3D

July
26 Comic-Con: Visionaries Jackson, Cameron Talk Future

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By far the high point of the Con for me was EW editor Jeff Giles' interview with Peter Jackson and James Cameron. The two men respect each other enormously. Weta's achievement with The Lord of the Rings' Gollum convinced Cameron that he might be able to forge ahead with Avatar, which had been collecting dust for more than a decade.

Cameron signed up Weta to do the elaborate visual effects on Avatar; Jackson wanted to visit the set but took off to shoot The Lovely Bones just as Cameron was arriving. He came back for the last week of principal photography.

Jackson was making his first visit to the Con. He always sent lovely personal video greetings from Wellywood, full of cool stuff for the fans to see. He clearly understands what goes on at SDCC, and the role the fans play. So it was odd to see him looking so thin, tired and low-key. Jackson made the schlep from Wellywood partly to support his protege Neill Blomkamp whose horror thriller District 9 was the hit of the festival. He candidly expressed his anger over how he and Blomkamp lost Halo, and then made District 9.

Cameron, for his part, seemed energized and mellow, while acknowledging that he and producer Jon Landau have their work cut out for them. (Avatar went over well, but it was not the best-received footage in San Diego. Cameron sets a high bar. And the film plays very sci-fi.) They cooked up the 15-minute free 3D footage stunt set for August 31, knowing that marketing will be key to turning Avatar into the event it needs to be on December 18.

I could listen to these guys all day. I love it that they respect their audience. They make smart movies to please themselves and everyone else at the same time. Which is really hard.

[Thank you, Kris Tapley.]

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Posted: Sun, July 26, 2009, 9:07 AM | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )

July
24 Comic-Con: Disney 3-D Panel Showcases Burton, Depp, Zemeckis, Tron Legacy

DSCN8952Thursday was a long day. The official Comic-Con movie program began in Hall H with Disney's 3-D panel. "A lot of you are going to stay here all day," said host Patton Oswalt. The 6000-strong crowd roared. Bob Zemeckis broke his Comic-Con cherry with footage from the start of Christmas Carol, which stars Jim Carrey in five roles. Instead of heavy make-up, it's the Zemeckis brand of motion capture (in 3D and IMAX 3D), which I find stilted. (People tell me that seeing Polar Express in IMAX was transformative.) The audience went "Ooooh" when they first put on their 3D glasses as Scrooge inspected Marley's dead body and was visited by his green, chained ghost. "It's a ghost story," Zemeckis said. DSCN8958 I was thrown off by Carrey's uncanny Alistair Sim imitation as Scrooge. He probably figured most younger audiences had never seen the British Dickens classic, my fave movie version. That said, Zemeckis's movie looks like a Big, Expensive, Audience-Friendly holiday picture. "We have the filmmaking tools to realize what Dickens wrote," said Zemeckis, who basically said that if Rembrandt could cut through the uncanny valley and paint eyes, so could he, by tracking the retina perfectly with four hi-def "capping" cameras shooting 64 fps also tracking every pore, facial muscle, and crease, he said. "It's happening. We're there. I can put my camera anywhere I want. I don't have to obey the laws of physics."

Zemeckis basically admitted he's working on a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel, which if it happens, would keep the 2D toons in 2D.

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I'm eager to see more of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which takes elements from both the Lewis Carroll classic and Through the Looking Glass, including lines and imagery from The Jabberwocky (a poem I know by heart) and "weave it into a story that had movement and emotion to it," Zemeckis said. The 3D footage was stunning, but was basically the same material that already hit the Web. They ran it three times. It was Burton's first Hall H panel; he came six times in the 70s as a fan. The director was anxious to get back to the editing room and finish the movie. He was crawling out of his skin. He's clearly wrestling with all the CG effects--more green screen than he's ever dealt with--"it starts freaking you out after a while" and said this was so far "the most difficult" movie he's ever done. (He's still in the thick of it, listening to a "ticking clock") He doesn't do much mo-cap, mostly "pure animation and using actors in mysterious ways," he said.

Disney orchestrated their Big Reveal and got a HUGE ROAR when Johnny Depp popped onto the stage. He plays the Mad Hatter with red hair and lots of Tammy Faye makeup. Stephen Fry voices the Cheshire Cat.

I'm on the fence about the sequel to Tron, a movie I actually saw and loved when it came out in 1982. Does anyone remember that it was ahead of its time? It was the first film to use CG, when there were no PCs, and was a boxoffice dud. "I feel like Rip Van Winkle," said Steve Lisberger, who worked on the new one too. (Disney launched a viral campaign at Comic-Con.)

