Zombies Meet Dinosaurs, Weta Cave Movie, & VFX Retinal Diabetes...
When Zombies & Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth
(MySpace) As promised, writer-director Rob Zombie
has posted preview art from his post-Halloween effort Tyrannosaurus
Rex. Alex Horley (Spookshow International) is the one responsible for
the testosterone-fueled image you can click on below. This is the
first time Zombie has come forward with anything that gives a glimpse
of what's to come when Dimension Films releases T-Rex on August 28,
2009.
Take a look: http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/topnews.php?id=6682
VFX / Anim Tentpoles Push Paramount Past $1B Domestic!
(comingsoon.net) Coming off reaching the
billion-dollar mark in international box office sales last weekend,
Paramount Pictures Corporation has now also crossed the billion-dollar
milestone on its domestic gross sales, making it the first studio to
accomplish this feat this calendar year and besting last year's
billion-dollar record by nearly three weeks.
This marks back-to-back years of firsts for Paramount Pictures and
five consecutive weeks of holding the Number One spot in domestic
market share. The studio also set a new first as of this weekend --
having the Top Three grossing films of 2008 at mid-year.
The half-year got off to a strong start with J.J. Abrams' thriller
Cloverfield earning $80M. Paramount was further buoyed by the
blockbuster successes of Marvel Entertainment's Iron Man ($305M),
Lucasfilms' and Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull ($291M) and DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda
($156M).
Spielberg to Direct Lockerbie Bombing Movie
(alpha411.blogspot.com) Legendary Hollywood director Steven Spielberg will direct a movie regarding the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing of Pan Am 103 over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland.
The movie is an adaptation of the book Flight 103, written by former Israeli officer and MOSSAD agent Juval Aviv.
"I believe the book will have an impact around the world because what happened over Lockerbie that day affected so many people in so many countries, and continues to do so," Aviv said a few weeks before the release of the book.
Although the book is presented as a fiction, it echoes the allegations made by Aviv in his famous INTERFOR report prepared to help the defense of Pan Am.
Aviv believes that Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of the atrocity, is actually innocent.
The former MOSSAD agent instead claims that Tehran officials ordered the destruction of the Boeing 747 as revenge for the accidental shooting of an Iranian airliner by the United States on July 3, 1988.
Spielberg and Aviv have collaborated previously in the making of Oscar-winning film 'Munich,' which was also based on a novel written by Aviv.
"I have been asked to consult on the movie and hope shooting will start later this year," Aviv said.
Both men are keen to make the movie as realistic as possible. They intend to hire British and Scottish actors and to film in the town of Lockerbie.
"John Carter Of Mars" NOT Live Action?
(scifi.com) Writer/director Andrew Stanton, who is reportedly working with Disney/Pixar to develop a film based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, denied to SCI FI Wire that a decision has been made on whether to shoot the movie as an animated feature, a live-action film or a mix.
"Everybody's asking that, and we are not going to make that decision for about a year," Stanton (Finding Nemo) said in an interview while promoting his upcoming animated SF film WALL*E in Beverly Hills, Calif., on June 20.
Stanton is actually responsible for Pixar's first mix of live action and animation in WALL*E in the form of short video clips of actor Fred Willard. (WALL*E opens June 27.)
Stanton confirmed widespread reports that he is indeed working on the film. "Well, it's pretty much already out there," he said. "I'm definitely writing it ... with Mark Andrews, and that's all we're doing right now, is just writing it."
Andrews' writing credits include the Pixar shorts One Man Band and Jack-Jack Attack.
The film would be based on Burroughs' series of novels, starting in 1911 and ending in 1964, set on a fictionalized version of Mars called "Barsoom" and centering on a Civil War veteran who finds himself transported to the planet, where he gets caught up with princesses and warriors.
