Paramount Heads To Hell, Send Your VFX To Prague, & $110M Disney Museum Preview...
Paramount Begins Epic Journey to Hell
(The Hollywood Reporter)
Hellified is known to be a supernatural action movie involving a journey to hell.
Bradley is a second-unit director and stunt coordinator-turned-director who is helming MGM's high-flying Red Dawn remake. Among his credits for action design are The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, Quantum of Solace and the "Spider-Man" sequels. He also was second-unit director on Spike Jonze's upcoming Where the Wild Things Are.
"Transformers 2" Adds Another $27 Million Thursday
(Variety) Early estimates for Thursday show Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen earning another $27 million, bringing its two-day domestic total to $87 million.
The film is on its way to scoring one of the top five-day openings of all-time at the worldwide box office. Overseas, the sequel's total through Wednesday was a whopping $59 million from 11,500 locations in 58 territories Wednesday, putting the worldwide tally at a massive $146.6 million.
The current record-holder for the best five-day domestic gross is The Dark Knight, which earned $203.8 million its first five days last year. That's followed by Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith with $172.8 million and Spider-Man 3 with $169.4 million.
Of the 4,234 screens on which "Transformers" is playing domestically, 169 locations are IMAX. IMAX reported a record-breaking opening day gross of $1 million for a per-screen average of $24,000.
Czechs Beef Up Visual Effects Firms
(variety.com) Foreign film shoots in Prague may be slumping from the double blow of economic doldrums and price competition from the East, but Czechs are nothing if not resourceful -- and have a decided knack for high-tech tools. As a result, post-production facilities have felt considerably less pain this year, and are continuing to give rivals in major Western cities a run for their money.
Many of these small, young and competitive firms pay the rent with commercial work, as do many local production service businesses, but as more and more films of every budget level use these services, and the big houses in Hollywood and London overflow with work, their Eastern European brethren are waiting in the wings, looking to snap up jobs.
David Minkowski of Prague production services shingle Stillking predicts that top post houses in the Czech Republic and beyond will win more and more major studio work. "Like runaway production, there is also runaway vfx work, because vfx work can be done anywhere regardless of where a movie was shot," he says. "There is a big push in Hollywood to lower vfx costs, and taking the work to places like Universal Production Partners in Prague or even further afield in India or elsewhere is one way to do it."
Even during the salad days before the crash, Prague post facilities were surprising skeptical foreign crews with their precision and professionalism, as shingles such as UPP scored vfx work for such pics including "Flight 93," "AVP: Alien vs. Predator," "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Youth Without Youth."
Another local operation, Post Produkce Praha, or PPP, has a credits list that includes "Les Miserables" and "Anne Frank: The Whole Story" and has all the necessary post toys, from Telecine to nonlinear editing on Discreet Smoke systems and a digital linear editing suite worthy of "Star Trek."
Prague is not known as the conservatory of Europe for nothing; Czech engineers clearly have well-tuned ears. Sound post house Soundsquare is an insider-tip among Western producers, having done ADR work with Matt Damon, James Franco and Liev Schreiber and recorded the Czech dubbing for a localized version of "The Incredibles."
Producer Tom Karnowski, a veteran of Prague shoots who used UPP for vfx on upcoming medieval fantasy actioner "Season of the Witch," which shot in Hungary, says the firm has built a track record that's now noted abroad. "Everybody that I have introduced them to has also been happy with their work. They get so involved in the projects, do state-of-the-art work and bend over backwards to make it work for 'challenged' budgets."
While several Hollywood majors have admitted they may soon be forced to farm out pieces of heavy vfx pics to affordable but high-quality small studios outside the U.S., Karnowski posits that UPP is more about soup-to-nuts work.
"I think UPP likes to take on projects that they can completely control and do all work internally. I know they have done piecemeal work on projects in the past, but the real value is working with them as an all-in vfx producer and supervisor."
As for "Season of the Witch," he says, "Challenges were CGI wolves for a wolf attack sequence and the designing and implementing (of) the stylized, exaggerated, frightening movement of the monks."
Ed Milkovich, who recently produced "Masterwork," a Fox TV pilot, also used UPP.
UPP co-founder Petr Komrzy takes a soft-sell approach, rarely touting his 15-year-old Prague shop and preferring to let its work stand for itself. But, he admits, compared with most local post studios, UPP "offers much wider and deeper post-production services, and much bigger capacity, in both vfx and DI."
Ludmila Claussova of the Czech Film Commission, which handles inquiries from potential foreign productions, says she's often asked about the quality and availability of local post houses. She generally refers inquirers to the show reels of companies like UPP and PPP, she says.
Minkowski, who notes that such companies in the U.K. have seen a major boost in business thanks to Brit tax credits, argues that the same trick would make the post biz explode in the Czech Republic, ratcheting it up from a solid bargain to a service that would be highly in demand.