Disney & co. have cooked up some nifty looking updates, but why would racing cars on the grid be accompanied by loud motor roars? This makes me nervous. The movie wrapped principal photography last week--using the Phantom Camera at 1000 fps for some shots--and has another year of VFX work to go. Jeff Bridges is back, playing his old and young selves. "This looks so new and fresh," he said, "I guarantee they'll get some pop for this."

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Posted: Fri, July 24, 2009, 8:07 AM | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )

May
13 Cannes Day One: Up Up and Away

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Cannes master promoter Thierry Fremaux knows what he is doing: the photo taken from the Debussy stage of the Cannes press corps wearing 3-D glasses will be seen everywhere. (They had to be returned.) I started out the morning in tears during Up , which as Disney chairman Dick Cook puts it, is Pixar's "most emotional film." Co-writers Bob Peterson and Pete Docter took the idea of an old guy who travels in a house carried aloft by balloons to find a lost South American paradise, and worked it over for a good two years before it passed enough muster to go into voice casting and animation.

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Whenever I listen to John Lasseter talk, I wish that everyone in Hollywood would take some of his wisdom to heart. The Pixar approach is to never produce anything unless it will stand the test of time as a good movie. And they haven't delivered one dud yet. They're ten for ten. This one challenges conventional wisdom about subjects (an old man and a chubby boyscout), killing off beloved characters, and lingering over slow moments. Lasseter paid homage to Japanese anime auteur Miyazaki for inspiring him to occasionally take it slow.

Lasseter and Docter admitted that on every Pixar film there are scenes that get worked over and over until they finally cohere--and others that are smooth as butter from the start--at Pixar they call them tentpoles on which to hang the rest of the movie. In Up they include the magical opener covering the history of the marriage of old man Carl (Ed Asner), and the sequence when the balloons pick up the house and sail over the city.

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When the Pixar team finally licked their most troublesome scene in South America, which was crucial, they went back and planted details and plot points to lead up to it. Doing a shot over 30 or 40 times is not unusual.

After the press conference, the Up group appeared on the Carlton Pier for a photo op that went awry when the special effects guys who had rigged a 40-foot house attached to a giant air balloon (covered by colored balloons) decided that it was too windy to risk having the flimsy house crash and break apart on landing. So the house and the balloons stayed put. The movie itself will not be so grounded and should take off nicely all over the world on May 29. Cook says Disney is aggressively chasing after all audience quadrants. (The segment that might resist is teenage girls.) It wasn't the most glamorous opening nighter, but Up was the best movie the fest has programmed in that slot for a long while. And Cannes can also count on the film being an Oscar contender.

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Here's Variety's Up-themed opener. And here's The Wrap.

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On opening night, young ballerinas in pink tutus lined the Palais red carpet steps as Cannes president Gilles Jacob and fest director Thierry Fremaux stood at the top of the stairs to greet their guests (see Life Magazine's red carpet photos), including Ashwarya Rai and Elizabeth Banks, Isabelle Huppert (who has had an amazing 17 Cannes entries) and her jury (among them Asia Argento, Hanef Kureishi, Robin Wright Penn, Shu Qi) plus Pixar's Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and famed singer Charles Aznavour, who voices Carl in the French version of Up, and officially declared the 62nd Festival de Cannes "open."


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Posted: Wed, May 13, 2009, 2:05 PM | Comments ( 4 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )

April
21 3-D Conquers NAB

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I'm out of my element in Vegas for my first-ever National Association of Broadcasters convention. Monday I did a Q & A with stop-motion auteur Henry Selick, who ran some nifty clips from Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and the surprise $74-million hit Coraline, which is starting to open in Europe. View this photo.

Coraline's peformance was hurt by too many 3-D movies fighting for not enough 3-D screens, Selick admits. (He's hoping for a rerelease this summer with the DVD, which will be in 2-D, he hopes, as 3-D DVDs are still cheesy). But he also thinks that Coraline's careful crafting of a story enhanced by the combination of lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion, CG effects and 3-D made the movie more of an event for moviegoers. He'll return to Laika in Portland, Oregon for his next stop-motion film, he said, and looks forward to building on what he learned on this film, as he has all along.

Selick is always wowed by Pixar films (he studied with many of the Pixar gang, and old collaborator Tim Burton, at Cal Arts), including what he's has seen of the upcoming Cannes opener Up. But he is not a fan of performance capture--which doesn't mean that James Cameron's Avatar won't be spectacular, he said. 3-D, even holograms, are the wave of the future.

Members at a later NAB panel, while admitting that 3-D cinemas are well ahead of 3-D in the home, touted the imminent future of alternative 3-D. A rep from BSkyB screened some impressive 3-D footage of soccer, boxing, gladiator-style Rocketball contests, ballet and a Keane concert broadcast via satellite with existing HD technology: they used two side-by-side HD cameras, a 3-D processor and HD encoder and transmitted up to satellite and down to the set top box.