"How Weta Came To Life" Feature Shows At WETA CAVE
(itikiwi.livejournal.com) Today I went to WETA cave! Not a cave full of wetas as in that "charming" NZ insect, but Weta, THE Weta. You can't visit the actual studios so they put up this little shop where you can see some props (Gollum! Orcs! Wicked elven swords! Axes! Helmets! Costumes! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!) and purchase some collectibles like awesome figurines and the like. They aren't even ridiculously expensive, I was expecting something along the line of several hundreds dollars for a bust or another tiny stuff, but instead most of them are between 85$ and 150$. Oh yes I'm coming back there definitely. I can't buy anything yet since it would involve carrying it around for months to come, but at the end of my trip I'll stop at every shops possible along the way I think! They also had scarves though (some made with the same kind of wool than the hobbitses capes, or Mr Tumnus' red one, oh my little fangirly heart!), so I might go back there sooner maybe so I won't freeze to death before I had a chance of seeing the majestic beauty of the South Island.
They have that small room also in which they run a maybe 15-20 min long feature, explaining how Weta came to life, their achievements, some techniques and all the different department etc. Hmmm, I just realized they didn't even show their academy awards statuettes, how modest of them. :P Richard Taylor was introducing the video, that was quite funny to see his face pop up on screen, as in hey, I know him! Well you know, as we all do, well some of you, watching the extra DVDs and all, but yeah I was please to see him presenting his company.
Source: http://itikiwi.livejournal.com/8916.html
Dark Knight VFX Get "Retinal Diabetes"
(wired.com) The Bat-plan was simple: Base-jump off one
Hong Kong skyscraper, smash through the window of another, grab the
Chinese crime boss, then hitch a drag chute to a passing C-130 cargo
plane for a daring aerial escape. And on to Gotham! An instant,
no-fuss extradition in the best tradition of American vigilantism.
Just another working day for Batman and, presumably, just another feat
of digital wizardry for the visual effects team. Except for one thing:
Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight, wanted to do it for
real.
Which is a funny thing to want when you're making a lavish superhero
sequel here in the heyday of the greenscreen. And certainly not an
easy thing to get, 88 stories above a juddering megacity on the other
side of the world. "They spent weeks in preproduction working out a
way to hang the stuntman from one helicopter and have a second
helicopter following him with the camera," says Wally Pfister, the
movie's director of photography. Two choppers and a stuntman on a
string — all to make a comic- book hero seem as credible on film as
Frank Serpico or The French Connection's Popeye Doyle. All to make a
comic-book movie speak the cinematic language of crime thrillers.
And not a moment too soon. While today's action heroes routinely come
dressed in shades of the giddy synthetic (à la Spider-Man and Iron
Man), movie fans have gorged on digital eye candy — and, perhaps
fearing retinal diabetes, now they're cutting back (Speed Racer,
anyone?). Still, gritty naturalism is no small leap for the spandex
genre. It's a mood more identified with art noir and the prestige pic,
the kind of cinema built to attract Oscars, not mass audiences.
The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan.
Nolan wants to clothe that grim aesthetic in a cape and cowl — and
then project it onto an enormous wraparound screen. He's the first
Hollywood director to shoot key sequences of a major feature in Imax,
the giant-screen film format still known mainly for whopping nature
documentaries. For Nolan, reality beats the hell out of gee-whiz
special effects. But keeping it real doesn't come cheap: The $180
million flick is Warner Bros.' biggest summer tent pole, and after
Speed Racer's flameout, its only box-office hope.
The studio should take heart. Nolan has a cogent Theory of Applied
Batmatics: Insist on reality — no effects, no tricks — up to the point
where insisting on reality becomes unrealistic. Then, in
postproduction, make what is necessarily unreal as real as possible.
"Anything you notice as technology reminds you that you're in a movie
theater," Nolan explains. "Even if you're trying to portray something
fantastical and otherworldly, it's always about trying to achieve
invisible manipulation." Especially, he adds, with Batman, "the most
real of all the superheroes, who has no superpowers."
Avengers Lineup Reported
(scifi.com) Iron Man director Jon Favreau told USA Today that Marvel Studios has its proposed lineup of superheroes for a proposed Avengers movie.
Favreau told the newspaper that the team's lineup has changed throughout the years, "but the ones Marvel is talking about now are Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man and Iron Man. I would love to see that."
Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios' president of production, confirmed to the paper that he's working toward the day when "heroes can cross into each other's adventures and occasionally team up if there's a foe too great for any one of them to handle."
