Film Industry News

What modern directors can learn from Hitchcock’s Psycho

from Movies - Den of Geek

Fifty years old this year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is as suspenseful as ever. And, Ryan argues, modern directors could learn a lot from its maker’s back-to-basic approach...
Few mainstream directors have been as influential or well-regarded as Alfred Hitchcock. In a succession of suspense thrillers, including  Rope, Vertigo, Rear Window and Dial M For Murder, the director forged a filmmaking language that was both distinctive and personal, which would go on to have a profound effect on the output of an entire generation of filmmakers, including Brian De Palma, William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg.
For a director whose work began in pre-war England, quietly crafting black-and-white classics such as The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps, his later rise to colossal fame in Hollywood was unprecedented. Within the space of a few decades, he was one of America's most bankable filmmakers and, for a time, each one of his productions topped the last in spectacle and scope.

After the big budget blockbuster North By Northwest (if you haven't seen it, think Knight And Day, but far, far less rubbish), Hitchcock, to Paramount's chagrin, decided to try something completely different.
Setting himself a budget of $1 million, Hitchcock employed the TV crew from his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and, over the comparatively brief period of just over three months, made Psycho.
Compared to many features of the era, particularly Z-grade, drive-in fare such as The Wasp Woman or The Angry Red Planet, Hitchcock's budget was hardly small, but his self-imposed creative boundaries (in a period when he had virtually none) were arguably the cardinal reason for the film's pared back, still shocking power.












And while the conventions and rules of filmmaking have changed considerably in the fifty years following Psycho's production, there are some constants in Hollywood that still remain.
For most directors, their dealings with Tinseltown's studio system is one of steadily diminishing returns. As their fame, stature and the budgets they're afforded increase, so does their creative daring. While this isn't always true (Christopher Nolan is one director who continues to thrive creatively in Hollywood), there are plenty of other big names that prove the point.

As an example, take a look at the career of James Cameron. From humble beginnings as a production designer on low budget sci-fi schlockfest Galaxy Of Terror, Cameron steadily rose through the Hollywood ranks, carving out a name for himself with The Terminator and Aliens, before going on to direct the most financially successful movies of all time with Titanic and Avatar.
But as impressive as Avatar was from a technical standpoint, the movie lacks the economical, aggressive narrative drive of The Terminator, a film that refuses to stand still for a single frame of its 108 minute running time, and whose ambition far outstripped its tiny budget.

Within the financial and technical constraints he was saddled with, Cameron created a film with an urgency that has ebbed away as his career has progressed. As the budgets for his subsequent pictures increased, so did their running time and creative verve. 2009's Avatar weighed in at a flabby 168 minutes, and even its biggest fans would surely admit that it's not in the same league as Cameron's earlier ventures into sci-fi.
If Cameron followed Hitchcock's lead, and packed away his expensive motion capture equipment, restricted his budget and shot a film in a few weeks, could he regain the same desire to tell a concise, urgent story he so clearly had while making The Terminator?

The same question could be asked of most big Hollywood directors, both young and old. If George Lucas dared to put aside the increasingly ridiculous Star Wars franchise, assembled a small crew and went back to making films along the lines of American Graffiti or, better yet, THX 1138, perhaps he could regain the creative promise he displayed early on in his career.
Hitchcock was sixty when he shot Psycho, and yet his desire to tell concise, often dark stories was as strong as it was when he began his career. After the financial success of North By Northwest, he could have continued making huge studio pictures with big name stars and watched the paycheques flow in.
Instead, he chose to make a low-key, black-and-white film in which the lead was killed within the first half-hour, a daring plot twist at the time, and one that has since been borrowed by William Friedkin in To Live And Die In LA, and Eli Roth in Hostel.

Psycho's (mostly implied) violence pushed the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking, and its moments of pitch black comedy bear all the hallmarks of Hitchcock's impish sense of humour. When Mrs. Bates turns to confront the camera at the film's conclusion, her teeth exposed in a lipless jeer, it could just as easily be Hitchcock's face, laughing heartily at his horrified audience.
Modern filmmakers continue to be fascinated by the fluent visual language of Hitchcock, by his bravura camera sweeps and editing tricks. But Psycho provides, potentially, the most important lesson: that budgets and gimmicks can only take your career as a director so far.
So, filmmakers of Hollywood - Cameron, Spielberg, Lucas, the brothers Wachowski - forget 3D, CGI and interminable, three-hour narratives. Go back to basics. Reconnect with your audience. Find an original, startling story worth telling, and tell it cheaply, quickly, and urgently.

The Avengers set for February start

from Movies - Den of Geek

Joss Whedon will be calling all the heroes early next year, as The Avengers gets set to go before the cameras…
Jobs we'd hate: the person who has to co-ordinate the shooting schedule for Marvel's upcoming superhero opus, The Avengers.
Under the directorship of Joss Whedon, the movie is bringing together a sizeable cast of actors, each of whose schedules have to fall into place for the production. Given that these actors include Robert Downey Jr, Samuel L Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans, amongst others, it's a cast that's full of people who are hardly overburdened with spare time, too.
Still, things are slotting into place, and Marvel is scheduling production of The Avengers to begin once the shoots of its 2011 blockbusters, Thor and Captain America, are tied up. Both will be in post-production by early next year, and thus The Avengers will be heading before the cameras in February 2011.
SuperHeroHype reports that The Avengers is set to film in Los Angeles, where it'll be in production at the same time as the new Spider-Man movie. More on that here.
The Avengers, meanwhile, will be heading to cinemas on May 4th 2012. We suspect many of you will be quite keen to see it.

 

Quantum Leap to jump into cinemas

from Movies - Den of Geek

Are you one of the many who still salutes late-80s TV classic Quantum Leap? Scott Bakula confirms that a cinema adaptation is on the way…
The San Diego Comic-Con may have been and gone, but the veritable landslide of information and rumour is still being processed. And one little tidbit of information to come from the convention was that a movie of Quantum Leap is now in the works.
For those too young to remember it (not us, you'll be surprised to hear), Quantum Leap was a late-80s/early-90s sci-fi series starring Scott Bakula as a scientist whose time travelling experiments saw him appear in the bodies of different characters in each episode.
Arriving in each timeframe with no clue as to whose body he'd ‘leaped' into or how he could get back out of it again, helpful advice was imparted every week by the holographic Al (Dean Stockwell), and it was the pairing's amiable chemistry that formed the show's good-natured core.
Almost two decades after the final episode aired, and following years of rumours, Bakula has revealed that a Quantum Leap movie is finally in the works, and that a script is currently produced by the original series' creator Donald P. Bellisario.
''The good news is that Don is working on the film script and has a big time Hollywood producer who wants to do it," Bakula said, before adding, "It's about time.''
And while Bakula admitted that both he and Stockwell are now too old to play the leads again, he suggested that both actors would be making appearances in the film "somehow".
At its best, Quantum Leap was one of the era's classic genre shows, with the best episodes drawing on fateful moments in history to powerful dramatic effect. If the movie version can recreate the memorable tension of episodes such as Lee Harvey Oswald, then the premise's leap to the cinema could be a highly successful one.
More news on the Quantum Leap movie as we get it.
Moviehole

 

 Batman 3 to shoot in New Orleans, new rumours round-up

from Movies - Den of Geek

A little round-up of the latest happenings with the next Batman movie…

With Inception now firmly dominating the box office charts right across the planet, it's inevitable that we're looking firmly in the direction of Christopher Nolan now to get cracking on his third and final Batman adventure.
Nolan, who hasn't officially signed up for The Dark Knight follow-up from what we can tell, is certain to direct the film, which is set to go before the cameras in March or April of next year.
Currently, the wise money is on Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play The Riddler in the film (Jackson Rathbone has said that he'd like to play the role, but we don't see that happening), although recent rumours have suggested that Selina Kyle aka Catwoman might be making an appearance. Tilda Swinton remains our favoured choice for the role should that happen.
Elsewhere, an IMDB page for a young actor called Cody Sousa popped up last week, that had on his list of forthcoming credits that he was due to play Robin in the next Batman movie (we're indebted to Screen Rant for spotting this). It's clearly nonsense and worth nipping in the bud, and it once again highlights how easy it is to edit an IMDB listing and put together something that looks more substantive than it is. Check out our recent interview with director James Mangold for more on the problem of getting a project removed from IMDB once it's been listed!
More likely news is that the production of the next Batman film is to move away from its Chicago home for the last two films to New Orleans. According to Comic Book Movie, a deal is being done to shoot around half of the next film in New Orleans, taking advantage of the big tax breaks that have incentivised the recent production of The Green Lantern to be located there.
That said, Nolan isn't likely to be leaving Chicago altogether if this deal does come off, and given the man's talent for shooting movies of such scale, it's hardly likely to have a detrimental effect on Batman 3 anyway.
More news on the film as we get it...
Screen Rant
Comic Book Movie

Tom Cruise to do Mission Impossible 4 for scale rates

from Movies - Den of Geek

Mission Impossible 4 pushes forward, but Tom Cruise is taking a massive up-front pay cut to get it made, in the light of his apparently-waning star pulling power…

It's not been the best couple of years for Tom Cruise at the US box office, as his last couple of films, Valkyrie and Knight And Day, have both failed to crack the $100m mark in the States. In fact, Knight And Day is still languishing at $75m, an unthinkable figure once upon a time for a big budget Tom Cruise action movie.
To call the film a flop, however, would be wrong. As we noted in our piece last week, the star power of Tom Cruise is likely to turn the domestic disappointment of Knight And Day into a decent hit elsewhere in the world, and already, $127m has been brought in outside of the States, taking the film's gross above $200m.
We're still talking less than would have been expected for a Tom Cruise movie, but the man still has star pulling power.
But not, it appears, in the States. The last film of his to hit expectations in the US was War Of The Worlds back in 2005, and as such, there have been many stories surrounding Paramount Pictures' reported discomfort with Cruise as sole star of its upcoming Mission: Impossible 4. As such, it was already revealed earlier this year that Cruise would be getting a co-star in the next movie. And now it's also been suggested that his salary package is getting a big restructure in the light of Knight And Day's US performance.
The suggestion is that Paramount doesn't have the necessary confidence in Cruise headlining the film (in terms of his box office pulling power), and NYMag is now reporting that he'll be taking a scale salary for the film, with a big back-end once the movie hits profit.
The upshot of this is that he'll be taking the minimum pay allowed by the Screen Actors Guild up front for Mission: Impossible 4, and basically sharing the risk of the film.
As someone who's really enjoyed the Mission: Impossible movies - especially Brian De Palma's outstanding 1996 take on the material - I'm more than happy to see Cruise back as Ethan Hunt, and the idea of Brad Bird on board as director has long since piqued my interest.
Meanwhile, both Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg are set to return too, and this is good news.
For more on Mr Cruise's salary joys, head over to NYMag here...

 

Release dates for Frankenweenie and John Carter Of Mars

from Movies - Den of Geek

Two big Disney films for 2012, including the next stop-motion project from Tim Burton, get firm release dates…
A pair of new release date announcements have arrived from Disney, and they're for two films that are both very firmly on our radar.
First up, there's Frankenweenie, Tim Burton's latest full-length stop-motion project, which he's currently in the midst of putting together. It's based, in case you've not had the pleasure of seeing it, on one of his acclaimed early short films, and we've got until March 9th 2012 to wait until we can see it.
Given that physical production began just a month or two ago, that's a reasonably compact amount of time he's got to turn the finished project round, even appreciating that stop motion animation can be one of the quickest forms.
Next up is John Carter Of Mars, which was shooting earlier this year in the UK, with Mark Strong and Willem Dafoe starring. What's particularly interesting about this is that Andrew Stanton will be directing.
Stanton's background is in animation, and he helmed the hugely acclaimed Wall-E for Pixar. He's one of two Pixar alumni directing big budget projects at the moment, with Brad Bird set to call shots on Mission: Impossible IV later this year.
ERC Box Office

J.J. Abrams "Super 8" To Shoot In September

(cinemablend.com)         
      Comic Con: J.J. Abrams Says Super 8 Shoots In September, Won't Be 3D Notoriously tight-lipped J.J. Abrams isn't likely to be slipping any details about his secret upcoming projects during today's Visionaries panel in Hall H, but he was convinced to talk a little bit about Super 8, the Spielberg-inspired project he's set to make next. He said it was far too early to talk details, and he doesn't have a cast in place yet, but that filming will start in September. Oh, and it won't be in 3D.

It was really more of a joke to ask if Super 8 would be in 3D-- after all, it's inspired by old-school films and home movies-- but the news still got a cheer from the audience. Abrams went on to explain a little of his aversion to 3D as a moviegoer: "Everything gets dim. It all gets a little gray and muted. You get into it, my brain adjusts to it after a while, but for the first few minutes, it seems less than the experience." Sounds like somebody saw Clash of the Titans and got burned like the rest of it.

The Visionaries panel is ongoing and fascinating, so hopefully there will be more to bring you shortly.



Spielberg's Terra Nova to Shoot in Queensland

(The Hollywood Reporter)                   Steven Spielberg's time travel TV series "Terra Nova" will shoot in Queensland, where state premier Anna Bligh on Monday said that production is expected to begin in October.

"Fox Broadcasting has today confirmed Queensland as the location of choice for 'Terra Nova'... and once again shows Queensland's ability to attract first rate productions to the state," Bligh said.

"My government provided considerable incentives through Screen Queensland to secure this production which, in turn, will generate in excess of AUS$54 million ($50 million) in economic activity and create thousands of jobs," she added.

Bligh said that around 80% of the cast and crew will be Queenslanders.

Production will be centered on locations around southeastern Queensland and at the Warner Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast.

"We wanted this ambitious series to look like no other on television and Queensland provided the best of all possible worlds," executive vice president of production, Jim Sharp added.

"Queensland had the right look, climate and terrain, a vibrant production community and attractive economic incentives. We are very excited to be shooting our first production there."

Starring Jason O'Mara, "Terra Nova" tells a group of scientists from 2149 who travel back 85 million years to prehistoric Earth to try to save the planet that is dying from development and overcrowding.

Fox will preview the first episode of "Terra Nova" in May and then launch the 13 episode series in the fall of 2011.





Disney Sets John Carter of Mars Release Date

(Walt Disney Pictures)                 On June 8, 2012, the studio will release the Andrew Stanton-directed John Carter of Mars, starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Daryl Sabara, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston, Thomas Hayden Church and Willem Dafoe.

Based on the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom Series," the film chronicles the journey of Civil-War veteran John Carter (Kitsch), who finds himself battling a new and mysterious war amidst a host of strange Martian inhabitants, including Tars Tarkas (Dafoe) and Dejah Thoris (Collins).





Could A Labor Organization Save VFX Facilities?

(vfxsoldier.wordpress.com)                     When I was working at a facility that had a bargaining agreement with IATSE local 839, The Animation Guild, I found the benefits to be in abundance:

    * Individual Account Plan – A retirement account completely employer funded.
    * Defined Benefit Plan – A traditional pension plan that was also employer funded.
    * 401k – No vesting periods, funded by employee.
    * PPO health insurance – No deductibles , no co-pays.

As I explained in previous posts, I was able to keep my health insurance almost 2 years after voluntarily leaving for a non-guild facility. Benefits were also portable if you go to another guild facility and there are no extra costs to include family members. When I explain to my fellow co-workers that I paid about $400 a year in dues for such great benefits their response is the same:

    It must be too good to be true.

For a while my sentiments were the same and that my employer was probably paying through the roof for my guild negotiated benefits. However, after doing some research in how those benefits are funded, a strong case could be made that organization of VFX Facilities could actually save them money. If anything, it would probably be wash since the health and retirement benefits the guild provides would replace employer-provided benefits.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the national average employers pay for benefits on top of employees’ salaries is about 30%. According to industry sources, that’s about in line with what VFX facilities pay on top of artist salaries. One commenter on my blog claims it to be 50%!

So how much would organization actually cost? Well according to sources in the IATSE, the national labor organization that The Animation Guild is a part of, a guild employer would have to pay the following for each worker:

    * about $4 per hour worked plus about a 6% contribution into the IAP (Individual Account Plan).

I estimate the IAP contribution to be about $6000 a year. If you want to see how that number is calculated go here but lets make an assumption and calculate the amount based on an artist’s salary.

    * Assume an artist works 40 hours per week for a total of 2080 hours a year.
    * Assume that artist makes $48 an hour for a nice even salary total of about $100,000 per year.

The total amount an employer would probably have to pay to the guild would calculate to be about $14,500 per year. (*Correction – this amount isn’t paid to the guild, it is paid into the health and pension benefits. The only money paid to the guild are the dues paid by workers.) That’s far less than the national average of 30% employers pay to administer benefits.

How is it possible for the guild to provide better benefits at a more competitive price? The answer is in residuals and the economics of scale.

Residuals

This is the biggest discovery that many of us fail to make. Members of the IATSE earn residuals from the big 6 studios that directly fund the health, retirement, and pension benefits they recieve. Everytime a theater ticket, DVD, or re-run of a movie or television show is sold, a percentage of that money goes to fund benefits for IATSE members.

You are probably thinking that would amount to a lot of money and it is.

In 2008, residual income for benefits amounted to $378 million dollars! For 2009 that number is projected to be $365 million. This is why the IATSE is able to provide such great benefits at a low cost to employers and members. 55-60% of the costs for those benefits are paid for by the big 6 studios with residuals earned from sales of movies and television shows worldwide.

