meyemind.com

For all the rest, click 'continue' below:

Cloverfield "Monster" TV Spot


Cloverfield "Robert" TV Spot


Cloverfield "Teaser" TV Spot

and TV SPOTs 4, 5, & 6 below:

Visual Effects by Tippett Studio

Posted by dschnee at 7:30 AM

December 8, 2007

Tippett thanks the Enchanted team in Cinefex #112

Posted by dschnee at 2:14 AM

December 3, 2007

2007 Golden Satellite Awards Nominations Announced

The nominees for the 12th Annual 2007 Satellite Awards have been announced by the International Press Academy... and look who made it below, Enchanted!?! With Transformers, 300, and The Golden Compass, I don't think we stand a chance, but to get noticed is just awesome.

See Also: Enchanted makes the First Cut for the VFX Oscar race?!?

Structured similarly to the Golden Globes, the Satellites honor both movies and television with the comedy and drama genres separate in many of the categories.

VISUAL EFFECTS
Scott Farrar, "Transformers" (Paramount Pictures)
Michael Fink, "The Golden Compass" (New Line Cinema)
Chris Watts, Grant Freckelton, Derek Wentworth, Daniel Leduc, "300″ (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Peter Chiang, Charlie Noble, David Vickery, Mattias Lindahl, "The Bourne Ultimatum" (Universal Pictures)
Thomas Schelesny, Matt Jacobs, Tom Gibbons, "Enchanted" (Walt Disney Pictures)
Jerome Chen, Sean Phillips, Kenn Mc Donald, Michael Lantieri, "Beowulf" (Paramount Pictures)

See Also, Also: Actress In A Motion Picture, Comedy Or Musical
Amy Adams Enchanted Walt Disney Pictures

See Also, Also, Also:
NIKOLA TESLA AWARD IN RECOGNITION FOR VISIONARY ACHIEVEMENTS IN FILMMAKING TECHNOLOGY
Dennis Muren

The complete list:

Posted by dschnee at 7:39 AM

December 2, 2007

'Enchanted's effects put a new wrinkle in the face of evil

The film's CG artists looked to animation for inspiration.

ONCE upon a time, golden age Disney films told magical stories via the art of cel animation -- but "Enchanted" director Kevin Lima wanted to create a 21st century tale with the film, which landed in theaters over the Thanksgiving holiday.

His saga about a virtuous maiden, a prince and a wicked queen mixes traditional animation with sequences in which live-action actors romp with photo-real digital characters (a chipmunk and a dragon, the queen's alter ego). Tippett Studio, the Oscar-winning visual effects house of "Jurassic Park," brought the characters to life and helped them channel the charm of Disney classics such as "Fantasia."

As an hommage to the Mouse House of old, "Enchanted's" first scenes are set in a cel-animated kingdom with cel-animated protagonists, supervised by master artist James Baxter. The maiden Giselle (Amy Adams) lives in this magical, musical world, where she is engaged to Prince Edward (Patrick Dempsey) -- until his evil stepmother, Narissa (Susan Sarandon), blasts her through a cosmic portal to the less-than-enchanted universe of Manhattan. In the Big Apple, the humans become live actors, the chipmunk morphs into a digital rodent and Sarandon's character transforms into a beast that conjures the spirit of the Maleficent dragon from "Sleeping Beauty."

"Kevin pulled his metaphors from 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Cinderella' and more," says visual effects supervisor Tom Schelesny ("The Shaggy Dog"), whose unenviable task was overseeing animators using state of the art digital animation tools such as Maya software to render performers that looked real but acted like, well, characters in the great Disney cartoons.

To capture that aesthetic, Tippett Studio had to reinvent itself by following the classic Disney animation protocol, which gave the artists more responsibilities but entailed huge changes and greater risks. Tippett's animation supervisor, Tom Gibbons, and lead animator, James Brown, created back stories to deepen the artists' understanding of each protagonist beyond what was in the script, which gave every department -- the digital modelers, painters and especially the animators -- a sense of ownership of the characters. "I needed everyone in our entire animation department to interchangeably 'become' those characters," Schelesny says.