Claussova has long crusaded, along with many other industryites, for foreign-production tax incentives, but the Czech Culture Ministry has yet to get seriously behind the idea, even though incentives worked wonders for Hungary's production sector.
With the recent collapse of the Czech government and a new culture minister in place, she's optimistic that a plan may finally take shape soon, particularly after the admonishments of George Lucas, who argued the need for incentives during his shoot of "Red Tails," the story of the fearless Tuskegee airmen of World War II.
"I don't see pure post-production work coming from an incentive," Claussova says, "but it could animate or encourage the film productions already shooting to do post here."
Lucasfilm to Broadcast from Comic-Con
(news.awn.com) Lucasfilm Ltd. and G4 are joining forces for a milestone in San Diego Comic-Con's 40-year history -- the first-ever, exclusive television broadcast of a presentation from pop culture convention. The Star Wars Spectacular! will air Saturday July 25th at 2:00 pm ET/PT only on G4, and will feature never-before-seen footage, breaking news, surprise announcements, guest stars and more. In addition, G4 will present three hours of live coverage from the Comic-Con floor, beginning at 4:00 pm ET/PT.
Traditionally, details surrounding Lucasfilm's primary panel presentation are closely guarded secrets, with only 6,500 lucky on-site fans allowed access to the wealth of coveted information from a galaxy far, far away. But this year, G4 is offering TV viewers the one-of-a-kind opportunity to share the excitement with an exclusive broadcast of the panel. G4's ATTACK OF THE SHOW hosts Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn will join Lucasfilm's Steve Sansweet and a galaxy of guests from STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS and beyond -- including supervising director Dave Filoni, and voice talent from the show -- to provide an insider look at the STAR WARS universe, with never-before-seen footage and a live table read of an exclusive new CLONE WARS script.
In addition, fans are invited to participate in the panel itself by submitting CLONE WARS questions through a special G4 micro-site. Questions will be answered during the live presentation by Filoni and other CLONE WARS creatives.
009's Comic-Con International also marks another Lucasfilm milestone -- the launch of the all-new Star Wars Stories Project. Fans of the franchise will have the opportunity to become a part of the STAR WARS universe by contributing to Lucasfilm's own historical archive. Soliciting movie memories and nostalgia, the Star Wars Stories Project invites fans to share their own tales of fandom through video testimonials. In addition to online submissions, fans will have the opportunity to record their stories at Lucasfilm's pavilion on the Comic-Con floor.
Fans are invited to upload their fan stories at http://g4tv.com/comiccon.
Exclusive Video: ILM's Scott Farrar at the Premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
(scifiwire.com) SCI FI Wire talked with the creators of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as they walked the red carpet at the film's world premiere, including executive producer and Hasbro C.E.O. Brian Goldner and Scott Ferrar, the visual-effects supervisor at ILM.
Take a look: http://scifiwire.com/2009/06/transformers-revenge-of-t.php
Sony To Adapt "Uncharted" Video Game to Feature Film
(darkhorizons.com) Popular and well-received PS3 video game "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune" is set to become an action-adventure feature film for Sony Pictures says The Hollywood Reporter.
The story follows a descendent of explorer Sir Francis Drake, a treasure hunter named Nate Drake who believes he has learned the whereabouts of El Dorado, the fabled South American golden city, from a cursed golden statue.
The search becomes competitive when a rival hunter joins the fray, then is racheted up several notches when creatures - actually mutated descendants of Spaniards and Nazis - begin attacking those hoping to learn the treasure's true secrets.
Kyle Ward ("Kane & Lynch," "Fiasco Heights") is set to write the adaptation which Avi Arad, Charles Roven, Ari Arad and Alex Gartner will produce.
LucasFilm: A Fast Network Key to Visual Effects
LucasFilm has produced some of the most memorable visual effects in the history of films. Rendering the special effects for Star Wars (Episodes 1, 2 and 3) and the Terminator and Indiana Jones series requires serious high-performance computing infrastructure in the company\u2019s data center in San Francisco and animation studio in Singapore. In this customer profile from Brocade Communications, LucasFilm senior network manager Peter Hricak talks about the importance of network performance in visual effects and the company\u2019s use of Brocade equipment.
This video runs about 4 minutes: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/24/lucasfilms-network/
$110-Million Walt Disney Museum to Show His Tech-geek Side
(latimes.com) Walt Disney -- the man, not the company -- was known for his imagination, his artistry and even his business acumen. But it turns out he also had a huge appetite for technology.
He pushed the envelope at his own firm, developing new gadgets to help in the making of his movies. He had a passion for the future, promoting ideas through such places as his Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla. And he often engaged with engineers from other companies, such as Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co., particularly as he developed exhibits for the New York World's Fair of 1964.