Economics of Scale

If you were to purchase health insurance individually, you’ll find that it’s really expensive. Part of the reason why is that it’s costly to adminster a plan just for you. Also, as an individual you have very little bargaining power with large insurance companies. However, if you join a group of people that need health insurance, you would have more bargaining power and the costs can be spread across the group making it cheaper. Like many employers, some VFX houses are able to get health insurance for their workers at a less expensive price because they can employ 200-1000 workers and bargain a bit.

The same can be said for the IATSE on a much larger scale. They sign collective bargaining agreements with hundreds of employers in the US and Canada which employ almost 120,000 members. When you combine the shear scale of the number of members and the residuals that pay into those benefits, you begin to realize how such good benefits are provided at a good price.

It’s important to note that the costs of healthcare have been rising throughout the world. The same can be said of the guild benefits. However, they have the organization to keep costs down and make sure that the rise in health care costs are slower than the national and worldwide average. They are able to accomplish this by offering their own set of clinics members can choose to visit at a lower cost and they recently increased the number of qualifying hours per year from 400 to 450.

I believe as more VFX artists become educated about organization, the more likely it will happen. We need portable benefits as we move from facility to facility, project to project. The guild has already been providing that for almost the last 50 years to thousands of workers. The question is whether we will choose to organize sooner or 40-50 years later down the line.

Eventually we will look back on this time and history will ask this question: In the midst of one of our industry’s darkest hours, did we stand up to answer the call?




Animated Tarzan Planned for 3D

(Variety)                 Tarzan will be making a return to the world of animation thanks to Constantin Films, reports Variety. Robert Kulzer and Reinhard Klooss will produce the CGI film for release in 3D.

Constantin, best known for films in the Resident Evil and Fantastic Four franchises, is also developing a live-action 3D adaptation of a classic literature in the form of The Three Musketeers, to be directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

Tarzan himself has been the focus of dozens of adaptations in both film and television since his first appearance in Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes in 1912. In 1999, Disney released a theatrical animated version (later spawning a cartoon series) as is currently at work adapting another Burroughs property for live action, John Carter of Mars, set for release in 2012.



 
Special-Effects Legend Unleashes His 'Creature Corps'

(fearnet.com)                   File this under "Very Cool Indeed". Next week, on Friday the 13th, special-effects legend Robert Kurtzman is launching a new web reality show, titled Creature Corps, which will take viewers into the world of horror filmmaking at its finest. More after the jump, including an advance video look.

Creature Corps 2010 Digital FX Reel from Creature Corps on Vimeo.

According to the official press release, "Robert Kurtzman's Creature Corps begins airing next week on Friday the 13th (August) exclusively on Robert's official website, creaturecorps.net. This innovative new weekly series dares to let you peek behind the curtain to see just how the magic of Hollywood is made, featuring backstage access only footage following the amazing Creature Corps artists as they create fantastic creatures, special make-up F/X and visual effects for various film and music video productions."

"Upcoming episodes show you the true insanity, gore and hilarity that permeate the day to day activities at the Creature Corps effects facility, as well as provide behind the scenes footage of Midnight Syndicates debut film THE DEAD MATTER and the shooting of their first music video Dark Legacy, Mushroomhead's latest music video productions for 12 Hundred and Your Soul Is Mine, extensive coverage of the creation of the monsters and F/X for the upcoming Jennifer Lynch fright flick HISSS as well as original projects and creations from the Creature Corps elite team of artists.

"ROBERT KURTZMAN'S CREATURE CORPS will also be featuring various contests and giveaways, with prizes including props, masks, autographed items and more!  Watch the web series for more info."





Frankenweenie 3D Sets Release Date

(Walt Disney Pictures)                Walt Disney Pictures is targeting a March 9, 2012 release for the Tim Burton-produced Frankenweenie, written by John August. The film is based on Burton's 1984 short about a pet dog brought back to life by his loyal owner. While the original "Frankenweenie" was a live-action project, the new one will be made using stop-motion animation and be in 3D.




A Complete Guide to Special Effects Makeup - Yours For $976.98

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Order today:    http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Special-Effects-Makeup/dp/4766118332%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJZGS6YKFPMU5FUVA%26tag%3Dmegaebookmall-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D4766118332




Disney Wraps up Mars Movie Shooting in Utah

(standard.net)                     SALT LAKE CITY - Principal photography is now completed in Utah for The Walt Disney Studios' upcoming feature film, "John Carter of Mars," being directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WallâàôE), and produced by Colin Wilson (Avatar).

Filmed throughout Southern Utah in the areas of Big Water, Kanab, Hanksville, Delta and Moab, the production created 300 jobs over a 120-day period, and brought $21 million into several rural Utah economies.

"As Governor, I am particularly happy that Utah has been host to the recently completed production of 'John Carter of Mars' during the past year. The book series was a favorite of mine when I was young, and I can't wait to see the finished film," Governor Gary R. Herbert said.

"This project has stimulated the state's local economies at a critical time and provided hundreds of jobs for Utah's film professionals."

The film's producers were considering Utah when Senate Bill 14 (Financial Incentives for Motion Pictures) was passed in March 2009. SB 14, in addition to the quality filming locations and the availability of professional crews, helped Utah win the starring role as the double for Mars.

"The collaboration between the Utah Film Commission, the Motion Picture Association of Utah and the State's robust film industry has yielded tremendous results," said Spencer Eccles, executive director of the Governor's Office of Economic Development. "We are anxious to welcome the next studio production to Utah, our message to Hollywood is, welcome home."

"This was an ideal project for Utah because of the unique landscapes we have within our borders," said Marshall Moore, director of the Utah Film Commission. Lockheed Martin had also recently used Utah as a double for Mars during an industrial shoot in 2009.

Various locations of the state were used in the production, among them Kane County and Moab City which felt a large economic benefit. "The film provided employment for extras, framers, carpenters and landscapers. Many local businesses including grocery, lumber, hardware, lodging and restaurants benefitted from the film," said Kay Giles, director of the Kane County Office of Tourism and Film Commission. The City of Moab was pleased with the economic impact the film had on their community. "This was a win-win situation for the City of Moab business owners and our citizens," said Dave Sakrison, Mayor of Moab, Utah.

The production of "John Carter of Mars," represents the largest economic impact of any movie made in Utah. Based on the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom Series," the film chronicles the journey of Civil-War veteran John Carter (TAYLOR KITSCH), who finds himself battling a new and mysterious war amidst a host of strange Martian inhabitants, including Tars Tarkas (WILLEM DAFOE) and Dejah Thoris (LYNN COLLINS). The film is scheduled to be released in 2012.




‘Tron: Legacy’ To Become lElecTRONica Dance Party

(travel.latimes.com)                A nighttime street party debuting this fall at Disney California Adventure will be tied to the upcoming “Tron: Legacy“ film and will feature sci-fi themed music, dancers and cocktails.

An open call by Disney Auditions looking for hip-hop dancers with martial arts experience, said rehearsals would begin in early September for the new “Tron” nighttime event in the Hollywood Pictures Backlot and the Sun Plaza entrance hub.

The nightly party, with the working title ElecTRONica, would run through the Christmas 2010 release of the much-anticipated movie, reported MiceAge columnist Al Lutz.

ElecTRONica replaces the surprise hit Glow Fest, a booze-fueled dance party scheduled to run through Aug. 22 at DCA. A Disney-fied version of a psychedelic rave, Glow Fest was designed to keep visitors entertained this summer while they waited for the Anaheim theme park’s popular new World of Color nighttime water show to begin.

As part of the ElecTRONica event, the former “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” soundstage may be converted into a neon-illuminated Flynn’s Arcade modeled on the video arcade in “Tron: Legacy” while the former Hollywood & Dine food court could receive an End of the Line Club makeover based on the futuristic nightclub in the film, according to Screamscape.

Spider-Man villain speculation: Christoph Waltz to play The Lizard?

from Movies - Den of Geek

Could Spider-Man finally be going head to head with The Lizard on the big screen? And is Christoph Waltz the man to play him?
Over the past week or two, I've sat back and re-watched Sam Raimi's trilogy of Spider-Man movies, and not for the first time, it left me thinking that the great loss of Raimi's cancelled Spider-Man 4 was the chance to see Dylan Baker's character reach fruition.
Baker, in Spider-Man 2 and 3, played Dr Curt Connors, whose long-term destiny was to turn into The Lizard. And there were rumours - although there was never confirmation - that Spider-Man 4 would have seen him do just that.
However, with Sony now rebooting the whole Spider-Man franchise, with Andrew Garfield in the title role and Marc Webb directing, Baker has left the franchise. And he's done so at a time when Sony is believed to be considering making The Lizard the principle villain of its new Spider-Man movie.
According to Production Weekly, Sony has someone in mind for the role, too. It's put the name of Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz forward as a potential contender for the role, which sounds like a decent call from where we're sitting.
However, we should note that there's no word from Sony on this, and nor is there a sniff of confirmation that The Lizard is set to be the primary villain in the next Spider-Man movie. At this stage, that's just where the rumour mill happens to be.
Given that Spider-Man starts shooting at the end of this year, however, we'd expect details to be forthcoming sooner rather than later...

 

Total Recall: 20 years on

from Movies - Den of Geek

Get your ass to Mars. It’s twenty years since Paul Verhoeven directed Total Recall. Ryan looks back at an action sci-fi classic…
Arnold Schwarzenegger at his brawny best. Sharon Stone divorced with a bullet. Martian hookers with three breasts. Paul Verhoeven isn't a director known for his subtlety or restraint, and 1990's Total Recall saw the Dutchman at the height of his trashy, wryly intelligent powers.
Because, while his trio of truly classic science fiction movies, RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers, is risibly, gloriously violent, there beats a deliciously cynical, satirical heart beneath all the blood and mayhem.
And yet, Total Recall could have easily been a very different film.
Floating around the offices of Hollywood for years, the rights to Philip K. Dick's original short story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, were originally purchased by Alien screenwriter Ron Shusett in the early 80s. Renamed Total Recall, the property was developed by Dino De Laurentiis, with David Cronenberg set to direct and numerous actorsincluding Richard Dreyfuss, William Hurt and Patrick Swayze attached to the lead role over the next few years.

When Cronenberg's drafts of the script failed to impress Shusett ("No, no, we want to do Raiders Of The Lost Ark goes to Mars" was how the frustrated director Shussett reacted at the time), another director, Bruce Beresford, was hastily drafted in as a replacement. Then, just as set builders began turning a corner of Australia into a miniature version of Mars, De Laurentiis' production company went belly up.
At the behest of man-mountain Arnold Schwarzenegger (he'd wanted to star in De Laurentiis' version of the film, but was turned down in favour of Swayze) Carolco Pictures bought up the Total Recall rights for $3 million. Paul Verhoeven was hired as director (again, at Schwarzenegger's insistence), and writer Gary Goldman was brought in to help Ronald Shusett finish off the screenplay, which by now had gone through more than forty drafts.

But while the movie's pre-production had been a fraught one, those difficulties didn't carry over to the big screen. Through its successive drafts, Dick's slight, curious tale had mutated into sprawling space opera, a mutation that resulted in a brash, undeniably exciting film that nevertheless retained faint, tantalising hints of the original story's themes.
Set in 2084, Schwarzenegger plays hulking construction worker Douglas Quaid, whose visit to Rekall, a company that specialises in implanting false experiences into customers' minds, inadvertently uncovers his apparently wiped true identity. Far from the blue collar underling he initially thought himself to be, Quaid is, in fact, a secret agent with mysterious links to a colony on Mars.
In a brilliant big screen synthesis of Dickian paranoia, Quaid returns home from Rekall to find that everyone he knows is arrayed against him in some massive conspiracy. His ice maiden wife Lori (Sharon Stone) isn't really his wife, but the deadly, high-kicking girlfriend of Richter (Michael Ironside, excellent, as always), and even his once-friendly co-workers are actually gun-wielding assassins.

Escaping to Mars, Quaid discovers his real name is Hauser, a one-time pawn of the colony's evil administrator Vilos Cohaagen (Ronny Cox, cast in the same nefarious bureaucrat role he played in RoboCop), and that his mind is the repository for secret information that could alter the Martian landscape forever.
Seldom concerned with logic, Verhoeven keeps Total Recall moving at an extraordinary pace, lurching from one ludicrously violent over-the-top set piece to another.
The film's most memorable moment, however, is a quiet yet remarkably tense sequence in which Quaid/Hauser is confronted by his estranged wife and a doctor, who claim that Quaid isn't really on Mars at all, but still strapped to a chair at Rekall and in the middle of a psychotic episode. By swallowing a pill, the doctor says, Quaid can save himself, and restore his life to its former balance.

It's a rare pause in the action, and made all the more mesmerising by the gory headshots and other grizzly slayings that bookend it. For the first time, the audience is given a moment to question the strange dream-logic of everything it's seen thus far. Are the colourful inhabitants of Mars, the dim-witted goons who insist on using machine guns in a glass dome, and Quaid's new love interest Melina (Rachel Ticotin) all constructs of his slumbering mind?
No matter. With another bullet through the skull, Verhoeven's off again, embarking on another half hour or so of chases, fights and gleefully nasty deaths. It's only as the final credits are set to roll, and a vast subterranean network of alien technology transforms the Martian surface, that Quaid, and the audience, have one final chance to wonder whether everything the protagonist has experienced is simply a fantasy.
Briefly the most expensive film of all time (knocked off its perch one year later by the groundbreaking Terminator 2), Total Recall looks like the product of a bygone age. Pre-CGI model effects aside, it's hard to imagine, in 2010, a big budget, mainstream movie getting away with the R-rated level of violence displayed here. With studios now more anxious than ever to pull in big audiences, executives would probably demand the film be cut for a PG-13/12A certificate.

It's unlikely, for example, that Inception or Avatar would have been granted such enormous budgets had they been as wilfully bloody as Total Recall was.
Nevertheless, Total Recall is, in its own way, a hugely entertaining movie. As a piece of action cinema or hyperactive space opera, it's a kinetic, brash rollercoaster ride, made all the better by Rob Bottin's squishy make-up effects.
And while it's not to hard to wonder just what David Cronenberg's take on Dick's premise would have looked like (though his reality-bending 1999 movie eXistenZ gives a partial answer), there's no denying that, between them, Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven created a bloody popcorn classic that, beneath the violent divorces and tri-breasted ladies, still contains distant echoes of the original short story's infectious paranoia.

GREEN LANTERN Wraps, Sequel Work Underway

(mania.com)            
    Over on Twitter, DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer and Green Lantern guru Geoff Johns tells fans, " GREEN LANTERN IS WRAPPED!!!! Finished the last shot today!!! Celebrating in New Orleans. :)"

He goes on to tweet, "As co-producer of the film, I am very, very proud of what we've got in store. Much more to come. Martin Campbell FTW."

As an added bonus, Johns also published a photo of a Red Lantern he discovered in New Orleans.

With the release of the first movie still about 11 months away, Variety reports that Warner Bros. have already gotten started with work on Green Lantern 2.

Greg Berlanti, Michael Green and Marc Guggenheim, the writers of the current movie's screenplay were commissioned to outline their treatment for the sequel a few months back. Now Warner has hired Michael Goldenberg (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) to write the script from their treatment.

Presumably the story will see Sinestro (played my actor Mark Strong) rise up as a nemesis for Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds). In keeping with
















Cloverfield Sequel Still a Priority

(MTV)                  MTV talked to Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, whose Let Me In opens October 1st, about the possibility of a sequel to the 2008 monster film.

He said that, while himself and producer J.J. Abrams are concentrating on other things right now, there's definitely still interest in returning to that universe.

"It really isn't the moment for [the sequel] to go any further than it has, but it continues to be a priority for both of us," Reeves said. "J.J. is very immersed in putting together 'Super 8.' He's... in pre-production and really, really passionately getting that together. And I'm passionately finishing 'Let Me In.'"

He also assured there's no connection between Cloverfield and Super 8.

"There literally is no connection whatsoever," he added. "It's just a really cool idea for a film. I know what [J.J. is] doing and it's amazing."

Cloverfield cost just $25 million to make and earned $170 million worldwide.





 







Tony Scott to Direct Nemesis for Fox

(Bleeding Cool)               20th Century Fox has acquired the film rights to writer Mark Millar ("Wanted," "Kick-Ass") and artist Steve McNiven's graphic novel "Nemesis," with Tony Scott attached to direct and Scott Free producing. Marvel describes the title as follows:

CIVIL WAR? Nothing. KICK-ASS? A warmup. What if the smartest, toughest costumed bad ass in the world was totally evil? Meet Nemesis. He's systematically been destroying the lives of every police chief in Asia, and he's now set his sights on Washington, DC. Between you and me, the police don't have a chance. Do not miss the book that EVERYONE will be talking about by the creative team that made CIVIL WAR the biggest book of the decade.

Millar commented on the announcement on his official site:

Oh, man. It's so good to finally be able to talk about this:

The man who shot Maverick in Top Gun, Bruce in the Last Boy Scout, yelled action for Will Smith in Enemy of the State, directed Denzel in Man on Fire (one of the finest revenge movies ever made), had Tarantino rework Hackman's dialogue in Crimson Tide and gave me Deneuve's naughtiest performance in The Hunger is directing our movie. Oh, AND he did True Romance, for my money the best of all the Tarantino flicks. Tony Scott: I can't even pretend to be cool about this.