For decades, Tippett founder and puppet animation wizard Phil Tippett was the dragon master, having brought the mythical beasts to life in "Dragonslayer," "Willow" and 1996's "Dragonheart," whose dragon was one of the first talking CG characters (all done with Industrial Light & Magic). But Lima wanted something completely different for "Enchanted's" scaly behemoth: a talking dragon that didn't resemble a dinosaur. "He wanted the Narissa dragon to look like a living character and a classic Disney villain," Schelesny says.

The un-dino-like result -- designed by Crash McCreery and sculpted by Peter Konig -- was loosely based on a traditional Chinese dragon with elements of Sarandon's face and costume. As Narissa transforms into the beast, her crown mutates into horns and her gown's flowing fabric sleeves become wings. "We gave her surface an iridescent opal pearlescence, like a piece of jewelry, so it didn't just look like scales," Schelesny says.

Unlike other animated talking lizards, whose rigid lips merely open and close, Narissa was to communicate like a classic Disney cartoon character -- i.e., a lot like a human being. Sarandon's performance was conveyed via the dragon's eyes, while her vocals were lip-synced to the dragon's mouth movements. Tippett's lead rigger, David Nelson, created digital controls that enabled the ultra-natural-looking lip movement and nuanced facial expressions.

Rodent springs to life

WHILE the Narissa dragon is "Enchanted's" most flamboyant character, the chipmunk, Pip, was the hardest to animate. He has to communicate without actually talking (he turns mute once he is banished to New York and has to rely on miming). Tippett's animators studied video of real chipmunks and filmed one another gesturing to discover how Pip might move, then applied those lessons to their CG character.

Eventually, Schelesny showed director Lima a QuickTime movie of a chipmunk running, washing his face with his paws and spinning in a circle. "Kevin goes, 'That's exactly what we should do with the CG chipmunk.' What he didn't know was that was our CG chipmunk. We needed that response from him, because without it, we couldn't do Pip as a character."

To balance Pip's animal and anthropomorphic qualities, Tippett's animators had to weigh how much cartoon versus chipmunk to add. "In some sequences, he's straight chipmunk and in others, he's quite animated and even changes shape," Schelesny says. In one bravura pantomime, Pip has to convey to Prince Edward that someone is trying to murder Giselle: "When the Prince finally 'gets' what Pip is miming, the chipmunk makes a 'ta-da' gesture that has made whole theaters erupt into applause," Schelesny says.

The "Enchanted" process has clearly left its mark on Tippett's creative team. "I will not do another show without copying the Disney model because it's so empowering for the animators," Schelesny says. "We've captured magic in a bottle, and we don't want to lose it."

Posted by dschnee at 9:31 AM

December 1, 2007

Enchanted still has #1 charm

Disney film on top after posting $4.9 million Friday
-from Variety

Disney's "Enchanted" continued to serenade auds for the top spot at the Friday box office, grossing $4.9 million from 3,730 theaters.

Despite a 66% drop in its daily haul from last Friday, the PG-rated princess pic is expected to hold its crown over the weekend. In its first 10 days at the B.O., "Enchanted" has bewitched $58.5 million.

While the post-Thanksgiving frame is notorious for being slow, many previous weekend holdovers saw Friday-to-Friday drops that were steeper than 50%.

Posted by dschnee at 7:05 PM

November 29, 2007

Enchanted in Cinefex #112

Disney's Enchanted will have a small VFX feature in the Overview section of Cinefex #112

See Also: The Golden Compass, Tippett completed over a dozen shots for the upcoming fantasy adventure.

The Golden Compass

New Line Cinema returns to large-scale fantasy filmmaking with The Golden Compass, written and directed by Chris Weitz and based on the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Visual effects supervisor Michael L. Fink orchestrated the work of nine companies in creating the film's rich array of magical characters and exotic locales, with lead vendors Rhythm & Hues and Cinesite responsible for the film's signature CG effect - shape-shifting, talking spirit animals known as 'demons.'

See Also, Also: Looks like The Spiderwick Chronicles will hog the cover of Cinefex #113 (I hope one of our creatures hog's the cover, but it very well, and most likely will be one of ILM's critters...)

I Am Legend

In I Am Legend, based on a novella by Richard Matheson, a viral plague has transformed the inhabitants of Manhattan into bloodthirsty, carnivorous and preternaturally strong creatures, leaving a lone survivor to fend for himself. Visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs engaged Sony Pictures Imageworks to handle the effects, which included digitally generating the hordes of infected creatures and creating a post-apocalyptic look for location photography shot in New York.