The geeky side of Disney is one of the elements that will be on display at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco when it opens in October.
Museum organizers -- particularly Disney's daughter Diane Disney Miller and his grandson and namesake, Walter E. Disney Miller -- gave the press a preview Thursday, showing off the state-of-the-art $110-million facility in Presidio National Park.
The museum itself makes heavy use of modern processing power, from admissions to displays. To keep control of the number of visitors, the museum will sell tickets on the Web for specific times. One could just show up and buy a ticket, "but I wouldn't recommend it," Executive Director Richard Benefield said.
Inside, the walls will feature what Benefield called "every kind of monitor known to man." And curators have taken advantage of 19 hours of recordings of Disney's voice to provide a guided tour through his life -- his childhood, his early work as a bankrupt cartoonist in Kansas City, Mo., and his most notable achievements, including the creation of Mickey Mouse, "Snow White" and "Fantasia" and his television and theme park operations.
Also on view will be a two-story multiplane camera that Disney used for such effects as rooftop shots in "Pinocchio" and an optical printer used to blend real-life characters with animation in "Mary Poppins."
Although the museum is not formally affiliated with Walt Disney Co., the company has provided many artifacts and may even provide some technical expertise. After all, its Pixar animation unit is based right across the San Francisco Bay in Emeryville, and a Disney executive told Benefield that the company was stepping up volunteer efforts by employees.
The company even offered to help the museum teach animation classes, Benefield said.
A 110-seat theater in the museum's lower reaches will open with a three-week screening of "Fantasia." Later, Disney plans to re-release "Snow White" for the film's 50th anniversary, "and we'll be showing it in Blu-Ray in our theater," Benefield said.
Robotech Feature Film Stays Alive
(scifisquad.com) When it comes to giant interplanetary robots, Transformers seem to be winning the movie franchise game. But that hasn't stopped Warner Bros. from developing their own robot franchise with a live-action Robotech. The project has been in development for two years now, and has gone through several writers (including a heavy hitter) -- proving once again that anime isn't an easy transition to big-budget popcorn flicks. Usually this kind of revolving door means that it isn't long before the project falls apart, but Robotech has been hanging on, and now there is a new screenwriter on the scene. Over at Mania.com, they have reported that Tom Rob Smith has been hired to draft yet another version of the script for WB. Smith is another unlikely choice for an anime film, since he made his name with a novel about a series of child murders in 1950's Russia. But, according to Mania's sources, even though Smith doesn't have much experience, "He had a very clear vision for the material that seemed to fit the collective group's vision for the property."
'Transformers' VFX Guru Gives Machines a Ninja-Like Fluidity
(baltimoresun.com) The wizardry of computer graphics has become so other-worldly that it's easy to imagine the army of specialists that worked on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hidden in some underground laboratory-bunker, scurrying like super-intelligent lab rats to create "sights no one has ever seen before" under the excruciating pressure of a hugely expensive franchise picture.
But the role of visual effects supervisor isas hands-on and real-world as jobs come. Industrial Light and Magic's Scott Farrar has performed it to perfection on both Transformers pictures. His work begins long before the shooting starts, when producer-director Michael Bay and his colleagues begin brainstorming with Farrar and his colleagues on how far, this time out, they can push the art of the impossible. It ends when the film lands in the theaters.
Farrar gets to act as what he calls "a special-effects referee" when ILM begins constructing and animating the good-guy Autobots and bad-guy Decepticons at the ILM compound in San Francisco's Presidio. The title takes on weight when you realize that animators are doing tumbling turns and karate chops to figure out their characters.
And when the movie begins shooting, Farrar is on set during all six months of principal filming, in every locale from a Bethlehem, Pa., steel plant to the Jordanian desert. (He even earned a second-unit director credit on this movie.) During post-production, he kicks into overdrive, as the hundreds of people under his leadership bring so many miracles of light and action to life that they threaten to burst their disc space.
Farrar has become such an integral part of the Transformers experience that Paramount has turned him into a focus of the film's publicity. On the phone from San Francisco opening day, just back from the Los Angeles premiere, he laughs when I ask what he's doing next. He says, "My dance card is punched. These movies take a year and half for me to do - and when I say a year and a half, I mean that's constant work. I cannot commit to another movie until I know about Transformers 3."
From Day One, Farrar's job stretches from the blue-sky of ideas and imagination to the dates of the schedule and the dollars and cents of the budget. Bay relies on Farrar's expertise for drawing the game plan and putting a price on it. Once Paramount and DreamWorks grant their approval, "we start building robots right away." An average-size robot takes three months to create. It takes an additional three months to perfect the skeleton that allows it to move within a shot without any of its pieces flying away. Farrar also helps Bay guide the "animatics" and "previsualization" - the moving storyboards that allow filmmakers to test their ideas before they go on the set.
