CGI Damage Control, Laika Anim Expands, & Ricci becomes Ri-CG...
CGI Lacks Spirit, So "Spirit" Will Lack CGI
(nerve.com) In a recent blog entry at the website for his upcoming adaptation of the beloved Will Eisner superhero comic The Spirit, director Frank Miller -- himself a much-respected comic book artist whose reputation has been decidedly mixed with the fanboy contingent since he entered the arena of filmmaking -- tries to come to terms with the debate over computer-generated imagery, and, somewhat surprisingly, decides he's having none of it in his upcoming movie.
Well, not none, exactly. Even Merchant-Ivory movies have CGI in them nowadays, and Miller says that The Spirit will only eschew the use of computers on the characters -- the rest of the film will be "abetted by abundant CGI that you will find elegant -- or invisible." Curiously, Miller claims that he came to this viewpoint after discussing it with CGI expert Stu Maschwitz (of the Orphanage, who's worked on everything from the Star Wars prequels to Iron Man). Maschwitz convinced him, Miller says, to make sure that the movie didn't "look digital", and that the entire urban landscape of New York -- where the movie is set, rather than the fictional Central City in which most Spirit stories take place -- would seem as if it were filmed in the comics' 1940s milieu.
While we're not exactly sure if this will make the movie any better, or why Frank Miller didn't develop this attitude earlier in his film career (CGI was hardly lacking in his Sin City, and 300 was so digitally processed it might as well have been made for the Xbox), we suppose it's nice that he's taking some liberties with The Spirit and not others. After all, you're not gonna hear us complain that he's leaving Ebony White out of the picture.
Potential SAG Strike To Send 'Transformers 2' On Hiatus
(ropeofsilicon.com) After all the coverage of the WGA strike late last year and into this year you would think the potential Actors' strike would be getting more coverage. Hell, I stayed on top of the WGA strike as much as I could and this is the first time I have even brought up the possibility that the actors could go on strike as early as June 30 sending Hollywood into a tailspin. Outside of The Hollywood Reporter it is strange the negotiations between SAG and AFTRA hasn't inspired more articles of dread, but perhaps no one is willing to fan the flames. Even rabid attention whore blogger Nikki Finke hasn't been all that talkative about it, even though she does have a teaser post up right now telling folks she has "urgent" news to tell. Oh boy Nikki, we can hardly wait...
Pushing Nikki aside (thank God), a new article at The Independent does a great job putting the entire affair into perspective as major films have already planned for a hiatus and several others may suffer a tragic blow as the rush to complete production inside the next week.
First off, we have projects such as Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Steven Soderbergh's The Informant, Will Ferrell's Land of the Lost, Seth Rogen's Observe and Report, High School Musical 3, GI Joe, When in Rome, Disney's Race to Witch Mountain and apparently Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (even though word on that one was that it had completed filming) that are rushing to finish production by July 1. Yeah, it's not a short list of films that are eyeing a ticking clock.
If a strike were to happen you can go ahead and count out, for now, films such as Ridley Scott's Nottingham and "The Independent" reports that both the currently filming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Ron Howard's Angels and Demons will be taking a planned hiatus, which had to have been thought of in advance, presuming the potential for a strike. The question is, how soon will they be returning from their break?
As it stands right now SAG has urged its roughly 44,000 members who also are AFTRA card holders, to vote down the current AFTRA agreement on the table. The union's leaders said they can get a better deal and do not want to be constrained by AFTRA's contract.
Billionaire to Break Ground on New Animation Studio
(blog.wired.com) Shoe mogul Phil Knight hopes to give Pixar and DreamWorks a run for their money. The Nike co-founder is moving forward with Laika, the animation studio he acquired six years ago.
Knight, who's worth about $8 billion, starts building a 30-acre studio campus in Tualitin, Oregon, later this year, around the same time he releases Laika's first feature, Coraline (clip embedded).
As sneak peeked earlier, the stop-motion movie based on the book by Neil Gaiman follows a girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who freaks out when she stumbles into a darkly fantastical universe.
Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) directs, with Knight's son Travis serving as lead animator. (Travis Knight already worked as an animator when his father purchased Will Vinton Studios of "California Raisins" fame.
