This is pretty cool. For Where The Wild Things Are Spike Jonze used a combination of real life-sized puppets with CGI faces that allowed them to show emotions, etc. Read more from Wired.com on how it was accomplished:
Building a lifelike monster is hard enough. But director Spike Jonze needed 14 of them, each with its own unique look and personality, for his film version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved Where the Wild Things Are. “When I read the book as a kid, I wanted to hug them, and I was scared of them at the same time,” Jonze says. To create fearsome physicality with approachable cuddliness, Jonze turned to the Muppet-masters at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, then used CG to make the beasts talk and emote. Sound complicated? That’s probably why the movie took half a decade to make. Here’s a look at the mechanics.
Heads: The heads were heavy and all-encompassing—performers could see, barely, through the creatures’ mouths. To make up for the lack of visibility, a small wireless video monitor mounted just above the performer’s eye level showed the view from Jonze’s camera. Head-mounted speakers played back the scripted dialogue.
Bodies: Some characters (like the horned Carol) had arms that were short enough for the puppet fingers to be slaved to simple tube controllers wrapped around the actor’s hands. Longer-armed monsters had mechanical hands made of a lightweight polymer called Plastazote, covered with carbon fiber for strength. Performers wore a backpack that supported a sort of rib cage and pelvis, over which hung a Lycra and foam “muscle suit” and a flexible fur skin made of custom four-way stretch fabric. “The suits had to be very lightweight, so as not to inhibit the characters, but they also had to look real,” says Peter Brooke, creative supervisor at the Creature Shop. That said, the Carol suit is 9 feet tall and weighs about 60 pounds.
Faces: “Initially I was thinking we would do animatronics in the faces,” Jonze says. “But then David Fincher,” who directed the facial-f/x-heavy Curious Case of Benjamin Button, “told me that was the stupidest thing we could ever do—go hours into the wilderness with a bunch of suits and all these servo motors and remote controls. We were working out of his office in Hollywood and he would leave notes on our door with a little drawing of a wild thing and an arrow that said ’suit’ and another arrow pointing at the face that said ‘CG.’” Heeding Fincher’s advice, animators created CG models of the creatures’ faces in postproduction and tracked them over what Jonze had shot on location. Using videos of the voice actors and of Jonze himself performing every scene, the animators added expressions. One tricky part was calibrating nonhuman mouth movements: Carol has a Kermit the Frog-like line that all but bisects his face; large movements would look cartoony and small movements would be too Muppety. (Turns out there is a such a thing!)
Well, this is sure to bump up the viewer numbers for Spike!
“The two hour extravaganza will feature the full cast of “Twilight” with a world premiere of footage from “New Moon” as well as the reunited cast of “Battlestar Galactica” and the cast and creators of “True Blood”. ”
New York, NY, October 5, 2009 – As twilight descends upon The Greek Theatre, Spike TV presents “SCREAM 2009,” an evening where galaxies collide and genres unite for the ultimate celebration of all things sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comic book. The 4th annual “SCREAM” is the first and only global event of its kind to honor and celebrate the hottest films, TV shows, comics, actors, creators, icons and pioneers who have influenced and shaped these genres. “SCREAM 2009” will tape on Saturday, October 17 in Los Angeles, CA. The two-hour extravaganza will premiere on Spike TV on Tuesday, October 27 (10:00 PM-Midnight, ET/PT).
Spike TV is proud to partner once again with Comic-Con International, the biggest comic book and pop culture convention in the world, to present real-life super hero Stan Lee with the Comic-Con Icon Award at “SCREAM 2009.” Lee is the creator of such legendary super-heroes as Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Iron Man and The Hulk. “Spider-Man’s” Tobey Maguire will lead the tribute to one of the most beloved and influential comic book legends of all time.