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Shooting in 3-D, several panelists agreed, requires less cutting and more lingering so that the audience can find their own focus. At a basketball game, said NBA Entertainment's Steve Hellmuth, you could watch the play as if you were sitting in Jack Nicholson's courtside seat, in an immersive experience.

The most impressive footage came from Brazil's TV Globo Network, which shot, edited and broadcast almost instantly live 3-D footage of the Carnivale in Rio. It was stunning--but what made advertisers sit up and take notice, not surprisingly, was the spinning 3-D can of beer popping out in the foreground. The sponsors wanted that on air the next day, said Jose Dias Vasconcellos de Assis, who points out that there are already 3-D-ready sets available from Mitsubishi, Samsung and Hyundai, which has a set that can turn 2-D HD into 3-D.

For now, said BSkyB's Gerry O'Sullivan, the trick is to shoot in 2-D and 3-D formats at the same time. NYT moderator Eric Taub wound up saying, "We're not just creating a new technology, but a new aesthetic."

I can't wait to see what they do here with the Thanksgiving Day Parade and The Rose Bowl.

Here's Variety's David Cohen on another 3-D in the home panel.

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Posted: Tue, April 21, 2009, 12:04 PM | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )

March
24 Monsters vs. Aliens Brings 3-D Invasion

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One of the surprises of the year so far is how well Henry Selick’s 3-D animated gothic fairy tale Coraline lasted at the b.o.; this weekend brings DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens and a spate of 3-D offerings are on the way. Even the venerable Cannes Film Festival, which has made an annual tradition of unveiling the latest animated fare, will for the first time open the 62nd fest on May 13 with not only an animated movie but Disney/Pixar’s 3-D balloon adventure Up, which opens May 29.

Time Magazine talks to 3-D boosters Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Spielberg is collaborating with Peter Jackson on 3-D performance capture movie Tintin. Some industry insiders wonder if Cameron will further delay Avatar's December 19 release date so that more 3-D theaters will be available. EW rounds up the 3D future. UPDATE: The LAT interviews Captain 3-D, Phil McNally.

(EW's list of upcoming 3-D pics is on the jump.)

[Photo courtesy of Time Magazine.]

Continue reading " Monsters vs. Aliens Brings 3-D Invasion " »

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Posted: Tue, March 24, 2009, 5:03 PM | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )

January
12 3-D Future: Bearish or Bullish?

MonstersvA First Look - Large [Posted by David S. Cohen]

In today's NYT, Brooks Barnes offers an especially gloomy take on 3-D and the problems getting theaters converted. The NYT gang seems bearish on Hollywood in general these days and this article is no exception. Barnes spoke to media analyst and author Harold Vogel and offered up this:

Filming in 3-D adds about $15 million to production costs, he (Vogel) said, but can send profit soaring because of premium ticket pricing. Well, I don't know whether it's Vogel or Barnes, but somebody's just flat wrong here.

For a contrary take, see my November 26 piece in our 3-D Entertainment Summit:

Stereo pioneer Vince Pace routinely tells potential customers for his 3-D technology that going stereo adds roughly 20% to the negative cost of a movie. (Walden Media's Doug) Jones, for his part, estimates that on a film with a lot of digital visual effects, the format brings a 20%-30% overall budget jump.

With tentpole budgets already in the $250 million range, that's a lot of extra cost, with no proof yet that a blockbuster like Iron Man would earn any additional money in 3-D.

Journey to the Center of the Earth helmer Eric Brevig told me the incremental additional cost is always a percentage of the budget, and it varies from a live-action with no effects on the low end to a big visual effects film on the high-end. In other words, a relatively low-budget live-action concert film like Hannah Montana probably spent nowhere near $15 mil on 3-D, and on Avatar, they're going to spend much more than that.

Furthermore we hear from Variety's Ben Fritz, who stopped by the Adult Entertainment expo in Las Vegas after attending CES, the only technological innovation at the expo was 3-D porn. Porn, which is all but vfx-free and is all live-action photography, can't possibly afford to incur $15 million in additional costs on a feature just for stereo. Let's not forget that porn helped drive the homevideo revolution and has been at the forefront of just about every advance in video delivery technology.

So where did that $15 million figure come from? Jeffrey Katzenberg has been saying that 3-D added $15 million to the cost of Monsters vs. Aliens -- that is, $15 million above the $150 million the animated CG feature would have cost in regular 2-D alone.

Continue reading " 3-D Future: Bearish or Bullish? " »

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Posted: Mon, January 12, 2009, 2:01 PM | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBack ( 0 )


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Variety blogger Anne Thompson is your trusted source for film industry news. She tracks Hollywood, Indiewood, awards season and film festivals for this daily blog.
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