Besides Coraline, Laika has six projects in development. They include Here Be Monsters!, a 19th-century steampunk thriller set in London, and The Wall and the Wing, adapted by Lost co-creator Jeffrey Lieber from the Laura Ruby novel about a Manhattan girl who can make herself invisible.
So, what's the demo for Laika? Development acquisitions boss Fiona Kenshole told Variety, "We're to the left of Pixar and to the right of Nightmare Before Christmas. There are a lot of people moving into animation, and what they do is copycat. The world isn't waiting for another Pixar and another DreamWorks."
It's a Wrap for Harry Potter 6
(sify.com) The cast and crew of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth instalment of the franchise, spent 20,000 pounds on drinks for a 12-hour session after finishing the movie.
Actors Emma Watson and Rupert Grint attended the party, but Daniel Radcliffe was not there.
A source said, "They asked to hire it out for a private party. It was fantastic and they all behaved very well."
Lucas & Tippet Dispel Star Wars Design Myth
(sfgate.com) One of the greatest Bay Area moviemaking urban legends involves the Port of Oakland container cranes and the AT-AT snow walkers that invaded the ice planet Hoth in George Lucas' "The Empire Strikes Back."
The question of whether the cranes served as design inspiration for the walkers was most recently discussed a couple of weeks ago on SFist.com. One local designer, the Girl and Rhino ( www.thegirlandrhino.com), has even made a T-shirt based on the legend, featuring a picture of a container crane with a thought bubble coming out of its head and a smaller picture of an AT-AT.
As a "Star Wars" geek and Oakland resident, I've been plagued by the legend as well. So last year, during an interview for a profile that ran in The Chronicle, I asked Lucas about the similarities - making sure it was my last question, in case it got me kicked out of Skywalker Ranch.
"That's a myth," Lucas said, politely but firmly. "That is definitely a myth."
(And for anyone who might think that the trench-like San Pablo/MacArthur exit on Interstate 580 might have inspired the surface features of the Death Star, Lucas insisted that "that's a myth, too.")
On the off chance that someone sneaked a crane schematic into Industrial Light & Magic without Lucas knowing about it, I recently asked the same question of Phil Tippett, the stop-motion animation master who animated the AT-AT walkers in "Empire."
"Everybody asks that," Tippett said, adding that "I think everyone would pretty much disavow it."
Tippett allows for the small chance that somewhere in the process someone looked at the cranes. But he said the original vehicles looked nothing like a container crane.
"At one point in the design they were going to be big and kind of radio controlled," he said. "More like big armored vehicles with wheels."
New urban legend: Were the AT-AT walkers actually inspired by the Waste Management Inc. garbage trucks?
"The Fly" Teleports Into A New Tuneful Medium
(io9.com) If you've always enjoyed the David Cronenberg version of transportation horror porn The Fly but felt that it lacked the certain je ne sais quoi that a couple of song-and-dance routines would've lent the occasion, then I've got two pieces of news for you. Firstly, you're not alone. Secondly, you're about to find your dreams come true with a new musical theater version of the movie.
The new show - developed by Cronenberg and The Lord of The Rings soundtrack composer Howard Shore makes its debut in France next week, before coming to the US for a LA run this September. The official synopsis of the show runs as follows:
The Fly is an engrossing exploration of the physical and psychological transformation in which a brilliant scientist begins to mutate into a hybrid of man and fly after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong. Researcher Seth Brundle makes a stunning breakthrough in the field of matter transportation when he successfully teleports a living creature. Frustrated in his budding romance with a scientific journalist, and in need of a human subject, he recklessly attempts to teleport himself. An unseen fly enters the transmission booth as well, however, and Brundle soon realizes that his experiment has had "mixed" results.
"Mixed" in this case meaning "Expect brutal arm-wrestling incidents that turn into graceful dance routines, all put to a toe-tapping beat," of course. How long before this show follows The Producers and Hairspray in the movie-musical-moviemusical route, and can we tempt Jeff Goldblum back when it does?
Academy Invites 105 To Become Members, Including...