“SCREAM 2009” will also honor the godfather of the modern horror film, George Romero with this year’s Scream Mastermind Award. This award is presented to a filmmaker whose unique vision of horror, science fiction and/or fantasy is both critically-acclaimed and culturally significant. Romero, best known for his gruesome and satirical zombie masterpiece “Night Of The Living Dead” and its sequel “Dawn Of The Dead,” as well as the cult classic, “Creepshow,” will receive the honor previously presented to cinematic luminaries Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
“SCREAM 2009” will celebrate the year of the vampire and the phenomenal popularity of the “Twilight” saga with cast and World Premiere footage from the highly-anticipated “New Moon.” In addition, fans will be treated to appearances from the cast and creators of “True Blood” including Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer, Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgård, Sam Trammell, among others. The celebration continues with a “Battlestar Galactica” cast reunion for a farewell tribute featuring Edward James Olmos, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, James Callis, Kate Vernon, Katee Sackhoff, Michael Trucco Tahmoh Penikett and executive producer David Eick.
“SCREAM 2009” will present awards in 16 different categories. J.J. Abrams’ sci-fi action-adventure “Star Trek” tops the “SCREAM 2009” list with 17 nominations including the categories of The Ultimate Scream, Best Science Fiction Movie, Best Director, Best Ensemble, Holy Sh*t Scene-of-the-Year and a nod in the all-new Fight Scene-of-the-Year category. Comic book-inspired blockbusters “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and “Watchmen” each nabbed 13 nominations, big screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s best selling novel “Twilight” received 10 nominations, while HBO’s vampire-themed television series “True Blood” garnered nine nominations. Fans can log onto scream.spike.com until Saturday, October 17 to vote for their favorites.
Watch the initial teaser trailer:
The only way that this feud would have been any better is if these two would have physically fought each other. Trump is pretty tall, but Rosie is a psycho, so I’m sure it would be an even match. These clips are classics, the amount of insults that Trump drops in a 1 minute interview is nothing short of astounding. We can only hope that the future holds more bitter feuds between moronic celebrities that are as good as this one. Take a walk down memory lane…
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This is awesome. From MichaelBay.com:
Robots
* 14 robots last time, 46 robots this time (ILM only)
* If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
* Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
* Devastator’s hand is traveling 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.
* The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
* All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles
* Devastator’s parts stacked tip to tip would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.
* If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.Disk space
* TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
* 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.Rendering times
* If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
* A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
* IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!Imax
* Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
* Imax frames take about 6 times longer than anamorphic to render.
* IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!ILM screen time
ILM Screen Time is about 51 minutes.
Devastator
* Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.
* Devastator has more than 10 times the number of individual parts found in an average car.
* Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.Devastator totals
* Number of geom pieces: 52632
* The total number of polygons: 11,716,127
* The total length of all pieces: 73090 feet
* The total length of all pieces: 13.84 miles
This is from CinemaBlend.com:
Judd Apatow’s name has been attached the rumors about Ghostbusters 3 since they first began, with all reports saying he would be the producer for the film written by The Office writers Lee Eisenberg and Greg Stupnitsky. Now the production has gotten so close to actually happening that Production Weekly is listing it– and wouldn’t you know, Apatow Productions is right there in charge.
Sure, it’s not huge news– we could probably have assumed from the first rumor that Apatow would be involved, given that he’s the reigning demi-god of comedy. But the inclusion in Production Weekly means the whole thing is actually happening, beyond just Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray getting asked awkward questions about the project’s status. No actor names are attached to the Production Weekly piece, but at this point, it seems like only a matter of time before the gentlemen prepare to suit up a third time.
Lets hope Apatow doesn’t screw this up…For old times sake:
Most people have probably heard this already, but if not, it’s worth a listen. Basically, the Director of Photography walks around on-set during the shooting of a scene in Terminator 4 and Christian doesn’t like it very much! I think he’s clocked at 36 f-bombs! Check it out:
It actually reminded me a lot of this Chris Berman freak-out:
Here’s an inside look at the recent premiere night for the much buzzed about film starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, “I Love You Phillip Morris” which is directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa.
