail in the world of digital effects remains seamless human representation.

Guy Griffiths, director of research at Animal Logic, which was behind George Miller's Oscar-nominated Happy Feet, says audiences are most critical when it comes to recreating human movement.

"As humans, we're very adept at picking up the subtleties of other humans," Griffiths says.

"If you read all the stuff about behaviour, a lot of what we communicate is not through speech but through body language."

Being an effective digital artist means not just knowing how to use a computer, but knowing the complexity of what you're trying to recreate.

Most CG movies have shied away from being too ambitious with their human representations with characters often styled in exaggerated cartoon forms, as they were in The Incredibles.

Square Pictures' 2001 title Final Fantasy is considered one of the few full-length movies to achieve almost-perfect photorealism through CG technology.

However, with the enormous amount of time and money needed to create such visuals yielding no return, the movie's spectacular failure at box office sent Square Pictures bust.

Even if computers do end up fashioning the perfect human, Griffiths is dismissive of that persisting question: will CG animations ever make human actors redundant?

"When I watch Helen Mirren in The Queen, am I watching Helen Mirren or am I watching a visual representation of her?" Mr Griffiths asks.

"I think of CG characters as being just another expression of that - it's just another form of make up."