Brian Gernand (Model/Miniature Supervisor, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, EVAN ALMIGHTY, TRANSFORMERS)
Edward T. Hirsh (VFX Supervisor, THE HAPPENING, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT, Additional Visual Effects Supervisor, WAR OF THE WORLDS)
The complete list: http://news.awn.com/index.php?ltype=top&newsitem_no=23699
Imageworks To Honor Winston At SIGGRAPH 2008
(AWN.com) With the recent passing of VFX legend Stan Winston, Sony Pictures Imageworks has decided to change its upcoming SIGGRAPH 2008 "Studio Events" program and instead pay tribute to Winston at the Nokia Theater on Aug. 13 (8:00 -11:00 p.m.). "Studio Events" is part of the newly expanded Computer Animation Festival under the guidance of SIGGRAPH Conference Entertainment Director Jill Smolin.
Winston, of course, altered the course of movies when he transformed makeup effects from latex to animatronics and provided the foundation for a veritable galaxy of interstellar aliens, menacing chrome robots and predatory dinosaurs. His work blurred the lines between makeup, puppetry and vfx.
Winston inspired legions of directors, visual effects supervisors and artists to stretch their abilities, and his insatiable curiosity even moved beyond the film world into robotics and artificial intelligence, in innovations that found their way from the labs at MIT to the workshop in Van Nuys. Sony Pictures Imageworks presents an evening of tributes, celebrations clips and memories. A screening of a classic Winston film follows the discussion.
Christina Ricci Turns Yellow for CG Feature
While she made a name for herself with her stint as Wednesday Addams, Christina Ricci has always dipped into brighter and colorful fare here and there.
The Hollywood Reporter posts that she is going to voice the lead in a new animated CG feature called The Hero of Color City. She'll play a timid crayon called Yellow, who is one of many crayons threatened when "an evil tyrant" appears to remove color from their world. Could a timid, yellow gal be the hero? The picture was penned by J.P. McCormick, Rich Raczelowski, and Evan Spiliotopoulos, and will be directed by Becky Bristow.
SIGGRAPH Takes On Clone Wars
(AWN.com) On Aug. 14 (8:00-11:00 p.m.), Lucasfilm will present an advance screening of STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS (opening the following day). ILM VFX Supervisor John Knoll will host the evening, which will include a conversation with director Dave Filoni.
Model Kit VFX Prove Demanding
(creativematch.co.uk) Golden Square Post's work conveyed the idea that Hamilton could be realistically built from model parts through convincing but technically demanding 2D visual effects.
The spot starts with a close-up of an Airfix model kit-box for a McLaren F1 car. We are taken on a journey of the car being meticulously assembled by hand, along with its driver, Lewis Hamilton.
It climaxes with Hamilton coming to life and driving his real full-sized McLaren car into the Abbey red cube. Using the line "Great things happen when all the right pieces come together", the spot draws parallels between the care Abbey and Santander have taken in building their range of bank accounts for customers, as well as the strength Abbey and Santander gain from working together.
The majority of model parts were built by Asylum model makers who took 3D scans of Hamilton's face and body to accurately rebuild him in miniature. Golden Square, however, applied greenscreen footage to these model elements, borrowing textures and mapping them onto the real Hamilton to increase detail and create a hyper-real looking model.
The most complex shot involved the model maker's hand lowering Hamilton's miniature head onto his body, at which point his face comes alive and, once connected, one hand corrects the position of the other. Greenscreen footage of Hamilton was tracked onto the miniature replica and textured to look like a model.
In the end, the majority of the shot comes from live action but the model elements were essential for providing otherwise unobtainable detail like the inside of his neck and collar. The rotating hand effect was achieved using an additional arm, which had to match in by warping the shoulder to sit the extra arm in with Lewis' real one.
Another significant challenge came from matching footage of the real car and body elements to their miniature counterparts. All model elements were filmed using a macro lens so when this footage had to be combined with shots of Hamilton's life-sized car and body, depth of field was altered in Flame to account for the different types of lenses.
Flame was also used to stabilise shots of the model maker's shaky hand. Lastly, some shots of the car were rebuilt in 3D in order to achieve the required moves.
Take a look: http://www.creativematch.co.uk/viewNews/?96143