And here is a behind-the-scenes interview with the cast of “Manure” which also just had its premiere at Sundance Film Festival. Faith Salie speaks with “Manure” director Michael Polish and cast members Billy Bob Thornton, Tea Leoni, Kyle MacLachlan, Ed Helms, and writer Mark Polish in the Sundance Channel Studio.
For more, head to SundanceChannel.com.
Check out some inside peeks at whats going on at this years Sundance Film Festival:
The much buzzed about Humpday had its premiere a few nights ago and here is a behind-the-scenes video featuring Lynn Shelton (Writer/Director) and some of the cast and crew involved in putting the film together.
Here’s an inside interview with Doug Pray (the Director of Art and Copy) and legendary ad man George Lois (one of the subjects in Art and Copy and the man who created the slogan “I want my MTV”)
And here is an inside look at the process of the Juror selection and the Jurors’ Brunch where all of the Jurors meet and greet with each other.
Head to SundanceChannel.com for some more behind-the-scenes videos and to stay up on all the latest news from the Sundance Film Festival.
REPO! The Genetic Opera, a futuristic tale of horror, love and betrayal that modernizes the “rock opera” genre with original music and rich, dark production design. REPO! The Genetic Opera features an eclectic cast that includes Anthony Stewart Head, Sarah Brightman, Alexa Vega, Bill Moseley and Paris Hilton. The DVD contains in-depth special features that include cast and crew audio commentaries and featurettes while the Blu-ray Disc includes those features plus video sing-a-longs, additional featurettes, deleted scenes and a bonus audio commentary with Paris Hilton and director Darren Lynn Bousman.
Check out the trailer:
From the producers of the Saw franchise and director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV), based on a screenplay by Darren Smith & Terrance Zdunich from their original stage play, comes the new cult classic Repo! The Genetic Opera. A futuristic tale of horror that modernizes the “rock opera” genre with original music and rich, dark production design, the film features an eclectic cast that includes Anthony Stewart Head, Sarah Brightman, Alexa Vega, Bill Moseley and Paris Hilton. The blend of Moulin Rouge style with The Rocky Horror Picture Show theatrics results in a unique viewing experience that comes to life on DVD and Blu-ray. At the core of this entire project, however, is the music, which is born of many influences. This rock opera boasts an entirely original soundtrack that blends equal parts Goth and punk rock to form an eerie and powerful musical narrative. The DVD contains in-depth special features that include cast and crew audio commentaries and featurettes while the Blu-ray Disc includes those features plus video sing-a-longs, additional featurettes, deleted scenes and a bonus audio commentary with Paris Hilton and director Darren Lynn Bousman.
Repo! The Genetic Opera was an Official Selection of the Fantasy Film Festival, Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Sitges Film Festival, Atlantic Film Festival, Edmonton Film Festival and Austin Fantastic Film Festival and was hailed by horror fans and critics nationwide. The film was declared “a spirited, absorbing, astounding, thought provoking futuristic fulsome fable” (Horror.com), “fresh, unique and exciting…remarkable” (Bloody-disgusting.com), “an instant cult classic” (Fearnet) and “absolutely mind-blowing on a visionary level” (Horror-Movies.ca).
In the not-so-distant future, a worldwide epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GeneCo, a biotech company that offers organ transplants…for a price. Those who miss their payments are scheduled for repossession and hunted by the villainous Repo Men. In a world where surgery addicts are hooked on painkilling drugs and murder is sanctioned by law, a sheltered young girl searches for the cure to her own rare disease as well as information about her family’s mysterious history. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo, she is unable to turn back, as all of her questions will be answered at the wildly anticipated spectacular event: The Genetic Opera.
Check out more coverage of the movie from WatchMojo.com:
The Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 DVD drops today, just in time for folks who want to catch up on the final episodes before the show returns next week. The DVD’s packed with special features, including an unrated extended version of the Razor movie. Check out some special feature clips right here:
The Bittersweet Final Season:
Katee Sackhoff Loves Starbuck:
The Political Thing:
Helo Speaks:
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