Feiger and screenwriter Zak Penn (X2 and The Incredible Hulk) are uniting to get Avengers in theaters by summer 2011.
Intel Calls for Next Graphics Era
(eetindia.co.in) The traditional raster graphics
pipeline used by companies such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and
Nvidia Corp. needs to go in favour of using ray tracing for a new and
better way to render graphics, said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief
technology officer, speaking at an annual gathering of Intel
researchers. Rattner also disclosed a separate effort to extend the
C++ programming language for multi-core processors.
"We believe a new graphics architecture will deliver vastly better
visual experiences because it will fundamentally break the barrier
between today's raster-based pipelines and the best visual
algorithms," said Rattner. "Our long term vision is to move beyond
raster graphics which will make today's GPU technology outmoded," he
said.
Ray tracing
Intel researchers will present a paper on its upcoming Larrabee chip
at the Siggraph conference in August, Rattner said. The paper will
provide examples of how to create superior images using ray tracing
rather than a conventional raster graphics pipeline, he added.
To date Intel has described Larrabee only in general terms as a
processor geared for graphics and technical applications made up from
many x86 cores with a simplified, in-order pipeline. Larrabee will
sport about 100 new x86 instructions including support for vector
processing at a TFlop rate.
Although its x86 cores will be able to handle ray tracing jobs, the
chip will also support more traditional graphics rendering models for
APIs including OpenGL and Microsoft's DirectX.
Ray tracing is a computational intensive method of drawing images
based on following rays of light and their collisions with objects.
Rasterisation is a traditional method of breaking a scene into many
tiny polygons, then drawing and colouring in each shape to give the
scene lighting and texture effects.
Larabee promise
Intel said Larrabee will not ship until at least late 2009.
Nevertheless it has generated plenty of interest in the graphics
community.
"We haven't seen a new discrete graphics chip player in about a
decade," said Dean McCarron, principal of Mercury Research who tracks
graphics.
Unofficial reports have said Larabee will use 16 cores running up to
four threads each and sport a 1024-bit wide memory bus.
Just as Intel is promising a deeper incursion into computer graphics,
AMD and Nvidia are already making inroads into high end technical
computing applications.
The two companies already ship graphics chips using more than 100 very
simple processing cores. The cores can handle either raster graphics
jobs or more general-purpose computing tasks for technical
applications ranging from astrophysics calculations to medical
imaging.
Both AMD and Nvidia are expected to roll out their next generation
parts later this month. They will likely pack even more cores into
their chips and expand their efforts in technical computing.
For its part, Nvidia already has a "few dozen" technical apps written
for its Cuda environment released a year ago that supports high-end
general purpose computing on its chips. "This is a time of generating
new code," said Dan Vivoli, a senior vice president of marketing for
the technical computing effort at Nvidia.
Beyond C++
Nvidia's Cuda provides extensions to the C language to help
programmers show what parts of their code could use multiple cores
running in parallel. Intel's Rattner disclosed a similar effort based
on C++.
Called Ct for "throughput," the Intel effort provides a range of
extensions for the C++ language and a runtime compiler that can ease
the process of optimising serial code to run on a multi-core CPU. The
extensions help identify the data types and operations on them that a
program is using so the compiler can automatically spread the jobs
across multiple cores.
"We've linked up with a small group of partners to give us feedback on
these extensions from different application domains," said Rattner.
"Our next step is to take this to being a commercial product,
something which seems highly probable," he added.
The project was co-developed with Intel researchers in China and at
its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. The code also handles vector
processing tasks, using Intel's SSE extended instruction set.
"Iron Man 2" To Focus on War Machine
- Jon Favreau planned Iron Man as the first in a trilogy.
- According to MTV Movie Blogs in July of last year Favreau believed the sequel will allow latitude in tone, and explore darker story elements such as alcoholism, which he intentionally set aside from the first film.
- Wikipedia reminds us that Robert Downey Jr. has said "the next one is about what do you do with the rest of your life once you've completely changed. I think the drinking and all that stuff would be a good way to confront his age, to confront his doubts, to confront the fact that maybe Pepper gets a boyfriend."