Beowulf

Director Robert Zemeckis re-teams with visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen and Sony Pictures Imageworks to bring the ancient epic tale, Beowulf, to the big screen as an all-CG feature. Expanding on and further refining the groundbreaking performance capture developed for The Polar Express, Chen and his team reached new heights of realism in the creation of the film's synthetic humans, while breathing new life into its fabled beasts, exotic environments and dynamic battle action.

OVERVIEWS

Enchanted

2D characters from an animated fairytale are magically transported to the real world of modern-day New York in the Walt Disney fantasy Enchanted, directed by Kevin Lima, with visual effects by Tippett Studio.

The Mist

For The Mist, adapted from a Stephen King novella, director Frank Darabont and visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell combined full-scale animatronic puppets, maquettes and makeup effects provided by KNB EFX with CG creatures created by CaféFX.

Q&A: Dennis Berardi

Visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi discusses the work of Toronto-based effects company Mr. X, and the state of the burgeoning visual effects industry in Canada.

Posted by dschnee at 10:30 PM

November 27, 2007

VFX of Disney's Enchanted

Making a classic fairytale come to life in modern-day Manhattan was no ordinary assignment, but that's precisely what was needed for Disney's Enchanted (opened Nov. 21). Director Thomas Schelesny at Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California.

-yanked from VFXworld's Article Enchanted: Conjuring Fairytale VFX

The studio has a great reputation for combining visual effects with live action, and Schelesny had previously supervised Tippett's crew on The Shaggy Dog and Son of The Mask. He also brought to the task a background that was useful for a film that bridged the worlds of visual effects and animation -- he had been an animator himself on such projects as Starship Troopers, Men In Black II and Hollow Man.

"When I was introduced to Kevin Lima," recalls Schelesny, "he was entrenched on the Disney lot, surrounded by hundreds of pieces of conceptual artwork thousands of storyboards. When I came to it, Enchanted was entirely not a visual effects effort. I felt like I'd walked straight into a 2D animation pipeline, which is where Kevin's foundation is. Initially what was unfamiliar to me as a visual effects supervisor was that I've rarely seen a director be so prepared to shoot a movie. I realized that this was a 'once in a career' opportunity."
Enchanted takes audiences on the journey of Giselle (Amy Adams), who's living happily in a 2D fairyland until she falls for Prince Edward (James Marsden) and is banished by his disapproving mother, Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon). Suddenly Giselle is propelled from an idyllic world (animated in traditional Disney style at Baxter Animation) into present-day, live-action New York City. The prince comes looking for her -- trailed by an angry Queen -- and they also transition from animation to live action. The naïve Giselle has embraced the Manhattan life, including a friendship with the handsome Robert (Patrick Dempsey) and the premise provided plentiful sight gags for Tippett's team to visualize. They created virtual sets, environmental effects and, most notably, realistic CG characters that performed alongside real actors.

With Schelesny serving as overall supervisor, Tippett ended up contributing 320 shots, CIS Hollywood did 36 shots (primarily wire removals and comps), ReelFX did four shots of pop up book page-turn transitions and Weta also did two.

Schelesny remembers, "When I met with Kevin Lima it was clear that we were going to participate in a true homage, not a spoof or some irreverent slam on the tradition of animated films. Kevin was very clear that even some of the best acting animation he'd seen in 3D would not measure up to what he'd need. When I came back to Tippett and sat down with Tom Gibbons (animation supervisor) and Jim Brown (lead animator) and I let them know that we weren't going to follow a regular visual effects paradigm. It wouldn't be the typical action-oriented animation where the monster walks over a truck or giant robot transforms into a plane and flies away."

Instead, they would have to animate -- and integrate -- creatures that ranged from cockroaches, pigeons and rats to central performers like a chipmunk named Pip and a gigantic dragon-like incarnation of Queen Narissa. Tippett Studio had previously animated Templeton the rat in Charlotte's Web, and their use of Autodesk Maya combined with their proprietary fur tool Furrocious had yielded a great character. Enchanted gave them the chance to build upon that experience.
Schelesny remarks, "Pip was a unique character. Unlike the 'Narissa dragon' -- who was allowed to be a fantasy character -- Pip had to sell as a real animal. When we began development, my first instruction was that we needed to make a photorealistic chipmunk and then demonstrate it to Kevin. From there we'd add some of the personification, which would allow Pip to stand on his hind legs and pantomime."