Bryan Hitch and I would reference Tony on a weekly basis when we were doing The Ultimates. Our dream was an Ultimates movie with Scott directing because he can do the character work and the intensity, but also handle scale and action like practically no other. The idea of a him helming a superhero movie had us giddy and here he is directing the one Steve McNiven and I created. We found out last Friday night and managed to keep a secret from all but a few of our closest friends and family. But this is the call I had a couple of weeks back, which I described as the most exciting of my career; Tony on the blower chatting about how he wanted to shoot certain scenes if we gave him the rights. He was buzzing about it, describing Steve as the best comic book artist he's seen in over twenty years. We talked casting, we talked budget (and we're talking way more than Wanted and Kick-Ass put together here in terms of money for him to play with) and we talked with Fox about making this into a major franchise, something they're really going to invest their time and energy into.




Cameron Updates "Avatar" Sequels

(darkhorizons.com)                In a lengthy interview with MTV News, filmmaker James Cameron says he's working on the "Avatar" sequel, though something else in that universe is currently drawing most of his attention.

"'Avatar 2'... we're still working on deals. We don't start the movie until we get the deals worked out. I'm making notes. I'm not sitting idle... But really, what I'm working on primarily is the novel."

Cameron's held back on releasing an "Avatar" novel tie-in as "I didn't want to do a cheesy novelization, where some hack comes in and kind of makes s--t up. I wanted to do something that was a legitimate novel that was inside the characters' heads and didn't have the wrong culture stuff, the wrong language stuff, all that."

There's also talk of doing the next two "Avatar" films back-to-back, something that's not as strenuous as it sounds due to the style of the production - "We're actually talking about that. That's not a decision yet. That is something that makes a lot of sense, given the nature of these productions, because we can bank all the [motion] capture and then go back and do cameras over a period of time."




'Star Trek' Sequel Inspired By 'Cowboys And Aliens'

(airlockalpha.com)                  Space always has been the final frontier, but the sequel to J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" will take some cues from the old Western frontier thanks to the latest Hollywood genre mash-up, "Cowboys and Aliens."

    Details on the plot of the new movie are being carefully kept under wraps (although that hasn't stopped wild speculation swirling the web) and the script hasn't even been finished, but writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman insist the follow-up will remain immensely loyal to the original canon and bring the series back to the very origins of the franchise.

    "['Cowboys and Aliens'] inspires it a little bit," Orci said. "'Star Trek' was 'Wagon Train [to] the Stars.' Isn’t that how Gene Roddenberry pitched it? So right now we’re just doing 'Stars Come to the Wagon Train' and now we start turning. Once we start relaxing about what we’re doing here, I’m hoping that being out in the woods a little bit will kind of inspire the right decisions hopefully."

    How far are the duo in scripting? Right now, they are about half complete, but events are still subject to change ... and change they might once fellow scribe Damon Lindelof returns from his vacation. The "Lost" co-creator, who has been consulting via e-mail, is enjoying a break from Hollywood following his six-year odyssey on a mysterious tropical island.

    "I’d say we’re halfway through the story," Orci said. "Halfway through all of us going back over what we’ve talked about and seeing if it really sticks. We’ve built a little Jenga castle storywise, and now we’re going to go pick at it and pull at it and if it stays standing. We know what we have."




Oscar Winner to Direct Digital Production Arts at Clemson

(clemson.edu)                   CLEMSON — Jerry Tessendorf, winner of the Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2008, has been named director of the Digital Production Arts program at Clemson University, a graduate program for professionals in the film, video and gaming industries.

"Jerry will take the lead in implementing our five-year plan to achieve recognition as the lead institution in the training of technical directors and technical artists for the film and electronic games industries," said Esin Gulari, dean of Clemson's College of Engineering and Science. "We're excited to have his knowledge, experience and enthusiasm at the forefront of this important program."

Tessendorf will be a professor of visual computing in Clemson's School of Computing. In addition to directing the Digital Production Arts program, he will teach and perform research in animation and rendering for visual effects production.

The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bestowed Tessendorf and three colleagues an Oscar for technical achievement in 2008 in recognition of their development of custom fluid dynamics tools. The tools allow artists to create realistic animation of liquids and gases. The system also included a unique scripting language for working with volumetric data.

Tessendorf's film credits include "Titanic," "Waterworld," the "X-Men" series, "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe," the "Night at the Museum" series and "Superman Returns." Most recently he was principal graphics scientist at Rhythm & Hues Studios.





NSW Boosts Support for Visual Effects

(news.smh.com.au)                   Television and film post production companies specialising in digital effects will find it easier to get financial support in NSW.

The threshold for the state government's Film and Television Industry Attraction Fund has been lowered from $3 million to $500,000 for post digital visual effects, to reflect recent changes at a federal level, it said on Friday.

NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal said the lower threshold for projects would help attract high-technology post production to NSW.




Hobbit Delays Crushed Guillermo del Toro's Disney Animation Deal

(slashfilm.com)             In the Deadline interview, del Toro makes it sound like the delays with The Hobbit were to blame for the quick demise of his deal with Disney to set up some animated films that have a slightly darker tone than most Disney fare. So if you’ve been looking for information on animated films from Disney Double Dare You, might be time to stop.

del Toro says,

    Some of those big deals I’d made, with Disney and Universal, I had to dance really fast to be able to get a period of grace to shoot those Hobbit movies, and then be able to make those deals active again. That period came and went, and we were not shooting. That Disney Double Dare You deal is gone.  I am developing a relationship with DreamWorks that’s still to be defined, but it’s not as it was going to be at Disney. Disney was a beautiful opportunity, but with the timing and the delays and everything, I couldn’t activate it.




US Image Metrics Buys Facepro to Improve Animation Efficiency

(tmcnet.com)             US facial animation software firm Image Metrics (OTC:IMGX) has acquired lip synchronisation technology company Facepro in a move to enhance animation efficiency, Image Metrics said Thursday without giving price details.

Embedding Facepro's audio-based facial animation technology in Image Metrics' software will improve the product's quality and will also make it more cost effective. As a result, the cost of facial animation will be reduced to USD12 per second, Facepro president Rod Stafford said.





Little Old Lady Talks "VFX Assault & Battery"

(theunion.com)                   Movie special effects have simply gotten out of hand. Lately, while attending two or three blockbuster movies in a row, I have felt like a victim of assault and battery. To begin with, Dolby surround sound is jolting enough to destroy brain tissue, and prolonged exposure to it must certainly result in acoustic trauma.

Secondly, putting on 3D glasses becomes the prelude to experiencing a kind of guided missile attack. The movie theater becomes a war zone. When I have dared to look around, I have expected to see dead bodies lying in the aisles. And I wonder if the next innovation will be to install explosive devices under the theater seats.

I am one of a trio of little old ladies who look forward to enjoying lunch together, and then attending an afternoon matinee. Of late, we have attended some highly rated, three or four- star movies, and have emerged from the theater feeling lucky to have survived. Then we ask each other, “Now exactly what was that whole thing about?”

As long-time movie fans, we are certainly not averse to innovation and excitement. We buy tickets because we want to be fascinated, enriched, amused or entertained, and, above all, to become involved in what we're looking at. What we do not want is “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

It used to be that film stars were the ones who carried a movie. Sometimes their sheer glamour or force of personality could make the ordinary seem wonderful, poignant, sinister or funny.

They were the main attraction. They may have been seriously flawed people in real life, but on screen they embodied the ideal. The acting of the great stars left us a legacy of splendid and memorable performances.

However, it seems to me that in present day films, the stars may become mere adjuncts to spectacular special effects which are undoubtedly impressive as purely technical achievements but do little to enrich the plot or augment our understanding of the motivations of the characters.

Of course, old-time movies were padded with some simple special effects, too. (Hours of dialog are hard to write!) Early on, the familiar car chase, which is still with us, became routine in any action movie.

However, in olden days it was merely a short diversion and although it might end in a crash, it was never grisly in the sense of having severed body parts flying through the air.

The first time I ever saw anything akin to a car chase was in a “picture show” I attended 80 years ago (the word “movie” may not yet have been invented!).

I forget the title of this opus, but I know it starred the Oklahoma humorist, Will Rogers, paired with a timid comedienne named Zazu Pitts.

Her talent lay in her sad-sack portrayals of characters who were the blameless victims of life, lost souls absolutely resigned to suffering every conceivable kind of mischance.

In the scene I remember, these two simple, lovable characters are in an open touring sedan, free-wheeling down a steep, one-way mountain road.

He is valiantly trying to steer the run-away car around hairpin turns as their speed relentlessly accelerates. She is haplessly hanging on to her hat, caught as usual, in circumstances beyond her control, with no happy ending in sight.

The sequence was scary but at the same time hilarious. Furthermore, what the actors seemed to be experiencing was something the audience could relate to.

We saw the actors as people just like us. We were riding along with them; the outcome concerned all of us. Probably that is why this scene has lingered in my memory and still makes me smile when I think about it.

As I get older, one of the matters I tend to ponder is the possibility that human beings may become redundant in an automated and technologically sophisticated world.

Scientists are now seriously discussing the matter of singularity which as I understand it is the real possibility that technology (robots?) could turn on us and eventually usurp control of our lives.

Can it be that my concern over this prospect has morphed into a neurosis? Am I crazy to worry about cinema special effects producing “reel” people who are not “real” people anymore?

Like Zazu Pitts, maybe the only thing I can do is just hang on to my hat and await developments, hair-raising though they may be.

Kevin Smith’s Red State gets going next month

The cast falls into place for Kevin Smith’s long-mooted horror film Red State, as its shooting start date is confirmed…
It's been a long time coming, but the Kevin Smith project that many of us are keenest to see - Red State - will be going before the cameras next month.
Red State is the supposedly-uncommercial horror movie that long-time Smith collaborators, the Weinstein brothers, opted not to invest in, and over the past couple of years, it's been a battle to put the funding together for the film. At one stage, Smith was considering a fan-funding mechanism, but logistical and tax problems brought that idea to a close.
However, the funding for the film has now fallen back into place, and off the back of his most commercially successful film to date, Cop Out, Smith is set to roll cameras.
As promised, he's put together a cast for the film that eschews star names. Michael Parks is in the lead role of Reverend Fred Phelps, with the likes of Stephen Root, Michael Angarano, Kyle Gallner, Melissa Leo and Dermot Mulroney all rumoured to be in the cast.
Smith is set to start shooting on 22nd September, he's confirmed via his Twitter feed, although compared to his usual openness about his productions, this one looks set to be a little quieter.
As soon as we have details of a release date, or more information on the movie, we'll gladly pass it on. This is one movie we're really, really looking forward to seeing...

The Thing 100% CGI, Dark Crystal in 2011, & Snowman Still Frozen...

(collider.com)               While I’m not sure that many would argue the previous Fantastic Four films were anything but disappointing from a sheer cinematic perspective (on the bright side, I’m sure they sold tons of merch to my nephews), 20th Century Fox still has future plans for the franchise with Fantastic Four Reborn. That said, Screen Rant is reporting today that the studio has made two announcements regarding the film’s status:
- The Thing will be 100% CGI rather than using a practical effect suit like the one worn by Michael Chiklis in the previous installments.
- The reboot itself is on hold pending the completion of X-Men: First Class.






"Monsters, Inc. 2"  Blinks - Moves Release Away From Twilight Sequeul
(Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures)                   With yesterday's announcement that Summit Entertainment will release The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 on November 16, 2012, both Disney•Pixar and DreamWorks Animation have moved their animated films into new spots that same month.
Disney•Pixar has announced that Monsters, Inc. 2 has been moved up from Nov. 16 to Nov. 2, 2012, while DreamWorks Animation has moved Leonardo DiCaprio-voiced The Guardians back from Nov. 2 to Nov. 21, 2012.
Disney also announced that the 3D version of Beauty and the Beast has been removed from the studio's release schedule along with Disney•Pixar's newt. It has been rumored for a while that newt was cancelled, but it looks like we got confirmation today.
In other release date news, Columbia Pictures has set a Nov. 11, 2011 release for the Adam Sandler comedy Jack and Jill. Sandler will play both characters in the film that will face Immortals on that same day.

The Henson Company to Release a "Dark Crystal" Sequel in 2011
(albertam.com)       

   In 1982, The Henson Company took a chance and created an all puppet fantasy film that many claim was a flop. Except that its fan base grew and grew, turning it into a cult classic loved by many all over the world. Fans know what we’re talking about: The Dark Crystal. Now, all these years later, we have amazing technology and the ability to create very real animation. So, the Henson Company is at it again, this time using our technology to create a sequel to The Dark Crystal.

The sequel, titled The Power of the Dark Crystal, takes place hundreds of years after the first movie. The world is in darkness, and a young girl made of fire travels through the land with a Gelfing outcast. The film follows their adventure as the young girl tries to get a shard of the Dark Crystal and try to relight the dying sun that rests within the deepest part of the planet.

Plans for The Power of the Dark Crystal have been tossed around for a few years now, but finally some important news has been released and we’re getting a bigger look at what this Dark Crystal sequel will include. Here are some things to expect in The Power of the Dark Crystal:

-The Power of the Crystal will be in 3D. Most people hear this nowadays and just groan. It didn’t take long for 3D to lose its hype. Lucky for us, this is about the only thing in The Dark Crystal sequel that might fail.

-Brian Froud, creative genius behind the puppets from The Dark Crystal is returning to develop the characters in The Power of the Crystal. This is a huge win for the sequel.

-The Power of the Crystal is going to combine live action, puppetry, animatronics and CGI effects. Since the movie isn’t going to rely heavily on CGI, there is a greater chance that the sequel will do the first film justice, and in fact, make it better.

-Australia based Omnilab-affiliated Iloura will do the CGI. Haven’t heard of them? These are the guys that did Where the Wild Things Are. No matter what anyone thinks of that movie, the CGI was right on with the creatures from the beloved book, and looked extremely real. With this group in charge for The Power of the Crystal, our fantasy beings are in great hands.

-Craig Pearce wrote the screenplay. He also wrote the screenplays for Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. Was it really that hard to write a screenplay for Romeo + Juliet, though? The lines are already written, just add direction. Moulin Rouge is a beloved cult film filled with over-the-top sappiness. So, we will see where Pearce goes with The Power of the Dark Crystal.

-The Spierig Brothers are set to direct The Power of the Crystal. Michael and Peter Spierig are relative newbies to the directing business. They’ve directed only two films. The first was a low budget horror film called Undead that channeled Sam Raimi pretty well. The second, and what probably won them the job for the Dark Crystal sequel, is Daybreakers. It is a vampire film, which has nothing to do with The Dark Crystal, but it has won good reviews for its humor and action. What will make fans happy about the Spierig Brothers taking the helm for The Power of the Dark Crystal is how much they love the movie. Michael Spierig said that this sequel comes with a “tremendous amount of responsibility” and that they want to create the film with the same “meticulous care that Jim Henson and Frank Oz gave the 1982 original”.

-The Power of the Crystal will arrive in theaters at some point in 2011.




Men in Black 3 Shooting in New York

(horror-movies.ca)                  From ComingSoon comes word that Men in Black 3 will begin shooting in New York in September. We have known for awhile that SONY has been working on a Men In Black 3 and that Ethan Cowen who wrote Tropic Thunder was writing the film. Men in Black 3 will be in 3D and released into theaters May 26th 2011. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are both slated to return and reprise their roles.








Luc Besson In 'Outer Space Prison'

(darkhorizons.com)                 French filmmaker Luc Besson and actors Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace are set to team for the space prison hostage thriller "Lockout" which is looking likely to be set up at Sony Pictures says Deadline.

Pearce would play a man wrongly convicted of espionage who is offered his freedom if he can rescue the president's daughter (Grace) from an outer space prison which has been overrun by its violent inmates.

Besson co-wrote the script with James Mather and Stephen St. Leger who will direct. Shooting starts September 7th.






"An American Werewolf in London" Reboot Looks For Modern Spin

(slashfilm.com)                 Last year it was announced that the Weinstein brothers had acquired the rights to remake An American Werewolf in London, and my heart sank. Since then, there’s been no news of any progress on the project.

It looks like the remake is starting to kick into gear, with the studio looking to Fernley Phillips, the writer of The Number 23, to tackle the screenplay.

The Los Angeles Times, who reported the news, is saying that The Weinstein Co. is looking to give the movie “a modern spin”. Bloody Disgusting adds that they’ve been told the Weinsteins “are really looking to depart from John Landis’ [film].”

What makes the original 1981 film special is its genre-bending wit and energy, and top notch direction from John Landis (as well as Rick Baker’s special FX work, natch).




'Transformers 3' Casting Extras in Metro Detroit

(mlive.com)                If you're looking to earn some extra cash, get your start in the acting biz, or just want to be part of a blockbuster action flick, take note.

According to Michigan Acting, "Transformers 3" is currently casting extras in Metro Detroit for filming that will take place here at the end of August.

There are virtually no discriminating factors -- males and females of all ethnicities and looks can apply (unlike this film, which was looking for a very particular type of people), they just have to be over the age of 18.

To apply, submit a current picture and your name, phone number, age, height, weight, and sizes to trans3detroit@gmail.com.

"Transformers 3" has been filming Los Angeles and Chicago and will move to Detroit later this month.

There are rumors some filming will take place in the abandoned Packard Plant, and that there will possibly be some "blowing up" of parts inside the building.

According to the Warren, Ohio Tribune Chronicle, Paramount studios execs said "They fell in love with it because they can blow up parts in the movie and it won't matter."




Beauty And The Beast 3D Pushed Back Indefinitely

(cinemablend.com)                 Beauty And The Beast 3D Pushed Back Indefinitely This whole 3D craze has taken the theater-going world by storm, but what about the in-home market? While 3D TVs are available and are being heroically promoted by the biggest 3D enthusiast there is, James Cameron, it’s still going to take a long time to sell people on the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a new TV set that requires they wear glasses to watch it.