- Downey and Favreau met with Shane Black, who suggested they model Stark on Robert Oppenheimer, who became depressed with being "the destroyer of worlds" after working on the Manhattan Project.
- Terrence Howard added this would be the manner in which his character would become War Machine, like in the comics: Rhodes built his own suit after temporarily becoming Iron Man when Stark succumbed to alcoholism.
- Favreau perceived depicting Iron Man's nemesis, the Mandarin, as a challenge, as he finds the use of the character as a metaphor for communism dated.
- There are references to the Mandarin into the first movie, primarily with the terrorist organization named the Ten Rings.
The sequel will heavily focus on War Machine. Says Howard, "Judging from how that audience responded, we got a pretty good shot of having some War Machine go down." (MTV.com)
Thor will appear in the sequel, setting up the Thor film.
Iron Man will face off against Mandarin in the sequel.
Captain America's shield has been spotted lying around Tony Stark's workshop; there have been rumors that Captain America will be interwoven in the second film's story line to set up the Captain America film, due out shortly after Iron Man 2.
Digital Models Not Subject To Copyright
(news.slashdot.org) "The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth
Circuit has affirmed (PDF) a ruling that a plain, unadorned wireframe
model of a Toyota vehicle is not a creative expression protected under
copyright law. The court analogized the wire-frame models to
photographs: the owner of an object does not have a copyright in all
images of the object, but a photographer may have a limited copyright
over a particular image based on artistic choices such as costumery,
lighting, posing, etc. Thus, the modelers could only copyright any
'incremental contribution' they made to Toyota's vehicles; in the case
of plain models, there was nothing new to protect. This could be a
two-edged sword — companies that produce goods may not be able to stop
modelers from imaging those products, but modelers may not be able to
prevent others from copying their work."
"Dance of the Goblins" Gets Funding From Game Show Mockery
(eveningnews24.co.uk) She may have been laughed off the BBC's Dragon's Den, but fantasy author Denise Channing says she is having the last laugh after securing a £20,000 investment to help get her novel made into a film.
Ms Channing, 51, from Kett's Hill, Norwich, appeared on the hit show before a panel of self-made millionaires in November, seeking £175,000 to pay for the shoot in the hope her book, Dance of the Goblins, would follow in the footsteps of fantasy films The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter by achieving box office success.
While she failed to convince the Dragons that their money would be well invested and was even described as "living in a fantasy realm" by one panellist, she said publicity from the show had been essential in securing the money from an unnamed Scottish investor.
Ms Channing has set up her own production company, Goblin Films, for the project and has even secured Hollywood star Kevin McNally, of Pirates of the Caribbean fame, for the lead role.
And she said she was particularly pleased to secure the cash in the hope it would encourage other potential investors to stump up the rest of the £200,000 needed to shoot the film.
Ms Channing, who is originally from California but who has lived in Norwich for more than 10 years, said: "When I found out about the investment I was elated. When you are seeking investments everyone always wants someone else to go first, so that's the first stumbling block.
"When you get someone putting in a significant amount it is the first step to get other people to think maybe I should be investing.
"Everything else is in place, I just need to get the money together."
Ms Channing was criticised by multimillionaire Deborah Meaden as living in a "fantasy" when she presented her business case on the BBC2 show and failed to convince any to stump up cash.
She was also repeatedly interrupted by stationery mogul Theo Paphitis and grilled over the identity of the film's star, which she wasn't able to disclose at the time of the show.
Despite the setbacks Ms Channing, who has written eight fantasy novels under pen name Jaq D Hawkins, said she was still convinced the novel would be turned into a film.
As well as the star she has secured a distributor and has even chosen sites to shoot the film, about a battle between goblins and humans, with most of the filming planned for Norfolk.
She added: "It will certainly go ahead. Going on Dragon's Den was just a way of getting people to know about it.
"It
is a bit of a game show but it is because of them that I've got my
investor, as he had heard of me from the show. People have heard of me
internationally because of Dragon's Den. They may have mocked me on the
show but it's all good publicity."