Once Bay signs off on the animation, it's time to go out and get the shots. "We filmed in seven states, Egypt and Jordan, and with a mini-unit in Paris."
Bay may be a critic's nightmare, but he's a visual-effects supervisor's best friend. "In many ways, he works like a second visual-effects supervisor, because he's got such a strong visual sense and so much skill and experience with the camera. If there's anything nightmarish about these films, it's that they're so big, and they have to be made so quickly." Farrar warms to the challenges Bay presents of seamlessly blending digital marvels with locations "the size and grandeur of Ben-Hur - and Apocalypse Now."
When Farrar started out as a special-effects camera operator in his early days at ILM, he did his effects shots on a separate VistaVision camera that had to be "locked down." The camera couldn't "pan or tilt or boom or dolly - no movement whatsoever." Farrar loves teaming up with Bay on a dynamic style where a regular 35mm anamorphic Panavision camera rarely stops moving and the effects keep pace with it. He helps Bay figure out the blocking as Farrar's team uses pink tennis balls and light poles to mark the position of the robots. Bay's camera units shoot from multiple angles, then ILM "adjusts the animation to the wild, willy-nilly flailings we come up with."
Bay insists on employing film rather than digital recording partly because he likes the grain and color range of film, and partly because he prefers spectacular natural locations. (Farrar scans the negative to create a pristine digital copy for ILM.) A high-def digital camera requires an unwieldy electronic "umbilical chord" that makes it hard to maintain out of the studio, especially in the Jordanian desert. It's heartening to think of Bay getting a thrill out of shooting in Wadi Rum, Jordan, where David Lean directed part of Lawrence of Arabia.
Outsiders tend to think of techies as slaves to the computer. Farrar, though, says, "Computers are dumb: they can't do anything unless they have a ton of information." ILM must translate into digital language every surface and texture in each shot, and set up lights within each scene's 3-D landscape according to "how a particular location looked at a particular time of night or day." Because of the shifts in shadows and light, the images in a sequence set in a deep forest could turn brownish, yellowish or vivid green. Since the robots are reflective they would look markedly different depending on the circumstances. An ILM craftsman on set stands at camera position for most of the set-ups and swings around in a circle to photograph the environment.
It's part of animation tradition that "character animators" observe the voice actors, then become mime performers themselves, acting out movements and expressions in a mirror and applying them to furry animals or magical objects. Farrar says they don't work any differently when they're doing robots. Bay always wanted the robot warriors to boast the speed and limberness of ninjas. "Our guys got so good at it that on this film they came up with unbelievable fight moves and bloodthirsty attack movements themselves, without the help of the stuntmen," even if these feints and thrusts stemmed from an animator growing up with three brothers rather than studying martial-arts or enlisting in the military.
"I'm always asked if the transformations would look right if we slowed them down," says Farrar. "The answer is, 'Yes.' " He says he relies on a couple of transformation experts who "like figuring out puzzles or creating them."
But I really wanted to know whether he thought that the different antagonists and protagonists would be clearer and stronger if the fight scenes had a more varied rhythm and choreography. "We're always conscious that you should be able to tell them apart, but sometimes just the framing of a battle sequence makes you go at a certain cadence. All I can say is that in L.A., with a huge audience of all ages, everyone seemed to get it - it was good and evil on epic scale, and all the 'Oooohs' and 'Aaaahs' and 'Yeahs' were coming in the right places."
Six months from now, the rest of us can do what I did to appreciate the first Transformers film. Fuel up the DVD or Blu-Ray, lower the sound and put on the subtitles, fast-forward through the exposition and the comedy and put the machine on slow-mo for the robot set pieces.
The Autobots and Decepticons (and their Gremlins-like underlings) - that's where the art and entertainment is in these movies, thanks to the wizards of ILM.
"Lord of the Rings" Films Used To Quell Unrest
(cinematical.com) Time Magazin has a piece from an anonymous Iranian resident reporting that the government is using film to try and quell public unrest. "In normal times, Iranian television usually treats its viewers to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. But these are not normal times, so it's been two or three such movies a day. It's part of the push to keep people at home and off the streets, to keep us busy, to get us out of the regime's hair. The message is 'Don't worry, be happy.'"
All television channels in Iran are owned by the state, so the government is choosing its films very carefully. One of their offerings has been a Lord of the Rings marathon, ostensibly picked because its length and epic content will keep people glued to their television. "We're glued to the trilogy. We are riveted. A child in the room loudly predicts that Lord of the Rings will put an end to the nightly shouts, that people will not take to the rooftops and windows because this film will keep them occupied."