The lack of widespread acceptance for 3D TVs helped Disney decide to push back the release of Beauty and the Beast 3D until 2011 or later, according to THR. The entertainment giant already has Toy Story 3D in the hopper after converting the first two Pixar classics for last October’s theatrical re-release, which earned $30mil collectively, just enough to cover the proposed $15mil per movie conversion cost. Right now, Disney isn’t sure that a Beauty and the Beast re-release would have as much success.

To hold people over, the Mouse House has planned a 2D re-release in Blu-ray/DVD combo form of Beauty for October 5th, but with the fate of in-home 3D still in question we may be waiting a while for the added dimension.





Lucas: 'Star Wars TV Series on Hold'

(digitalspy.com)                 Star Wars creator George Lucas has revealed that a live action television series based on the franchise has been put "on hold".

The director originally announced his intention to produce a show set between the events of Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope back in 2005.

However, at a recent digital screening of The Empire Strikes Back in Chicago, he admitted that the project's future is uncertain.

"The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don't know how to do them," he said.

Lucas explained that budget restraints had made it difficult to realize the grand scope of the stories he had planned.

"They literally are Star Wars, only we're going to have to try to do them [at] a tenth the cost," he confirmed. "And it's a huge challenge, [a] lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be."




'Clash of the Titans' Dominates Video Charts

(hollywoodreporter.com)                "Clash of the Titans," a remake of the 1981 cult classic, was a titan on the video charts the week ending Aug. 1.

The Warner Home Video title, which earned more than $163 million at the boxoffice, easily topped the national sales, Blu-ray sales and rental charts its first week out.

It also scored the second-highest Blu-ray share of total unit sales for a No. 1 new release this year, at 44%. It was second only to blockbuster "Avatar," which scored 49% in Blu-ray sales share its first week of release. "Avatar" managed to come in No. 4 on the Blu-ray sales chart, despite being in release since April.




Tron Legacy 3D & VFX Panel Talk From Siggraph

(vfxworld.com)                  When asked why make Tron Legacy in 3-D, director Kosinski responded: "It's Tron, man! If any film needs to push boundaries and take you into a new world, this was it. Stylistically, what I found interesting about 3-D is you can sit on a master shot and let the scene play out longer like a stage play because it does have depth and there's all this other information you're getting from it. You don't have to cut around as much to keep the energy up. There's really something nice about just sitting with the 3-D image for a while, which I'm really excited about."

Preeg explained that the performance capture process was the reverse of the Oscar-winning Benjamin Button's: "… we had to utilize these mounted cameras and figure out what to do with that data, which meant writing a lot of software internally, and I think one of the big things that has helped us on this show is that our animation team is actually quite small. One of the [other] things that we wanted to do was put this volume process in the hands of the animator so they could run the iterations of the solver and choose parameters for the solve and put it all into a nice interface for them. I think that was a big change for us and they've been very responsive to that process."

Full Press:   http://www.vfxworld.com/articles/3d/siggraph-2010-tron-legacy-and-more/page/2%2C1




Disney Snowman Still Frozen

ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Engineers at Walt Disney World say they trying to figure out how to re-activate a 25-foot tall mechanical abominable snowman that stopped working last year.

The animatronic yeti that once lunged at rollercoaster riders at the Florida theme park stalled in March 2009 and has been idle ever since with no more than a flashing strobe light giving it the illusion of motion.

"It's embarrassing that this technological marvel is left … to just sit there," Tony Crane, 35, St. Louis, told the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel during a recent visit to the park.

Disney told the newspaper the 20,000-pound yeti has a lot of moving parts and is the most complex of Disney's animatronics. A spokeswoman said getting the yeti back in motion was equally complex and the company was considering its options.

The Sentinel said the frozen state of the snowman goes largely unnoticed by most customers on the Expedition Everest ride, but at least two Facebook groups lobbying Disney to fix the creature have been formed.

"The yeti not working to me is akin to riding the Haunted Mansion and not having any ghosts in the graveyard," Martin Smith, 38, Manchester, England, told the newspaper.

Babar Hybrids, VFX Pros Out Of This World, & Ridley Scott's Forever War...

• 4 days ago

Sommers Returning to Direct G.I. Joe Sequel

(TheWrap)                  Paramount Pictures has yet to confirm this, but TheWrap is reporting that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra director Stephen Sommers will return for the sequel.
The site adds that Channing Tatum is expected to reprise his role as Captain Duke Hauser in the follow-up. Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are writing the script.
"The Rise of Cobra," which was released a year ago, earned $302 million worldwide and cost about $175 million to make.

Quentin Tarantino to Direct The Shadow
(comingsoon.net)              Quentin Tarantino is now attached to direct and co-write a new version of The Shadow at 20th Century Fox. The site says:
The Shadow is likely one that may be passed around to a few directors before it ever gets made — as of the moment, it's not even a huge priority over at Fox. In fact, it's currently out for a rewrite... However, the person that is now attached to the project is none other than Quentin Tarantino, who is also attached as co-writer... Maybe he loved [the] original radio show and the pulps (which do seem up Tarantino's alley), and maybe he saw Siavash Farahani's script and decided that, if anyone could erase the memory of Alec Baldwin's atrocity, it'd be him. Maybe Tarantino just loves the challenge. Or maybe he’s just added this to the huge pile of future possibilities and has no intention of ever directing. All I know is that, for the moment, he is being discussed (and this is a two-way discussion) and or already attached as the future director of The Shadow.

Haden Blackman Resigns From LucasArts
(theforce.net)       

   IGN reports that Haden Blackman, executive producer and writer for The Force Unleashed series, has resigned from his LucasArts position. IGN got confirmation from LucasArts on the news and a representative assured that the development of The Force Unleashed II will not be affected.

Blackman issued a statement that included the following:

"I've had a fantastic time working with the team at Lucasfilm and am really grateful for their ongoing support."

"While the decision to leave LucasArts did not happen overnight or come easily, I really feel that now is the best time for me to move on and explore new creative challenges and I look forward to the next phase of my career."





Transformers 3 Cancels Return Trip to Wisconsin

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- "Transformers 3" will not be returning to Milwaukee.

Crews used the Milwaukee Art Museum last month to film scenes with Shia LaBeouf and Patrick Dempsey.

There were thinking of using pyrotechnics at the empty Tower Automotive site. But Film Wisconsin spokesman Dave Fantle says changes to the production schedule made returning impractical.

VISIT Milwaukee has estimated the production brought $1 million to the area in salaries, hotels, food, fuel and equipment.

The movie is expected to be released next summer.




"Babar" To Become CG/Live Action Hybrid Feature

Temple Hill, the production company behind the "Twilight" films, is planning a family film franchise based on the classic "Babar" children's books reports Deadline.

The books, first created by French author Jean de Brunhoff, followed an elephant that leaves the jungle for the big city, then returns with lessons learned to become king. Temple Hill recently made the deal with rights holders Nelvana and The Clifford Ross Company to adapt the property for the big screen.

Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey are producing the project which is being pitched as a family comedy mixing live-action with CG.





VFX Pros Head "Out of This World" For Academy Show

(latimesblogs.latimes.com)                There's science and there's fiction and then there's science fiction. The space in between them -- or, more precisely, the outer space between them -- will be the topic this Thursday at "Out of This World: The Science of Space Movies," the latest program from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Woman in Space The presentation will be made by Adam Weiner, the author of "Don’t Try This At Home! The Physics of Hollywood Movies," who plans to cover a lot of stellar territory.

"We are starting with the original 1902 Georges Melies 'A Trip to the Moon,' which is quite fantastic," Weiner said. "We will be doing factually true-to-life movies like ‘Apollo 13’ and ‘October Sky’ and then more fictional ones like ‘Mission to Mars,' ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Star Trek.’ There are movies like ‘Armageddon,’ which is famous for sounding scientific, but really makes a lot of mistakes along the way. We will also be showing a couple of clips from the movies."

Weiner, who hosted a similar program last year on superheroes and superhero cinema, teaches physics at the Bishop’s School, a private high school in La Jolla.

"I discovered in my classes that using clips from movies was an excellent way of keeping them engaged and learning science," Weiner said. "We take scenes from movies and deconstruct them according to real principles of science. Obviously, you are showing how something can’t be true, but you are also showing how some things might be possible."

Weiner will join a panel discussion with Oscar-winning visual effects artist Richard Edlund of "Star Wars"; Philip Eisner, a screenwriter whose credits include "Event Horizon";  former NASA flight director Gerry Griffin, who was technical advisor on "Apollo 13" and "Contact"; former NASA astronaut Jeffrey A. Hoffman, who has logged more than 1,200 hours in space;  and visual effects supervisor Hoyt Yeatman, whose credits include "Mission to Mars."

Also, on Friday, Weiner will host a screening of Fritz Lang’s 1929 sci-fi silent film "Frau im Mond," a.k.a. "Woman in the Moon," at the academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater.

On Saturday, the academy and Cinefamily will be screening 1968’s "Project Apollo" and the Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary "For All Mankind" at the Silent Movie Theatre.

"Out of This World: The Science of Space Movies," 7:30 p.m. Thursday , Samuel Goldwyn Theater

Event Info:    http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2010/outofthisworld.html





Green Lantern Villain Fitted CGI Costume

(splashpage.mtv.com)                  Even though we received our first look at Sinestro in "Green Lantern" last week via a series of promotional posters for the film, there's still a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to Hal Jordan's mustachioed mentor in the Green Lantern Corps.

During this year's Comic-Con, MTV News caught up with actor Mark Strong, who plays Sinestro in "Green Lantern," and got more info about the popular character's look for the film and how it evolved.

"People will be — and I am — really delighted at the fact that they've really made sure that he is as he is in the comics," said Strong. "Because there was a whole production run of ideas of ponytails and goatees and all this kind of stuff, [and] I couldn't really understand why they would want to change it, because it's so successful in the comic."

"It's born of the look of David Niven, that moustache and that widow's peak, and I think it would be a shame to get rid of it," he added. "I'm delighted, because he looks pretty much exactly like he is in the comic."

Asked how the "Green Lantern" team pulled off his signature look, Strong said it was "prosthetics and makeup from the neck up," but indicated that the suit would be entirely CGI — much like Ryan Reynolds' "Green Lantern" costume.





Technicolor To Set Up VFX Unit

(broadcastnow.co.uk)                      Technicolor will launch a dedicated graphics and visual effects department at its Soho facility next month as it looks to extend its reach in the broadcast market.

The company’s Design Lab will be made up of five current editors, a senior DI op and new Flame artist and senior designer Dolores McGinley, who will join in August.

The new department will use Smoke on Mac, Nuke, Cinema 4D, Quantel iQ, Avid DS and Final Cut Pro to provide title sequences and end credits, alongside vfx supervision and compositing services.

Design Lab will look to avoid any competition with sister visual effects facility MPC by side-stepping high-end work, instead targeting existing and new clients working on TV series and midrange feature films.




Ridley Scott's 'The Forever War' Gets a 'Blade Runner' Screenwriter

(cinematical.com)                   Author Joe Haldeman just announced on his Livejournal that the film adaptation of his excellent The Forever War, a science fiction novel that serves as an allegory for the Vietnam War, now has a screenwriter attached to it. Now, for the sake of context, director Ridley Scott has been threatening to make an adaptation of The Forever War for, uh, a while (Must! Resist! Obvious Pun!) and with this announcement, it looks like the film may finally be moving forward.

Though he only obliquely alludes to it, Haldeman says that the film's script will be written by someone " with good credits--like, Unforgiven." That could only mean David Webb Peoples, the sole credited screenwriter of Clint Eastwood's inimitable and much-ballyhooed western.

It's interesting, though hardly shocking, that Haldeman should isolate Webb's most prestigious solo screenwriting credit. I mean, he's not likely to name-drop Paul W.S. Anderson's Soldier, Peoples's most recent script, solo or otherwise (I like Soldier but c'mon, the script isn't what makes it fun, y'know?), though it probably has more in common with The Forever War than Unforgiven does. No what's interesting is Haldeman's emphasized a solo credit over one of the films Peoples's has collaborated on with others, like, say, 12 Monkeys or even Scott's Blade Runner. Makes me think that he's really pulling for this guy to make a good adaptation.




George Lucas Donating Half His Fortune to Charity?

(guardian.co.uk)                    The world of philanthropy got a huge financial boost today as more than 30 American billionaires pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes to charitable causes, signing up to a campaign launched by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

In an unprecedented mass commitment, top figures including New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hotel heir Barron Hilton, CNN media mogul Ted Turner, and the Star Wars director George Lucas lent their names to the "giving pledge", an initiative founded last month to encourage America's richest families to commit money to "society's most pressing problems".

The pledge is not a legally binding contract but is described as a moral commitment. Buffett, the legendary Nebraska-based financier known as the "sage of Omaha", welcomed the influx of support: "At its core, the giving pledge is about asking wealthy families to have important conversations about their wealth and how it will be used. We're delighted that so many people are doing that."

He added that many of those involved were committing sums far greater than the 50% minimum. Buffett himself is handing the vast bulk of his $47bn fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is largely orientated towards tackling disease in developing countries.

Among those committing to give away money are the Oracle software tycoon Larry Ellison, the banker David Rockefeller, and oilman T Boone Pickens. The media entrepreneur Barry Diller is on the list along with his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

There are also names from Wall Street and the hedge fund industry including David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle private equity group, and the financier Julian Robertson, plus a former Citigroup boss, Sandy Weill.

The pledge does not define any specific causes that the billionaires will target with their fortunes, and it does not involve all the individuals pooling their money. Instead, it will be left up to each individual to determine which endeavours they wish to fund.

The Hollywood director George Lucas said his chosen cause would be education: "My pledge is to the process; as long as I have the resources at my disposal, I will seek to raise the bar for future generations of students of all ages."

New York's mayor, who made his fortune in Bloomberg financial information terminals, said: "By giving, we inspire others to give of themselves, whether their money or their time."

Source:     http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/04/us-billionaires-half-fortune-gates

MGM's Outer Limits, Star Tours Is Closed, & SPFX Mousterpieces...

• 5 days ago

MGM Goes to The Outer Limits

(Variety)               Although MGM's future is in doubt, the studio has hired "Saw" franchise writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to pen a feature take on "The Outer Limits," the sci-fi series that aired on ABC from 1963-65.
A spokesperson for MGM tells Variety that the duo was hired well before the studio's current financial troubles began.
Cale Boyter is overseeing for MGM. Jon Shestack (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) and Jeremy Stein are producing alongside original series producer Mark Victor.


"X-Men: First Class" Cuts  Physics-Bending  Visual Effects
(slashfilm.com)                  This was probably bound to happen: in the wake of the release of Inception, we now know of the first film to cut out dreamlike sequences that feel too much like scenes in Christopher Nolan’s film. Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman have been hard at work rewriting X-Men: First Class so that the film can go into production. But after seeing Nolan’s film, Vaughn had the sinking feeling that some of their ideas for First Class would be taken to be too much like Inception. So he dumped them.
Vaughn describes the effect Inception had on First Class to the LA Times:
    I saw ‘Inception,’ which I loved…But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards.
Twelve pages could be big, or it could be a relatively workable setback, if Vaughn and Goldman can quickly come up with new sequences that can deliver the same story and character beats.
So what was the material that had to go? The LAT says,
    …the jettisoned sequence was a sort of dream-space combat…the filmmaker said for the film the fight involving Professor X (James McAvoy) and some other mutants was to going to be presented with spinning rooms and other physics-bending imagery — visions that he felt drifted too close to signature moments in Inception.

Star Tours Is Closed
(parktastiq.com)                     Star Tours is now closed for an upgrade. First introduced in 1987 using erstwhile state-of-the-art flight simulation technology, it makes sense that 23 years later the ride would get an upgrade.  The new version of the ride will be a 3D experience, and new scenes from more recent Star Wars films will be added.
Star Tours was the first ride in an amusement park to use flight simulator technology. Mark Eads, a Disney Imagineer in the 1980s, says that Randy Bright, the VP of Concept Development, called him to his office in 1983 and asked him if it would be feasible to create a ride based on simulator technology. Eads said that he thought it was possible, although at the time he didn’t know how to start.
So, far, so good. A ride with a flight simulator, but what was the big idea behind the attraction? Eads solicited ideas, and got 78 responses. Many of these had something to do with Star Wars. He then developed a proposal for the concept, suggesting a new ride for Tomorrowland. The proposal made its way to the new management team at Disney, including Mike Eisner, who loved the idea. A deal was made with George Lucas, and a team was tasked with making the idea a reality.
There would be lots of technical and project details to work out, but just as important was the story. They came up with the idea of a space touring company that made tours to the moons of Endor. One sticky challenge was to find just the right voice for the hapless droid pilot — nobody’s voice seemed quite right. Eventually they found out about Paul Rubens, and went to see him during a shoot for the first season of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”
Eventually, the work was all done and the ride was launched to popular acclaim. The best possible comment from a guest was, “Can you imagine how many miles of track Disney had to build underneath the park for this ride?”
As is the case for many Disneyland attractions, Star Tours has some devoted followers who made their way to the park on Monday to go for one last ride before the attraction was shut down. Of course, fans with this much dedication would be lax if they didn’t wear their Princess Leia outfits and Imperial Storm Trooper gear. De rigeur. Eads was able to make it for the final day. He looks forward to what the new team comes up with.
Originally the ride was slated to close in October, 2010, but the schedule was moved up so the team could get a jump on the upgrade.
Captain America Filming Locations Revealed
(BBC News)                 America's First Avenger will battle his foes on the streets of Manchester and Liverpool during filming on the big-budget superhero film.
Manchester's Northern Quarter is to be transformed into 1940s New York for a dramatic car chase in Captain America: The First Avenger.
Producers chose the Northern Quarter to recreate New York because of its towering buildings and pre-war architecture.
The location was organised through the Vision+Media film office, based at Mediacity in Salford Quays, which brought the big budget production of Sherlock Holmes to Manchester and Liverpool.
Susan Williams, drama liaison manager, said the company was approached by the studio, which is also behind the successful Spider Man and Hulk films, in February.
"We suggested the area to Marvel as its wide streets, towering buildings and pre-war architecture will make the perfect 1940s New York."
Residents, local businesses and Manchester City Council have all been consulted about the production, which will last about two weeks from mid September.

WB Hiring Game Developers for Hobbit. Good News for Movies?
(theonering.net)                    This comes to us from Fragland.com via a Gamasutra job posting. Warner Brothers is hiring a director for future gaming development and they specific mention ‘Hobbit’ games. Here’s the posting from Gamasutra:
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc. seeks a Director, Marketing for the Marketing department. Position will be responsible for brand development and product marketing activities for the entire portfolio of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit games at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Position manages high-level cross-company & external partnerships relative to the assigned franchises.
This is obviously good news for the gaming community, but could it also mean that WB is a bit more confident in The Hobbit films happening soon?


Syd Mead & Mythbusters Have Judged Digital Art Competition
Los Angeles, Calif.— The CGSociety and Nvidia have announced the top five entries in their ACCELERATE Digital Art Competition. The challenge of creating futuristic vehicle designs in the style of Syd Mead produced more than 1300 images. The five winners will share over $35,000 in prizes.
Their challenge was to create vehicle designs for a future on the move ... transport in the style of Syd Mead. The Master Futurist, famous for his concept designs in Blade Runner, TRON, and 2010, led a panel of star judges: Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (co-hosts of Mythbusters), Mark Frauenfelder (founder of boingboing.net), Kevin Kelly (the founder of Wired Magazine), Brian Gernand (creative director of Kerner), Lorne Lanning (of Oddworld fame), David Wright (creative director of Nvidia) and Mark Snoswell (president of CGSociety).
Together these luminaries vigorously deliberated over the hundreds of worthy images, finally deciding on the five winning entries:
Full Press:     http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/News/2010/Syd-Mead-and-Mythbusters-have-judged-Digital-Art.aspx

VES Announces Release of THE VES HANDBOOK OF VISUAL EFFECTS
Los Angeles, Calif. — The Visual Effects Society (VES) is proud to announce that The VES Handbook of Visual Effects is now available to everyone who wants to learn or needs to know about the art and science of visual effects.
Written by 89 top leading visual effects practitioners and edited by VES Chair and leading VFX Supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun, as well as VFX Producer Susan Zwerman, The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures covers everything about visual effects from pre-production, production, and post-production, making it a complete depository for visual effects techniques and best practices available today. The book outlines procedures and solutions VFX artists, producers, and supervisors need to know and it is filled with hard facts and methods learned from research, trial and error, and practical experience. Contained in its pages are the lessons, tricks, short cuts, and wisdom garnered throughout the history of visual effects and is a must-have book for anyone working in or wanting to work in the visual effects industry.
The Handbook contains in-depth sections on stereoscopic moviemaking, color management, and digital intermediates, as well as interactive games and full animation authored by working artists and experts.
Anyone interested in purchasing a copy of The VES Handbook of Visual Effects can do so at leading online bookstores.

Spider-Man and Men in Black III Start Dates
ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype has learned that the Marc Webb-directed Untitled Spider-Man Project will start shooting in December in Los Angeles. We've received no word yet whether Sony's Columbia Pictures will also film in New York. Andrew Garfield stars in the July 3, 2012 release, produced by Laura Ziskin and Avi Arad.
The studio's Men in Black III, however, is scheduled for filming in New York starting in September. Barry Sonnenfeld is directing the May 25, 2012 release, starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Jemaine Clement.

Previs Society- Siggraph Documentary
(forums.cgsociety.org)                The Previsualization Society released the first of six documentaries on the previs process.
http://www.previssociety.com/documentary-part-1/

New Curious George Movie in the Works
(comingsoon.net)               24 Frames is reporting that Despicable Me creators Illumination Entertainment is developing a new Curious George movie for Universal Pictures to distribute.
The site says that "The movie is expected to feature the wry animated images of 'Despicable Me' and will spin a new story of George the monkey/chimpanzee (depending on whether you favor H.A. and Margret Rey's text or the tail-less images) who's taken out of the jungle by an eccentric explorer to live in the city, where mischief always seems to find him."

Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova Delayed Until 2011
(slashfilm.com)                When the show was bumped from an announced panel at Comic-Con, we should have known something was up. The Steven Spielberg-produced Fox sci-fi television series Terra Nova has been delayed. Fox said today that the pilot episode won’t be ready until May 2011, back from the originally discussed Winter 2010 debut. Even worse, the actual series won’t premiere until Fall 2011. I’m assuming they’ll do a sneak preview of the pilot episode during next year’s Comic-Con, and maybe a wide sneak preview online or at a special date/time.
Brannon Braga, a former producer and writer of various Star Trek tv shows from 1990-2005 including The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise, in addition to Flash Forward and the last couple seasons of 24, is on board as the showrunner. The series has been given a 13-episode order. The network is skipping the traditional pilot because breaking down the pilot’s sets only to rebuild them again would add too much to the already high price tag. The pilot episode is directed by Alex Graves, who has helmed the pilots for The Whole Truth, Fringe and Journeyman, as well as directing episodes of Sports Night, The Practice, The West Wing and The Nine.
Jason O’Mara (Life on Mars) will headline the series. The series will follow a family who live 100 years from now on future Earth, who are flung back in time 150 million years to the prehistoric age, when Earth was ruled by dinosaurs.

Fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean film to Shoot at Pinewood
(screendaily.com)                The fourth instalment in the Pirates  franchise will shoot in a number of UK locations.
Pinewood Studios has confirmed that it will host the latest Pirates film, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, this summer.
The fourth instalment in the Walt Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer series will also shoot in a number of other UK locations.
Production began on the film in June with shooting already taking place in Hawaii and Los Angeles.
Directed by Rob Marshall, new cast members for the latest film include Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane. Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush are back as Captain Jack Sparrow and Barbossa, this time on a quest to find the Fountain Of Youth.
The film is scheduled for release in 2011.
Andrew M. Smith, group director corporate affairs for The Pinewood Studios Group said: “We are thrilled that Pirates of the Caribbean has chosen to film part of the latest instalment in this fantastic series here at Pinewood.  It’s great for the UK film industry and for Pinewood Studios in particular. We look forward to welcoming the entire cast and crew.”
Motion Capture A Virtual 'Fountain of Youth' For Tron Star
(mtv.com)                  In March, when the "Tron Legacy" teaser trailer dropped online and showed us our first glimpse of a reverse-aged Jeff Bridges, director Joseph Kosinski revealed to MTV News that capturing this CGI-assisted footage was his greatest challenge.
"The hardest thing to do in visual effects is pull off a realistic human face," he explained.
But that was the task filmmakers took on when they set out to make a sequel to the 1982 original, in which Bridges starred as two characters: a software designer named Kevin Flynn who's sucked into a computer-generated gaming world, and a digital villain named Clu. With Clu playing a key role in "Legacy," Kosinski had to re-create the '80s-era Bridges to step into the Clu role once again. As he revealed to us, his reference point was the Bridges of the 1984 drama, "Against All Odds."
For Bridges himself, the opportunity to play, in essence, his younger self was not one he could pass up. "It was very exciting to be a part of that," he told us recently at Comic-Con. "That was one of the reasons that got me involved in 'Tron' in the first place, was to be a part of that cutting-edge technology. This one takes it to the nth degree."
To get the visual effects right, Bridges shimmied into a motion-capture suit and set to work. "Playing the young guy, we did a lot of work in a space called the Volume — you record motion-capture work," he said. "That was a completely unique experience for me. I had never done that. It's great to be able to play a character in a story at any age you want now. I can play my character when he's 4 years old."
Of course, there's always the chance that one day actors won't be needed at all, as filmmakers fully create their characters in a computer. "I go between worry and gratefulness. Maybe I'll be ready to do something else by that time," he laughed about the possibility. "There is going to be a time — it's probably already here — when they say, 'Let's get a combination of [co-star] Garrett [Hedlund] and Bridges and let's put a little Bela Lugosi in there. What the hell — let's see what happens!' "

Pixar versus Dreamworks
(kippreport.com)                Pixar versus Dreamworks - This summer saw two animation powerhouses premiere the final installments of their biggest blockbusters. As Toy Story 3 and Shrek 4 play at the cinema, we put the businesses head to head.
Take a look:    http://www.kippreport.com/2010/08/pixar-versus-dreamworks/

SPFX  Mousterpieces:  Crafting More Than 100 Model Mice
(Los Angeles Times)                  The Chiodo brothers — Stephen, Edward and Charles — recently crafted more than 100 model mice for the new Steve Carell-starring comedy "Dinner for Schmucks," but it was a great ape that initially set them on a path to filmmaking: The New York natives as children made 8-millimeter stop-motion animated movies in their parents' basement, inspired by the work of special effects legends Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien.
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"When we went to one of our first trips to New York City after seeing 1933's 'King Kong,' we were at the Empire State Building looking for the cracks in the sidewalk where he might have fallen," said Charles.
In college, all three pursued creative degrees: Edward in theater arts and photography, Stephen in photography and filmmaking, and Charles in illustration. Stephen and Charles explored the filmmaking scene in New York and Washington, D.C., before moving to Los Angeles in 1980 and founding a company. Edward joined them in Los Angeles in 1984 after finishing school.
Since then, they've created effects and characters for films including 1985's "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," 1986's "Critters," 2003's "Elf" and 2004's "Team America: World Police." They also wrote, produced and directed 1988's "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" and currently are developing a sequel.
"We give our characters a life that you might not get someplace else," said Charles. "That's our Frankenstein complex: We're bringing life to things."
Classics reinterpreted: For "Dinner for Schmucks," the Chiodo brothers are credited with creating the film's "mousterpieces and dioramas." "Steve Carell plays a character whose idiosyncrasy is building mice dioramas: basically great moments in history told with mice," said Stephen. "These guys like Benjamin Franklin and the Wright Brothers and Louis Pasteur — these were all mice dioramas we made. Then on top of that, we had to do the mousterpieces. So we have the 'Mona Lisa.' We have Michelangelo's 'Creation of Adam.' 'American Gothic.' We did 'Scream.' All of these classic art masterpieces are re-created by Steve Carell's character with mice. We had the references, and we had to match all the details."

Scott Ross Vs. Scott Ross

Scott Ross needs to have a debate with himself.
I want to thank Jeff Heusser for giving my blog a shout out on fxguide today. I was really excited to hear that he conducted another interview with vfx industry vet Scott Ross. He was general manager of ILM and founded Digital Domain and he has recently been involved in an effort to help create a trade union to organize the VFX facilities.
If you have a moment please take the time to listen to the podcast. While I found myself agreeing with alot of points, I almost crashed my car when I heard Jeff and Scott completely contradict themselves on a labor organization to represent the artists. According to Jeff Heusser:

Everybody I talk to, what they are interested in is not what you would normally think of for a union. What they are interested in is portable benefits, help with enforcement of labor laws because there are a lot of people who are not following the labor laws, and retirement plans. Those seem to be the three things that I hear most from the artists. Seems like an odd time for a union to be discussed.

Okay. That’s like complaining of  stomach pain, headaches, and vomiting and then coming to the contradictory conclusion that going to the doctor would be a bad idea. Here is some news, while VFX facilities and Scott Ross have talked the talk about giving artists portable benefits, respecting labor laws, and creating retirement plans, The Animation Guild has walked the walk for almost the past 60 years.

• They provide not one, not two, but 3 retirement plans. I was vested in over $13,000 dollars after only 450 hours of service each year without paying a dime. I even posted my IAP statement as proof.

• They provide great health insurance that lasted for 17 months AFTER I left the guild to work at a non-union vfx house. In fact, Steve Hulett did a comparison of the Guild health plan to the health plan provided by Digital Domain. DD’s health insurance was a total joke. Best of all, these benefits were portable if I ended up at another guild facility.

• They have cracked down on employers who violate labor laws. Recently, TAG offered access to their lawyers to help unpaid VFX interns get paid.

What makes things worse is how Scott Ross piles it on. He essentially uses every argument to validate the creation of his trade organization to invalidate artists joining a guild. It’s unbelievable.

If a union was to organize the workers, particularly here in the United States, what it would do is it would make the cost of business considerably higher to the employers which would therefore:
A) Lower the margins even greater therefore forcing those companies out of business.
B) (They would) Not being able to compete at all because, face it, there is no union in India and there is not going to be a union in India and the Indian artist is making probably 40% of what a US artists is making already.

How can someone so successful be so misinformed? A labor organization would put vfx facilities out of business? I don’t know what planet Scott Ross has been on but it’s the studios and some of his business partners that have been putting vfx facilities out of business, and they have done so with complete glee as famously mentioned in a Variety article by an unnamed producer:

If I don’t put a visual effects shop out of business (on my movie), I’m not doing my job.

Scott Ross alluded to his famous feud with Digital Domain co-founder James Cameron which is well summarized in this Forbes article of how Cameron almost put DD out of business during Titanic. The feud became so heated that at one point James Cameron said the following through his lawyer:

Ross professes to be unconcerned and vows to stick to his ambition of becoming the next Pixar. “There’s a huge growth opportunity,”he says. “Studios are making movies that ultimately don’t make money, so what’s the problem?The problem is they don’t run it like a business. They make cans of Coke for $10 a can. Can you make that can of Coke for a dollar? The answer is yes.”

Yes, that’s right James Cameron thinks VFX is the equivalent of making a can of Coke. I wonder how quickly and easily that can of Coke would be made elsewhere if the whole vfx crew at Weta Digital walked out on Avatar during crunch time? If Scott Ross agrees with that kind of statement and that VFX is already being made for 40% less in countries like India and China then why do they keep doing business here? Why is ILM Singapore recruiting artists here to go work there? Couldn’t the cheap locals create VFX instead?
I’ve pointed out that this is essentially the VFX outsourcing boogeyman argument used to scare VFX artists. The jury is coming back in on doing visual effects in developing countries and the quality has not improved and the cost advantage is quickly dwindling. VFX facilities continue to stay here because the talent resides here, not because of some charitable donation.
And then there is the costs associated with the guild. Scott Ross argues that the guild would make the costs of doing business higher for VFX facilities. At the same time he argues that VFX facilities need to write him a check to help start a trade union. Does Scott Ross realize how much its going to cost to hire lawyers and lobbyists to create a global organization that works with all VFX facilities and state, local, and federal governments? What’s to stop studios from awarding vfx work to shops who avoid Scott Ross altogether?
While a trade union will add extra overhead costs for vfx facilties, the guild would most likely replace costs that are already being administered in the forms of health insurance, and retirement benefits. Best of all the costs for these benefits are shared by the big 6 studios in the form of residuals and thousands of members in various locals that are part of the greater IATSE labor organization. In 2005, $347 million dollars in residuals funded the healthcare and retirement plans and we VFX artists are sitting around wondering why we can’t get any benefits when every other discipline in the Hollywood industry ranging from actors, directors, truck drivers, and caterers are receiving those benefits. All you have to do is sign a rep card which is pretty easy.
What got me steaming mad at Scott was when he eluded to the wage minimums as if they were maximums:

I can’t imagine having a conversation with Dennis Muren and saying okay well Dennis you know the rate now for the VFX Supervisors is X and so were going to lower (your salary).

Simply outrageous. That is completely WRONG. The wage minimums set by the guild are just that – minimums. There are no maximums, however employers love to use it as a way to smear the guild and it needs to stop. It’s wrong. In fact, many of the top talent that Scott Ross employed at Digital Domain left to go work for DreamWorks Animation which is under a TAG contract. If it were so true that TAG was lowering talent wages then why are so many going there? Maybe because it was a better deal?
It’s moments like these that remind me of an email sent to me by an owner of a small VFX shop which contained the following:

Occasionally there’s the rant “UNIONIZE!!!” ….a thought just occurred to me; unionization could be good for VFX shops. If the shops could somehow step aside, and let the angry artists directly insist on humane treatment from the studios, it’s politically easier; visibility is important. Right now, the struggling VFX shop owners have to go into a studio office and argue that a larger check should be cut to them so some peon that the decisionmaker never sees can feed his children. If that peon could argue his own case directly to the studios, there’s a way better chance of getting heard.
we are too deperate to fight. the workers should do it for themselves.

This begs the question to me and it’s a question I would like to pose to you Mr. Scott Ross:
What purpose do VFX facilities serve?

• They fund vfx I think, but no, the studios do that.
• They create a pipeline for vfx to get done, but no, the software engineers and TDs do that.
• They create vfx, but no, the artists do that.

At the end of the day I can’t find a reason why VFX facilities should stay in business. They are unable to earn a profit. They are unable to provide job stability and benefits to their workers. We are essentially freelancers working for a poor middleman. Maybe if those really skinny cats die and get out of the way we could all join a guild and start negotiating directly with the big fat cat studios.
meow.. um I mean.. Soldier On.
Source:  http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/scott-ross-vs-scott-ross/

McG vs New York, Yogi the CGI Bear, & Spectacular VFX Breakdowns...

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Michael Bay Producing "Cloverfield" Meets "Paranormal Activity" Alien Movie

(Heat Vision)                Paramount has bought an alien-related pitch from new writer Bobby Glickert.
The blog says that the project has been described as Cloverfield meets Paranormal Activity and will be getting the Area 51 treatment.
Michael Bay will produce with Paranormal Activity 2 executive producer Steven Schneider.
Interestingly, Paramount is working on a similar thriller titled Area 51 by Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli.
McG To Demolish New York
(Vulture)                 Bronson and Inception star Tom Hardy is joining Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine in director McG's This Means War.
It's the story of two best friends (Pine and Hardy), inseparable since childhood, who fall in love with the same woman (Witherspoon). The two men's bond disintegrates and their ensuing battle escalates to mammoth proportions, with New York City demolished in their wake.
Witherspoon is also producing the 20th Century Fox release with Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment.
Lets Meet Yogi, The CGI Bear
(Yahoo! Movies)                        Warner Bros. Pictures has debuted this teaser poster for Yogi Bear and the trailer will come online Wednesday as 7ET/4PT, so stay tuned! Opening in theaters on December 17, the Eric Brevig-directed animated aventure features the voices of Dan Aykroyd, Justin Timberlake, Tom Cavanagh, Anna Faris and Andy Daly.
Everyone's favorite pic-a-nic basket-stealing bear comes to the big screen in "Yogi Bear." Jellystone Park has been losing business, so greedy Mayor Brown decides to shut it down and sell the land. That means families will no longer be able to experience the natural beauty of the outdoors -- and, even worse, Yogi and Boo Boo will be tossed out of the only home they've ever known. Faced with his biggest challenge ever, Yogi must prove that he really is "smarter than the average bear" as he and Boo Boo join forces with their old nemesis Ranger Smith to find a way to save Jellystone Park from closing forever.
Take a look:    http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=68304
'Gears Of War' Budget Gets Downgraded
(latinoreview.com)

'Gears Of War' Budget Gets Downgraded "Gears of War" is a really fun video game filled with violence, sweet visual effects and a some-what coherent story line. When you have this modern-day-like version of Doom in your hands, of course you'll want to go all out for it, right? I guess not. New Line Cinema is cutting the costs a bit on the "Gears of War" movie. Since the likes of Len Wiseman is no longer attached to direct the project, it's easy for New Line to snip away at the budget. At this point though, it could still work despite the smaller amount of money for this production. There's been plenty of science fiction films within the past few years, including "Serenity" and "District 9", that have worked with a small budget and put out better visual effects than other blockbuster films have produced.
"Gears of War" is still sitting in the hanger, waiting to get out of development and go full on into production. Does anyone want a "Gears of War" movie? Whenever I think of an interesting 'adaptation' for "Gears of War", my mind immediately wanders to Egoraptor's flash animated version of it.

31 Absolutely Spectacular VFX Breakdowns
(ae.tutsplus.com)                I say it time and time again, these are seriously some of my favorite roundups to do. Watching these amazing making ofs, behind the scenes content, and VFX breakdowns really give you a look into how a shot was made, or what really goes into a production. You can take a lot away from just seeing a couple of shot breakdowns… so check em out!
Take a look:    http://ae.tutsplus.com/articles/roundup/31-absolutely-spectacular-vfx-breakdowns/

Framestore's Spruce Promoted to Head of Animation
(animationmagazine.net)              U.K. vfx house Framestore has upped Kevin Spruce to head of animation, vfx. Spruce, who has been with the company since 2000 has overseen many of the company’s high-profile projects including Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
Spruce joined Framestore in 2000 to take on the challenge of senior animator in the groundbreaking Hallmark series Dinotopia. Spruce will oversee forthcoming projects including Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, Michael Apted's The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader and David Yates' new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sequel. 

In 2007, Spruce received a VES (nomination for his work on Prehistoric Park. He began his film career at Steven Spielberg's London Amblimation studio.
"Kevin has been a key member of our animation team and has continuously demonstrated his talent throughout his decade with us,” notes Framestore CEO, William Sargent. “We're delighted that his enthusiasm and leadership qualities have led to this new appointment.”
Pixar's Jim Morris Defends Digital Filmmaking
(hollywoodreporter.com)                     An eloquently affable industry veteran, Jim Morris offered a blunt reply Tuesday to any suggestion that digital production is lowering the quality of moviemaking in Hollywood.
"Bullshit," the Pixar Animation GM said during a SIGGRAPH 2010 keynote address. "There always have been a lot of bad movies."
The cross-pollination of filmmaking and digital arts has had some awkward growth spurts, Morris conceded, and there have been ham-handed applications of the fledgling technology.
"But it's up to us to take advantage of all these things that have been built," he urged at the conclusion of an hourlong presentation that was equal parts career survey and digital-effects industry overview.
A producer on Pixar's 2009 animated feature "WALL-E" and its 2012 live action/animation hybrid "John Carter of Mars," Morris headed effects titan Industrial Light + Magic for 17 years before crossing the Bay Bridge to join the animation studio. Bearing the additional title of executive vp production at Pixar, Morris also supervised work on "Ratatouille," "Up" and "Toy Story 3" and is helping to shepherd "Cars 2," "Brave" and "Monsters Inc. 2."
"There are those who would believe American movies have gone to the dogs," he said in addressing a packed assembly hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center. "I would suggest there are as many great films being made today as always."
Other than those pointed observations, the tenor of Morris' talk was anything but defensive. Using clips from such landmark effects-driven movies as "Star Wars," "The Abyss" and "Jurassic Park," Morris shared experiences gleaned from his "ringside seat" to the effects industry's digital transformation.
" 'Star Wars' teed us up for the digital age," he said. But a 90-second bit of computer-generated imagery in James Cameron's "Abyss" brought the industry into the age of CG character animation.
Morris recalled an effects hands' frantic search for leased time on a corporate supercomputer to render the necessary images for the pic's underwater-alien "pseudopod" segment.
"You could probably do it on your iPad now," Morris quipped to good effect. As usual, the SIGGRAPH audience was full of spotty-faced digital wannabes as well as industry stalwarts.
Evidence that "CG was moving into puberty" came via the more elaborate digital effects of 1991's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and 1992's "Death Becomes Her." Stephen Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" -- whose dinosaurs were originally to be created simply through stop-motion photography and creature effects -- evolved during preproduction into a groundbreaking amalgam of those traditional processes and CGI character animation.
"In many ways, 'Jurassic Park' was the big enchilada in the evolution of live-action digital cinema," Morris said.
By 1994, Robert Zemeckis' "Forrest Gump" had industryites cooing over so-called invisible effects.
"Gary Sinise is absolutely convincing as a man who lost his legs in war," Morris said, recalling one much-discussed scene from the Oscar-winning film.
Something of an industry campfire for visual-effects geeks to gather around each year, SIGGRAPH bills itself as a computer-animation festival and features scores of academic presentations. Morris recalled that in 1984, "The Adventures of Andre and Wally B." -- an early CG-animation short by Pixar -- "took SIGGRAPH by storm."
For Morris, a onetime producer of documentaries and commercials, the move to Pixar and feature producing has been a return to a first love. "WALL-E" was "animation leaning toward live action," and "John Carter" is "kind of live action leaning toward animation," he said.
A SIGGRAPH announcement circulated just after Morris' speech drove home the ever-expanding scope of the effects business. ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks trumpeted a computer-graphics interchange format dubbed Alembic, boasting sufficient capacity to "handle massive animation data sets often required in high-end visual effects."
If that sounds a bit daunting for filmmaking newbies, Morris stressed that digital filmmaking simply offers new means "to tell great stories and transport audiences to special places."
Recalling that the low-budget "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" was an early career impetus, Morris added that the Andrew Stanton-directed "John Carter" is sort of "the new age version" of the 1964 space adventure.
"I feel like my entire life I've been in basic training to do this film," Morris said.
Industry training will continue through Thursday at SIGGRAPH 2010. Alternating between Los Angeles and other locales annually, the confab next travels to Vancouver on Aug. 7-11, 2011.

Ryan Reynolds' MoCap Suit Made Of "The Most Aggravating Substance On Earth"
(contactmusic.com)                Ryan Reynolds had problems working in his motion-capture outfit on 'Green Lantern' because of wearing it in the summer heat.
Ryan Reynolds' suit in 'Green Lantern' is "the most aggravating" he has worked with.
The 33-year-old actor - who plays the titular superhero in the movie - confesses he had difficulty working with the motion-capture costume because of how hot it got.
He said: "This costume is a motion capture suit that I'm wearing, so because it's not seen on camera they've managed to find a material that I think most would agree is the most aggravating substance on earth. We're shooting in Louisiana which is pretty close to the sun. The suit's been difficult running around in a unitard in the New Orleans summer heat."
The Canadian actor also admits training for the film was different to other projects, but he expected to end up in hospital because he was working with 'Casino Royale' director Martin Campbell on the movie.
He said: "The training's just different. You're not training on an aesthetic level, you're training on a functional ability. You want to stay out of the hospital as long as possible, but it is a Martin Campbell movie so you're bound to be there once or twice. Martin described it as a knife fight in a phone booth. That's an apt description of how his action feels.
'Green Lantern' is set to hit cinemas in June 2011.

'Judge Dredd' Movie Revived
(torontosun.com)               SAN DIEGO, Calif. - Karl Urban could be beaming back to a much grittier future.
It looks like the New Zealand-born actor, who played Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in last year's Star Trek reboot, will soon play the sci-fi law enforcer Judge Dredd.
"Yes, there is a lot of truth to that rumour," Urban told journalists at Comic-Con Thursday, responding to a report on the UK website Bleeding Cool.
"It's early days yet, but it is something that's definitely looking very, very good."
Alex Garland (28 Days Later, The Beach) has penned a screenplay purportedly more faithful to the original British comics. Pete Travis (Vantage Point) will direct.
In 1995, Sylvester Stallone starred in a Dredd adaptation that bombed at the box office.
Regardless of Dredd's fortunes, Urban has that other science-fiction franchise to fall back on. Cameras are expected to roll on a Star Trek sequel next year for a June 2012 premiere.

DreamWorks Signs Cloud Computing Deal
(channelregister.co.uk)                DreamWorks SKG has signed a multi-year deal with Cerelink for cloud computing access.
Instead of rendering movies like How To Train Your Dragon on thousands of its own computer cores, DreamWorks will use elastic compute resources housed in Cerelink's supercomputing-class facility at the New Mexico Applications Centre (NMCAC).
“Elastic” cloud computing allows clients like DreamWorks SKG to dynamically adjust technical capacity to meet their real-time business needs.
How To Train Your Dragon
Cerelink is a high performance cloud computing (cloud HPC) provider to the motion picture industry. It provides private clouds for rendering and other content creation and management application, based on a combination of data center space, scalable high performance computing and networking, in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.
This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.
Cerelink's private cloud computing service was used by DreamWorks Animation to render parts of Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon this year. Cerelink itself was founded by a group of ex-Intel managers in 2005.
James Ellington, its CEO, said: “We forecast growing our technical capacity by 20 times by the end of 2011 – this will create one of the largest cloud computing arrays for motion picture production in the world.”
This represents a threat to suppliers of in-house HPC compute and storage facilities to the movie rendering industry, such as BlueArc, DataDirect, Dell, HP, Isilon, and NetApp. If their customers start hiring rendering and animation HPC capacity from service suppliers such as Cerelink, then there will be less demand for in-house kit.
It is some distance from the movie mecca at Hollywood to New Mexico, raising the question of why the movie moguls should look at doing their rendering and animation in New Mexico?
The State offers film production incentives, like a 25 per cent tax rebate, for projects done in the state. Also, Cerelink and the NMCAC, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, and the New Mexico Department of Information Technology, use an ultra-high-speed network link to link New Mexico to Hollywood.
Cerelink says that, because of this link, Hollywood should hire its elastic compute cloud in New Mexico to do rendering and animation work more cheaply than in California.

Green Hornet Sequel Unlikely
(cinemablend.com)                 Green Hornet Writers Have A Sequel Planned, However Unlikely It Is To Get Made Looks like we made a mistake by not asking to interview Evan Goldberg at Comic Con last week. While my conversations with Seth Rogen (watch it here) and Michel Gondry (coming soon) were total thrills, neither gave me much by way of scoops about either The Green Hornet or their other projects. Screenwriter Goldberg, on the other hand, was totally forthcoming when The Playlist asked him if they were planning a Green Hornet 2: "You don’t make a movie like this without considering the sequel. Yeah, we have the whole plot planned out, which is kind of what we would have done in the first place."
That "in the first place" comment may be a nod to the fact that The Green Hornet is no longer the mid-summer tentpole release it started out as, and is something closer to a gamble as the studio plans to release it in January and in post-converted 3D. But what Goldberg says makes sense, even if none of the people in charge of the money actually believe they'll ever make a second film. If Goldberg and Rogen hadn't had a plan for a potential franchise way back in the beginning, they probably would never have gotten the job. Will we ever actually see this second planned Green Hornet? You're welcome to hold out hope all you want, but I'm staying skeptical for the moment.

Sony & ILM Release Alembic, an Open Source Graphics Interchange Format
(h-online.com)                     Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks have released an alpha version of Alembic, a co-developed open source project focussed on creating an interchange format for storing and sharing animation and visual effects. Alembic will allow Sony Picutures Image Works and ILM to create interchangeable and customisable pipelines for animation creation.
This involves creating a format that handles the massive data sets that represent animated scenes, distilled from the animation generation processes used by the animators, but not the computations or dependencies that would be used to create final rendered scenes. The developers say Alembic could be used, for example, to pass creature animations to a clothing or flesh simulator, or a physics simulator and save the results, ready for lighting and rendering.
The move to an open source, open format was welcomed by The Foundry, Autodesk, NVIDIA, Pixar, Luxology and others. Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry, said that "Interchange formats need to be open and non-proprietary to achieve adoption, and innovations that fit these criteria, but also come out of genuine production experience are what the industry needs" and called Alembic "a wonderful bridging idea that will remove another unnecessary hurdle in the creative process"

"Avatar" Creature Creator To Display Work In New London Gallery
(courant.com)                   Spirit Gallery -- New London's art gallery and tattoo studio hybrid -- presents "Creatures," an exhibition of movie sculptures and artwork created by Hollywood creature sculptor, painter and character designer Jordu Schell. The collection will be displayed in Spirit's main gallery beginning August 7.
A part of the television and film industry since 1987, Schell's talent as a designer and sculptor is world-renowned with credits including lead characters designer for the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar," conceptual creature designer for "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian," "300" and "Aliens vs. Predator -- Requiem" and sculptor for "Hellboy." Schell currently serves as owner and head designer for Schell Sculpture Studio, a full-service sculpture and design facility, located in Sherman Oaks, Calif. and specializing in creature and character design, props, prototypes for toys, special effects work and creature design classes.
The exhibit opening will mark the completion of Spirit Gallery's week-long Schell creature building workshop, scheduled for August 2-6. For the workshop, Schell will give participants an overview of the basic principles and history of creature design, in addition to an ongoing demonstration of how to create a full-head sculpture. The Schell multi-day workshop is currently at capacity.
The "Creatures" artist's reception will be held at Spirit Gallery, 207 Bank St., New London, Conn., on Saturday, August 7, from 6 to 9 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The show runs until September 7. Viewing hours are 12-8 p.m., Tuesday-Thursday, and 12-10 p.m., Friday-Saturday. For more information call (860) 443-0484 or visit www.spiritgallerytattoo.com.
About Spirit Gallery:
Located at 207 Bank St. in downtown New London, Conn., Spirit Gallery is a tattoo studio and fine art gallery focused on custom tattoos that compliment the wearer's body and style. Spirit shows and sells works of local artists in its gallery and rotates shows every two to three months. A firm believer in community involvement, the studio supports and promotes a variety of events and causes including the American Red Cross, Wolf Conservation Center, Friday Nights in the District and the Festival of Trees auction. For more information, visit www.spiritgallerytattoo.com.
About Schell Sculpture Studio:
Schell Sculpture Studio offers the finest creature and character design available anywhere. The studio has been providing concept art in the industry for over ten years, and owner and head designer Jordu Schell has been in the film and television industry since 1987. The studio specializes in creature and character design, props, prototypes for toys and model kits, general special effects work, and creature design classes. For more information, visit www.schellstudio.com.

Chicagoans Take "Transformers 3" Disruption In Stride
(articles.chicagotribune.com)
"I like this. I am lucky for this action,'' said Sameh el Gammel, 42, a tourist from Cairo, as he watched a "Transformers 3" battle scene on Wacker Drive.
**
The state's tax credit to movie makers "could end up being a positive thing. This does bring in more tourists," said Karina Devine, 16, in town from Eden Prairie, Minn.
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**
"I really don't know all that much about (the state's subsidy), but … it's got to be bringing money to the city one way or another. People rent rooms, come to see it. They got to eat, they got to park'' said Bob Baker, 61, a retired mechanic from New Lenox.
**
"I thought it was pretty sweet. … It works. It's right outside,'' said Connor Smith, 16, of Lowell, Mich., who watched the filming outside his hotel on Wacker Drive.
**
"I'm trying to pick up people on time, and I have people with disabilities. That's the problem. … I found a way to get around it, so it didn't bother me,'' said Harrison Smith, 64, a Pace Paratransit driver who picked up a rider near the filming site.
**
"I love 'Transformers,' but this is ridiculous,'' said Ashe Grilliot, 26, a visitor from Dayton, Ohio, after driving around for more than an hour trying to get to her hotel on the closed block of Wacker Drive.

Boilerplate Winds Up, Total Recall To Re-Recall, & CG Bears Get Schneidered...

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J.J. Abrams to Produce Boilerplate Adaptation

(Heat Vision)                J.J. Abrams has purchased the rights to the book Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel and will oversee the film adaptation, reports Heat Vision.
The book, 170 pages of text with 350 illustrations and photo manipulations, was written by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett and relates the adventures of a robot built in the Victorian age who, through its travels, meets all manner of famous historical personalities throughout it's century-spanning existence.
Originally pitched as a graphic novel, the authors spent a decade compiling Boilerplate's (the robot's) history online, evolving Boilerplate's history into a guide called The History of Robots in the Victorian Era, attempting to establish the character's presence throughout various famous historical events.

Columbia Has "Total Recall"
(Columbia Pictures)                Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard, "Underworld" films) is in final negotiations to direct Columbia Pictures' Total Recall, it was announced today by Doug Belgrad and Matt Tolmach, presidents of Columbia Pictures. The film will be a new, contemporized adaptation of Total Recall, which was based on the story, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick. Kurt Wimmer is writing the screenplay. Neal H. Moritz will produce through his Original Film banner.
Commenting on the announcement, Tolmach said, "Len has an incredible love of the genre and a great gift for action. He'll bring a contemporary feel to the film while taking care with everything we love about Philip K. Dick's original story."
Moritz said, "I have been trying for years to work with Len and fortunately we finally found a great project that he loves as much as we do. Len is terrifically talented and we know he is the right director to re-imagine Total Recall for a new generation of fans."
Last week, ComingSoon.net talked with Moritz, who told us a little bit about his planned revamping of the property.
Wiseman added, "I've always been fascinated with Philip K. Dick's short story, and I'm excited at that prospect of diving even deeper into the type of world it evokes and the questions it asks. I love that the most crucial mystery our character is trying to solve is the one of his own soul."
Toby Jaffe will oversee production on behalf of Original Film. Tolmach and Sam Dickerman are overseeing the project on behalf of the studio. Columbia Pictures secured the rights to "Total Recall" from Miramax.

New Pixar Show Opens at Oakland Museum July 31
(sfgate.com)             This Saturday, July 31, after a tour around the world, the Pixar 25 year retrospective will make its hometown debut at the Oakland Museum of California.
Pixar: 25 Years of Animation, is a major exhibition of more than 500 works by artists at the Pixar Animation Studios. The animation film company will display a plethora of drawings, paintings, and sculptures that highlight the Emeryville-based company’s wildly successful computer-animated films.
Art work will encompass a range of items, from 'Ratatouille', to the smash hit 'Up', and all the way to Pixar’s latest, 'Toy Story 3', will be displayed at the Oakland Museum.
For the complete story visit here.
For more news visit Oakland Local here.
Oakland Local is a news & community hub for Oakland, Calif. If you'd like to blog for us, e-mail editor@oaklandlocal.com. You can also visit us on Facebook.

CG Polar Bears Get "Schneidered" For 'Norm of the North'
THR reports Rob Schneider will be lending his voice as the title character of Norm of the North, about a polar bear and three Arctic lemmings who wind up in New York after their actual homeland starts to melt.
Ken Jeong and Loretta Devine are also lending their voices to the film, which will be directed by Anthony Bell, also responsible for this fall's Alpha and Omega, an animated movie coming from Lionsgate.   Schneider is currently doing a stand-up tour AND released a new comedy album AND wrote, directed and starred in the drama The Chosen One.

Guillermo del Toro Finally Enters the Mountains of Madness
(Deadline)        After nearly two months of anticipation and speculation about what movie Guillermo del Toro will direct next, Deadline has come forward to confirm that Universal has given the go-ahead for del Toro's adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, produced by none other than James Cameron and to be del Toro's first movie shot in 3D. Del Toro has been wanting to make this movie for years, but the inordinate cost to make what could be a difficult R-rated period horror movie held it back, but with Cameron involved and Universal giving the thumbs up, the movie might start filming as early as next summer.
Written way back in 1931, Lovecraft's serialized novella dealt with his famed "Cthulhu Mythos," as a geologist leading an Antarctic expedition finds a huge chain of mountains, and on the other side, they find the remains of ancient uncharted life forms.
Having heard through the grapevine--oh, and rumored on Entertainment Weekly last week--that the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation may finally move forward, ComingSoon.net/

ShockTillYouDrop.com decided to ask del Toro about it when we interviewed him at San Diego Comic-Con last week, and he gave us a few exclusive comments essentially on why it's been so difficult getting the movie made: "What 'Mountains of Madness' is is a throwback to something nobody does anymore, it's tentpole horror," he told us. "Everybody now understands horror as minimum investment, maximum return, and most of the time, they go at it, as production entities, with great cynicism, like 'Let's make it really gory or extreme' and for a very low budget, and recuperate our investment, make money, all that. If you make a horror movie for half a million and it makes 4, they're very happy. The studio sees horror movies as something they will not invest more than $30-40 million. 'Mountains of Madness' needs to be tentpole in the way that the tentpole movies of the past were, about $130 million."
"I remember when I saw 'Alien' and I was absolutely blown away by it," he continued. "I saw John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' I saw Kubrick's 'The Shining.' These were massive movies in a genre that normally doesn't get massive movies. (With) 'Mountains of Madness,' there are two things that I've been battling all these years: period and R-rated, and a very very tough ending, so the studio is very scared of period obviously, he's very scared of the budget and an R-rating, and the first conversation I always have is, 'Does it have to be R?' and I go, 'Yes.' 'Does it have to be period? Does it have to be Antarctica?' 'Yes.'"
"'Mountains' is my dream and we've been pursuing it for thirteen years and I hope it happens," he told us as we wrapped up the conversation.
Well, Guillermo, it looks like your dream is going to come true, and reportedly, they're starting pre-production in the next few months to gear up for shooting the film next summer.
Addendum: One source at Universal has told us that the above is not a done deal just yet, though clearly, del Toro and Cameron are ready to roll forward.

Ridley Scott Alien Prequel Hatches Rewrites
(comingsoon.net)               "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof has signed on to do rewrites on director Ridley Scott's Untitled Alien Prequel.
It will be his first solo writing gig since "Lost," an opportunity he jumped at (according to Mike Fleming's sources) because Scott's 1979 space thriller was such a huge influence on him, although Lindelof is also currently writing the sequel to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, following their collaboration on Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens.
The Deadline piece goes onto report that this prequel isn't necessarily going to be Scott's next movie, as he has a couple other options including Gucci, which may team Scott with Angelina Jolie as Maurizio Gucci's ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, an adaptation of Justin Cronin's The Passage, or The Wolf of Wall Street, which would reteam Scott with Leonardo DiCaprio with Martin Scorsese producing.
THX1138 Co-Star Passes At 65
(jam.canoe.ca)                Actress and casting director Irene Cagen Forrest has died. She was 65.
Forrest passed away in Providence, Rhode Island on July 25 after a year-long battle with a brain tumour.
She began a successful casting career in the 1980s, and made her mark on television series Crash and feature length films including Light and the Sufferer, for which she was also executive producer.
As an actress, she co-starred in George Lucas' 1971 sci-fi film THX1138 and made appearances in hit series L.A. Law.
She also appeared in films including Communion, Baby Fever and Sitting Ducks, for which she earned a National Association of Film Critics Award nomination for best supporting actress.
She later taught acting in Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
Forrest is survived by her brother, Andrew Cagen, two nieces and a nephew.
Industrial Light & Magic Turns to Luxology modo for Creative Concept Development
(prweb.com)              From taking 2D reference art and concept sketches into 3D, to creating the “look” of some of today’s most technologically advanced feature films, the Art Department at San Francisco-based Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., is pioneering the evolution of the concept development process. As more artists move toward a 3D workflow, ILM’s Art Department is utilizing the powerful visualization tools in Luxology’s 3D modeling and rendering software, modo, to increase speed, flexibility and efficiency.
"Our clients rely on the ILM art department to create world-class concept art and design for their films. To generate that type of work we utilize best-of-breed tools, and modo is turning out to be a terrific 3D tool for the team,” noted Richard Kerris, CTO at Lucasfilm Ltd. “modo is playing a key role in how certain looks and concepts are best created and it has earned its place in our toolset."
ILM has set the industry standard for visual effects and has contributed to some of the most influential and groundbreaking films of the last 35 years. Working alongside a full complement of professional tools, 3D concept art developed in modo has played a key role in a number of recent projects including Confessions of a Shopaholic and Iron Man 2.
"Using modo and producing concept art in 3D has been a huge asset to our department,” said David Nakabayashi, creative director at ILM. “Our 2D images are invaluable communication tools, but 3D visualization really takes creativity to the next level and brings a whole new dimension to our work."
The talented artists in the Art Department at ILM are responsible for the technical 3D aspects needed to create the artistic feel of an entire film ranging from small details, such as how a creature’s skin will look, to the creation of an actual character, vehicle or environment. With the scale and complexity of modern production, an efficient workflow is key to getting projects done quickly. Using modo 401’s modeling, painting and rendering tools, artists can efficiently iterate on a concept and provide a filmmaker with multiple options to best capture their vision.
In addition to leveraging modo’s speed, the ILM Art Department has also been able to add a new dimension to a process that was fundamentally rooted in 2D imagery. 3D concept art can be incorporated into the company’s production pipeline as modo geometry and renderings created for artistic reference can readily be prepped for production.

MoCap Goes Ape On The "Rise Of The Apes" Set
(cinemablend.com)          Go Ape With This New Pic From The Rise Of The Apes Set We’re all familiar with the nearly perfected art of motion capture. The technique has been used for what seems like forever in film and video games and with Avatar upping the game last year we should expect even more films that lean on actors wearing jumpsuits with silly dots on them.
That's exactly what we see in this first set photo from Rise of the Apes, the Planet of the Apes reboot directed by Rupert Wyatt. You don’t get a whole lot out of this image other than the satisfaction of knowing that the world’s foremost mo-cap actor, Andy Serkis, is at it again, returning to ape-form from the second time in recent years. Having brought King Kong and Gollum to life, we can rest assured that while the actor looks incredibly silly now, making a severely monkey
-like face and wearing an ugly grey suit, he will look great once the WETA team goes apeshit in the effects process.
Also pictured are James Franco and Frieda Pinto who are presumably studying and experimenting with Caesar
, Serkis’ ape. We have 11 months to go before the film is actually release, but for now, check out this picture and marvel at Serkis’s skill.
Take a look:    http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Go-Ape-With-This-New-Pic-From-The-Rise-Of-The-Apes-Set-19902.html
Making Model Miniatures for Special FX
(minimodelfx.blogspot.com)            'Nothing makes a model look less convincing then too much detail on distant objects.'
Take a look:      http://minimodelfx.blogspot.com/

Godzilla's Augmented Reality, Tron To Oblivion, & CGI Fashionistas...

• 5 days ago
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Godzilla Meets Augmented Reality

(Talking Dog Studios)                    Legendary Pictures unveiled a first look at the new Godzilla using Augmented Reality at the San Diego Comic-Con. Attending the convention to celebrate the beginning of production on the film, Comic-Con attendees were able to receive a T-shirt with this image of the new Godzilla. When they looked at themselves in a webcam at the Legendary Pictures booth, they saw a superimposed animation of Godzilla's "atomic breath" shooting out into the air in front of them from Godzilla's mouth, complete with black smoke rising from the flames and the ground-shaking bellow of Godzilla's instantly recognizable roar. Talking Dog Studios designed the immersive experience for the film, which Warner Bros. Pictures is targeting for a 2012 release.Take a look:    http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=68255

Extended Avatar Adds 8 Otherworldly Minutes - New Creatures
(popwatch.ew.com)

James Cameron, honorary dean of the More Is Better School of Blockbuster Studies, has some good news for Avatar fans: He’s releasing a special edition of the movie that boasts eight additional minutes of footage, including “new creatures and action scenes,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. The movie will roll out Aug. 27 on 3-d screens only. Pixar Artists Masterclass Coming to Vancouver

(Marketwire) - Artists from Pixar Animation Studios will be presenting a unique Masterclass in Animation & Story Development on September 24/25th in Vancouver, Canada.
This exceptional 2-day event takes place at the Simon Fraser University, with instructors Animator Andrew Gordon and Story Artist Matthew Luhn, both of Pixar. This masterclass has toured the world, this being one of only two North American stops in 2010.
Geared toward experienced and enthusiast animators and storytellers, it offers a rare opportunity to learn from the industry's top talent, providing participants with the tools to help create their own stories and feature-quality animation.
The event is being presented by the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts (aka VanArts). It has been scheduled to coincide with the running of Pixar's latest feature film "Toy Story 3", which both Andrew and Matthew helped create.
CURRICULUM:
Details available on the event info page at: http://www.vanarts.com/pixar-vancouver. Sessions run from 9:00am - 5:00pm on both September 24th & 25th, 2010.
REGISTRATION:
Tuition is C$499 for the 2-day program. Tickets are now selling, with limited seats available for purchase online at: http://www.vanarts.com/pixar-vancouver.
VENUE:
Fletcher Challenge Theatre at the Simon Fraser University (downtown campus), located at 515 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC, Canada.
"Dead Space" Animated Feature Unveiled

(news.softpedia.com)               Electronic Arts and Visceral Games have announced two new brand extensions in the Dead Space franchise, an animated feature entitled Dead Space Aftermath and a graphic novel called Dead Space Salvage. Both of these products will be available in the Winter of this year as part of the pre-launch campaign for Dead Space 2.
“It is tremendously inspiring to see Dead Space continually expand to more media. It has always been our goal to experience the universe through multiple lenses and our vision is being realized. The Dead Space world is living, breathing, and terrifying. We couldn’t be more excited about these new offerings,” said Steve Papoutsis, executive producer of the Dead Space franchise.
Dead Space Aftermath tells the tale of a crew sent by the Government to be exposed to Marker shard in another attempt to produce a viable “Marker blueprint” carrier. Aftermath is being developed by Starz/Film Roman is set to arrive before Dead Space 2 sometime in January 2011. Film Roman is the studio between the Dead Space Downfall animated prequel that came before the original game.
Dead Space Salvage centers on a group of rogue miners called the Magpies who discover the abandoned USG Ishimura. While thinking themselves lucky at first, they soon discover what happened on the Ishimura, as the Necromorphs come back to life and begin slaughtering members of the crew. Furthermore, the Government makes it appearance and tries to violently claim back the ship. The graphic novel is being created by Christopher Shy and will be launched in December 2010.
The biggest launch in the Dead Space series is Dead Space 2 who continues Isaac Clarke's terrifying story as he battles his own dementia and the Necromorphs on a space station called The Sprawl. The game will be released on the 28th of January 2011 on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC.
'Star Trek' Scribes Are 'Making Significant Progress' On Sequel

(mtv.com)                    The writers of the hit 2009 flick "Star Trek" are pretty stingy about what they can reveal about the much-anticipated sequel, but they can tell us one thing: They're working on it.
"We actually are making significant progress on the story," Alex Kurtzman told MTV News at Comic-Con in San Diego. "I will tell you nothing more. That's something we've never told anyone."
Kurtzman was quick to point out that while he and co-writer Roberto Orci are busy with other projects, they are making sure they get in plenty of time for "Star Trek 2," which star Zachary Quinto said probably wouldn't begin filming until next year.
"Our days are regimented by the hour; it's the only way to get through it," Kurtzman explained. And if they're on the set of another film, he said, "We can step into the trailer and do work on 'Star Trek.' "
The writers said they are developing storylines for "Trek" characters both new and old.
"There were new characters in the first one, so we really want to focus in on them," Orci said. "For example, Scotty (Simon Pegg), who you met at the end of the last movie, who [was] so important to the crew but had the shortest screen time, now is going to be in the movie from the very beginning. In fact, the whole crew is in it from the beginning.
"Now, the whole family is there," he continued, "and you want to focus on them first before you worry too much about new characters, and then make sure you have them taken care of."
And that means their personal favorites may make the cut for the next flick.
"I loved, and a lot of people loved, Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood)," Orci said. "I loved Bones, who a lot of people thought, '[Karl Urban is] too good-looking to be cast as Bones.' ... He was a fan favorite and ours too."

"Robocop" Reboot Finally Dead

(cinemablend.com)                   Aronofsky's Robocop Reboot Finally Dead The writing’s been on the wall for Darren Aronofsky’s Robocop reboot for awhile now. Back in February we heard he was still attached to the project, but the Requiem for a Dream director has shown no inclination to actually, you know, make it. Worse it’s an MGM property and, well, anything at MGM is pretty much dead. So it’s no surprise that Moviehole and the Financial Times says the whole thing has been scrapped.
It sounds like the entire project has, almost literally, been flushed down the toilet. Aronofsky has lost interest in it anyway and even if he hadn’t it wasn’t going to get made. Word is that there won’t be another Robocop, at least not any time soon. It makes sense, if MGM can’t get The Hobbit or more James Bond made, what hope for Robocop? None. Maybe some day someone else
Special Effects Innovator's Work in Clarington

(newsdurhamregion.com)               CLARINGTON -- Gordon Smith is surrounded by familiar objects, but he feels out of place.
He's one of the most successful and innovative special effects creators in film history, but to see his creations on display at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington is a new experience for him. Smith has never exhibited his work, never even thought of it until he was invited to do so by the VAC's Craig Ryan.
"I'm flabbergasted; this is just junk from my studio," he says in an interview at the July 18 opening reception of the show. "Seeing it like this, I'm flabbergasted."
Well, maybe not junk. Smith means that the pieces have had their time, perhaps no more than a second or two, on screen. They've all been used; they no longer have a practical purpose.
Most movie fans will find something recognizable in the more than 100 items on display. There's Mystique from X-Men and the giant bat, or parts of it, from Graveyard Shift. Facial casts designed for actors in films such as Truman and 4 Brothers. Models, props, drawings and photographs, all created by the talented crew Smith assembled to work with him at his company, FX Smith. Among Smith's contributions to the world of special effects is the silicon, gel-filled prosthetic that can be used for a face, an arm, any body part. Before that, actors had to routinely undergo hours of make-up work to get foam glued on to their skin. He and the fine artists he employed and toiled with worked without computers, before digital processes took over the industry.
"It's so hard to do all of this, the risk factor is really high," Smith says. "There's probably about a 98 per cent chance of failure. In the digital world, it doesn't matter if it doesn't work, you do it again."
It wasn't about egos at FX Smith, but about creating the best work possible.
"My studio has always represented for me the state of the art, both creatively and technically," Smith says.
It's amazing that he got into the business of creating often gruesome effects for the screen in the first place. He has "a very severe blood phobia" from his father's death of leukemia. And Smith never intended to get into this line of work. He has a classical education in theatre and started in the industry as an actor.
His first big effects job was to re-create open heart surgery for the 1982 film Threshold. It was said to be impossible, but in the years that followed Smith became Mr. Impossible, maybe Mr. Mission Impossible.
"Almost everything I do is deemed impossible; that's why they call me," he says. "By the time it gets to me, it has been considered impossible."
Smith's work begins from the script. And while anything goes in a writer's imagination, actually making the thing he or she conceived, making it move or appear a certain way, is Smith's practical challenge.
"I have a script and I have to interpret the words written in the script to the image," he says.
Sometimes he would call for changes to the script because, in creating a piece, he'd discover that it just couldn't do what was written there.
He left the film industry five years ago, bitterly, after what he describes as jealousy made him a target, blackballed. All the creativity in Hollywood is now at the mercy of "the bean counters," he says.
Smith's building a new company, making a jump from the film to the music industry. Typically, he's aiming for the sky.
"We've developed a whole new performance format for live music," he says.
The Clarington exhibit is intended to make the viewer consider the process behind the movie magic, the creativity involved. But heck, Smith also had a blast doing it all.
"Look around. I've had a gas. I've had such a good time," he says. "I fell into it and was lucky enough to have wonderful people help me do it."
Visit Smith's website at www.fxsmith.com.
Gordon Smith - Special Effects is at the VAC until Aug. 29. The arts centre is at 143 Simpson Ave., Bowmanville. Its summer hours (July and August) are Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. and Sunday 1 to 4 p.m. (during exhibitions).

Sony Imageworks & Industrial Light & Magic To Announce Open Source Development

(prnewswire.com)                       LOS ANGELES, July 26 /PRNewswire/ -- BOOTH 1018, SIGGRAPH 2010 -- Sony Pictures Imageworks, the Academy Award® winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, will feature its latest artistic and technical achievements at SIGGRAPH 2010, the 37th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Presentations around the art and technology of Disney's ALICE IN WONDERLAND are on the program, including technical sessions, a Computer Animation Festival production session on Wednesday afternoon and a Siggraph Evening Theater entry. Imageworks will be recruiting for current and upcoming productions, notably Warner Bros GREEN LANTERN, the Aardman Animation production ARTHUR CHRISTMAS, Sony Pictures Animation's HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, THE SMURFS, in association with Columbia Pictures, and several other projects soon to be announced.
Imageworks adds to its Open Source initiative, announced at Siggraph09, with the release of its sixth program, OpenColorIO, which provides a framework for sharing color transformations across computer graphics workflows.  Imageworks has also scheduled a press conference with Industrial Light & Magic on Tuesday morning to announce another important Open Source development.
"SIGGRAPH gathers the leading artists, innovators and educators to the computer graphics world's most influential meeting," observes Randy Lake, executive vice president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks.  "The conference gives us an opportunity to share our latest technical developments, meet talent, and showcase our best work of the year."
IPAX, Imageworks and Sony Pictures Animation's innovative academic outreach program will convene an Educators Forum gathering member schools and a select group of new institutions. The IPAX program was created in 2004 to connect faculty and students from leading academic institutions with Imageworks and Sony Pictures Animation to further develop future talent and enhance academic programs.
Imageworks can be found on the exhibit floor at SIGGRAPH in booth 1018.

"Tron" Helmer Heads Into Apocalyptic "Oblivion"

(darkhorizons.com)                   "Tron Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski is currently pitching a film version of his upcoming graphic novel "Oblivion" which he created for Radical Publishing reports Deadline.
Set in an apocalyptic future where most people live high in the sky due to Earth's surface being uninhabitable, a soldier stuck on the ground goes about his job repairing hunter drones which seek out and destroy members of a savage alien race.
He soon comes upon a beautiful woman whose craft has crashed nearby and together they set out on an epic adventure. Disney is expected to have first dibs on the property.
5X Faster 3D + 8X Faster Sim = Shweet

(marketwatch.com)                 LOS ANGELES, CA, Jul 27, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- SIGRRAPH 2010 -- NVIDIA (Booth #717) today launched the era of the 'computational visualization workstation' for designers, engineers, researchers and animators by introducing its Quadro(R) graphics processing units (GPUs) based on NVIDIA(R) Fermi architecture, and by also introducing the new NVIDIA 3D Vision(TM) Pro solution. The new Quadro GPUs deliver performance that is up to five times faster for 3D applications and up to eight times faster for computational simulation(1), shattering previous benchmarks.
The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 7000 array, and Quadro 6000, Quadro 5000 and Quadro 4000 GPUs feature the new NVIDIA(R) Scalable Geometry Engines and leverage NVIDIA Application Acceleration Engines (AXE) to enable the world's fastest performance across a broad range of CAD, DCC and visualization applications(2). Rated at an unheard of 1.3 billion triangles per second in raw performance(3), the Quadro 6000 enables users to interactively work with models and scenes that are five times more complex than ever before.
"For over a decade Quadro has been the choice of professionals around the world. We've also built Engines like AXE to enable the creation of next-gen applications," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. "When you couple these technologies with our Fermi architecture, the result is a new Quadro family that's exponentially better than anything the market has ever seen."
Redesigned from the Ground Up to Accelerate Entire Workflows
Combining high performance computing capabilities with advanced visualization, the new Quadro GPU is the world's first professional graphics solution with Error Correction Codes (ECC) memory and fast, IEEE double precision floating point performance. These are intended for applications demanding the highest accuracy, such as medical imaging, finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics.
"In high-end visual effects development, fast iteration is essential," said Olivier Maury, research and development engineer, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). "By using NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, we are seeing up to eight iterations each day of complex fire, dust and air simulations, representing speed improvements of ten to fifteen times. NVIDIA CUDA and Quadro GPUs have entirely changed the way we solve complex visual effects challenges."
The new Quadro GPUs are built on industry standards, including OpenGL 4.1, DirectX 11, DirectCompute and OpenCL. In addition, Quadro leverages technologies that are unique to NVIDIA -- such as the company's portfolio of Application Acceleration Engines (AXE) and NVIDIA CUDA(TM) parallel processing architecture. The result is that software developers are able to create and deliver the next-generation of professional applications that incorporate compute-intensive tasks. Among these tasks are ray tracing, physics simulation, computational fluid dynamics and real-time video effects processing.
"NVIDIA isn't just working on building better graphics hardware, but the software tools needed to drive the needed advancements that are now changing the industry," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group. "NVIDIA was committed to building tool after tool this past decade in order to drive the market where they needed it to go, and their efforts are paying off."
Green Lantern Fashionistas Upset About CGI Costume

(current-movie-reviews.com)                  When a sneak peek of the Green Lantern costume was shown at Comic Con, fans of the comic book were split. Half of the fans feel that the costume is not right and does not display the Green Lantern the way he should be and the other half feels that it is fitting to the character.
“There has to be a little healthy debate about it. That’s important,” Ryan Reynolds told MTV. “If it were just slanted one way or the other, I don’t think it would be that satisfying.” Ryan Reynolds is playing the Green Lantern in the new super hero movie coming out soon.
The Costume is made completely of CGI, which is Computer Generated Imagery used as special effects in films. The costume has lines on it to create the musculature required for the look of Hal Jordan. However the costume does not have the white gloves that the Green Lantern has in the comic books.
“The white gloves aren’t there, and I think that’s fine because, specifically, they’re lame,” Reynolds said. “But everything else is going to be there. I think the fanboys and the people that are new to the character are going to love it.”
Cold, Calculating IBM Servers Created Despicable Me

(informationweek.com)                     A hurriedly assembled data center, based on the IBM iDataPlex rack server, rendered 142 terabytes of data in 12 months to create a CGI movie that's currently showing in US theaters.
Many movies are made in Hollywood, but the recently released "Despicable Me" CGI movie was made in a data center that took up four parking spaces in the garage of the production facility of Illumination Entertainment.
The IBM iDataPlex rack server, touted as a unit that can optimize data centers, allowed the ad hoc facility with 6,500 cores to run without air conditioning, achieving a 40 percent power savings. The racks did, however, have water-cooled back doors, each supposedly capable of removing 50,000 BTUs, or the equivalent of a five-ton air conditioner. The doors make the racks about four inches deeper.
The server uses one or two two-socket Xeon 5500 or 5600 processors running about 3 gigahertz, supporting up to 128 gigabytes of RAM.
Some consumers remain wary to conduct mobile transactions but perception, reality aren't in sync
The State of Mobile Security
Production of the 3D animated full-length film required rendering about 500,000 frames per week over a 12-month period, with the data center running 24/7.
Starring Steve Carell in voice-over, the firm is about a villain named Gru who hatches a plot to become the world's greatest super villain. Reportedly, production continues for the French-language version.

Lucasfilm - G4 Party In Pictures

(cinematical.com)                  G4 and Lucasfilm set up a party that was obviously a love letter to Empire Strikes Back (celebrating its 30th anniversary this year). The room was designed to feel like outer space -- with black walls and small white lights surrounding your every move -- while little lightsabers hung down from the ceiling and Stormtroopers, as well as Darth Vader, Boba Fett and more, paraded around the space. There were video games to play in one room, Empire Strikes Back screening in another and folks like Olivia Munn and Seth Green filling out the space alongside people way too cool for school.
Take a look:     http://www.cinematical.com/photos/g4-lucasfilm-party/

Haunted Mansion Revived, Lucasfilm Campus Plans, & 36 VFX Jobs Created...

• Jul 23, 2010
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Guillermo del Toro Takes on The Haunted Mansion


(ComingSoon.net)                 Walt Disney Pictures has informed us that del Toro is NOT confirmed to direct yet. At this point, he is only signed to co-write and produce the project.Guillermo del Toro made a surprise announcement at Disney's panel for Tron Legacy that he will next co-write, produce and direct a 3D The Haunted Mansion reboot.
A teaser was shown with a very brief narration about the haunted house over animation that looked to be either done by Mike Mignola or Mignola-inspired. Mignola, the creator of Hellboy, also illustrated a poster for Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.
"We are not returning Eddie Murphy's calls," del Toro said, making a surprise appearance onstage, "...and we are not making it a comedy... We are making it scary and fun, but the scary will be scary."
The story will be built around the Hatbox Ghost and del Toro hopes that he'll be reintroduced to the ride as well. Check out what he looks like below, courtesy of ShockTillYouDrop:
Here's the official announcement from the studio:
Guillermo del Toro surprised the 6,500 fans gathered today at Comic-Con with the announcement that he is currently developing a new film for The Walt Disney Studios based on the classic Disney theme park attraction, The Haunted Mansion.
“Dark imagery is an integral part of the Walt Disney legacy. After all, Disney himself was the father of some really chilling moments and characters - think Chernabog from Fantasia or Maleficent as the Dragon or the Evil Queen in Snow White,” said del Toro. “I couldn't be more excited to be a part of my own adaptation of the original theme park attraction Walt envisioned and that remains- for me- the most desirable piece of real estate in the whole world!"
“Millions of people from around the world visit The Haunted Mansion each year, but no one has ever had a tour guide like Guillermo del Toro,” said Rich Ross, Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios. “Guillermo is one of the most gifted and innovative filmmakers working today and he is going to take audiences on a visually-thrilling journey like they’ve never experienced before.”
Lucasfilm Dusts Off Big Plan for Campus at Marin Ranch
(sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com)
Filmmaker George Lucas is pushing ahead with a major new development near Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, just five years after relocating many of his Lucasfilm Ltd. employees from the North Bay to the Presidio in San Francisco. Lucasfilm is seeking approval to build a 262,728-square-foot Mission-style building, including two 85-foot towers, at the former Grady Ranch in Lucas Valley. The building would house a digital film production studio, administration offices, a restaurant, a general store, a wine-tasting room, screening rooms, costume storage, dressing rooms, 19 guest suites and basement parking.
The project is part of a master plan Marin County Board of Supervisors approved 14 years ago. Under that plan, Lucasfilm was granted permission to build facilities totaling about 456,000 square feet at the 1,000-acre Grady Ranch and about 185,000 square feet at the nearby Big Rock Ranch. The company wrapped up construction of the Big Rock complex in 2002, but the Grady Ranch phase has been on hold as Lucasfilm focused on its new 800,000-square-foot Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio.
Lucasfilm spokeswoman Emilie Nicks said Grady Ranch will fill an important need for production facilities that are different than what is available at the other campuses. She declined to state how much the complex would cost, but based on conservative construction costs of $300 to $400 a square foot, it would probably run between $80 million and $100 million. Lucasfilm has spent an estimated $100 million thus far on developing at Skywalker Ranch and adjacent Big Rock Ranch, according to media reports.
“This master plan is something we’ve always intended to complete. Once we finished construction on Big Rock Ranch and the Letterman Digital Arts Center, this was the logical next step to complete the production needs of the company,” said Nicks. Once approvals are secured, construction could take anywhere from 18 months to two years, said Nicks.
Marin County Deputy Zoning Administrator Tom Lai said the project’s precise development plan remains incomplete. He said he expects Lucasfilm to answer remaining questions within the next few months.
“We do intend to move quickly with the application and hope that we can take it before county decision-makers sometime early next year,” said Lai.
Enviro challenges
While the master plan was forged through a lengthy environmental review back in the mid-1990s, Lucasfilm still faces a challenging approval process. The film company is working on a precise development plan, and Marin conservationists are pushing for a more extensive supplemental environmental impact report.
In a July 9 memo to Lucasfilm Senior Director Angelo Garcia, Marin County Community Development Agency planners sought to clarify dozens of elements that were not included in the original environmental review. They include retaining walls, a utility tunnel, new bridges, a vineyard knoll, a “wine tunnel” and a new creek restoration plan. In addition, Lucasfilm has yet to finalize an agreement to get water from the Marin Municipal Water District. The project calls for 223,770 cubic yards of excavation.
“There are many ways in which the proposal deviates from the (environmental impact report) and we will be looking at each of those,” said Nona Dennis, the executive director of the Marin Conservation League. “The point here is that they are looking to do a huge amount of rebuilding and reshaping of the landscape in order to accommodate the structures.”
Dennis said the Marin Conservation League has not taken a position on the project, but that environmentalists don’t like the idea of allowing office and light industrial uses in an area zoned for housing and agriculture. At the same time, Lucasfilm has been a supporter of green causes. The 1996 master plan called for development on 108 acres, with 3,283 acres permanently preserved as open space.
On the Grady Ranch part of the land, 800 acres were granted to Marin County Department of Parks and Open Space, with 187 acres set aside as private open space. The project would occupy 52 acres.
“You wouldn’t believe how popular George Lucas is around here,” said Dennis. “Our concern is that it’s precedent setting. George Lucas has a position here. He has a big fan base and it seems to be the feeling that ‘it’s OK because it’s George Lucas.’ But would it be OK for George Smith who has a lot of money and wants to create a private enclave for 650 people?”
Nicks said Lucasfilm is in “full partnership and cooperation with the county to transparently accomplish all that needs to be done to meet, and in some cases exceed, requirements for approval.”
Jobs needed
Marin has suffered its share of economic blows over the past few years. In addition to Lucasfilm relocating hundreds of workers to San Francisco, Fair Isaac Corp. moved much of its operations out of the county and Autodesk scaled back operations in San Rafael. Finally, in March, the Disney Co. announced that it would shutter its 450-employee ImageMovers Digital animation studio at Hamilton Landing in Novato. That put 120,000 square feet of newly built-out space on the sublease market. None of it has been subleased so far.
Cornish & Carey broker Haden Ongaro said that Lucasfilm was a driver in the Marin office market until it moved to its Presidio facility. Not only did it occupy five buildings in San Rafael, but groups of Lucasfilm workers regularly spun off to create new animation, production or film groups. Adding more than 300 jobs at Grady Ranch could bring some of that energy back to central Marin.
“Those guys are going to be buying houses and supporting the school district and using the restaurants and services at night,” said Ongaro.
Nicks said construction would “lead to a large number of jobs for the area, but the exact number is difficult calculate.” As for post-construction staffing, the capacity for the Grady development is 340, but exact numbers would ebb and flow depending on the various projects that come and go and production schedules. Nicks said it should not result in a significant staff relocation at the Presidio.
“This is a very important project, not just for San Rafael but the entire county of Marin,” said San Rafael Chamber of Commerce Chairman Mike Kadel. “I think the Lucas family is very environmentally conscious and have always been very good about reaching out to their neighbors.”