The Tippett team had observed a pet rat while animating Templeton, but it's illegal to own chipmunks, so Schelesny went out and filmed live animals in motion from every conceivable angle. Lima also provided a "soundtrack" of noises to suggest a voice for Pip (who doesn't speak when he's in 3D.) Once again Tippett's artists used Maya and Furrocious to generate a believable furry creature.

"In our first test for Kevin," Schelesny recalls, "our CG chipmunk ran in, groomed himself and stretched upward. Then he spun in a circle and took off. We nailed all of the little cues, which made this chipmunk seem real. It's typical when you're working on a CG character that you want to say 'Hey, look at me!' But we deliberately held back because I wanted to show Kevin that we could 'do real.'"

When Schelesny was on location with Lima in Times Square, he showed the director a QuickTime of this test on a laptop. It looked so convincing that the director thought he was looking at reference footage and said, 'Yeah, like that.' Schelesny remembers how surprised Lima was to learn that he was looking at a CG character. "That helped us build confidence that we were on the right track."

Setting up the scenes in which Pip would perform was challenging, according to Schelesny. "We had a number of tricks to help the actors and the cinematographer understand what they were working with. I had a small stuffed chipmunk that had a wire armature on the inside that we'd place in the scene during rehearsal. In some cases where we couldn't do that, I'd have a rod with a flag on the end with a small marker to show them where to look. I'd be digitally erased from the plate and we place the CG Pip where that marker had been.

"In other situations, if numerous actors had to watch where Pip was moving through a scene, we'd use a device like a synchro mark. It essentially is a laser pointer that plugs into the camera and runs out of phase with the camera's shutter so its mark isn't seen. I would control where the laser pointer went -- pretending I was Pip. The actors would look where the laser pointer went, so we'd get all their eyes looking in the right direction."
It also helped the camera crew, led by DP Don Burgess (Spider-Man, Terminator 3, Forrest Gump). Schelesny notes, "The camera operator needed to know where he'd have to pan or tilt to follow something that's supposed to be moving very quickly." It was important to suggest that the camera was trying to keep up with a darting creature, Schelesny believes. "It sells the spontaneity of the moment. I'd rather see Pip leave the frame and have the camera catch up with him -- almost as though we didn't know where he was going to go, rather than have him always be in the center of the frame." This approach reflected the director's wish to have the CG filmed with a "real" camera, and not a CG camera that would make moves that ignored the rules of physics.

Of course, the Tippett crew couldn't hone the performance of CG characters until the plate photography was complete, and Lima's editorial crew tried to expedite the process as much as possible. As Schelesny explains, "After the background plates were shot they cut out the storyboards and did some simple Avid composites that put 2D versions of characters into the real backgrounds to help our animators understand how long their shots should be and how their coverage should work. It was very clear what the mechanics of those scenes needed to be.

"The main difference between 2D animation and visual effects 3D work is that in 2D animation it's never too late to make a huge change, given a bit of time. In 3D, once the plate is shot, you have nothing but limitations. When you're on set you're limited by time and the camera equipment that you have." Schelesny recalls with a laugh how surprised he was to arrive at one NYC location -- a very small bathroom in which they'd stage a musical number where scores of animals help Giselle clean the messy room.

Shooting visual effects plates in cramped quarters was not for the timid, Schelesny admits. "Some of these camera moves were fast whip pans and tilts. We knew we knew we couldn't do those moves plus have floor effects occurring and still hit our timings. So I called out the timings in half time and we ran the camera at 12 fps. We got whip pans that were super fast and framed perfectly. And it also got us perfect motion blur."

That cramped bathroom was one extreme, and the other was a grand ballroom where Susan Sarandon transforms into a 50-foot beast with explosive force. "It was a real adjustment to start working in large scale," Schelesny acknowledges. "Over 100 extras had to watch her move through the ballroom. So the little rod trick had to become a big rod trick. To help direct the extras' eyelines, rather than use a laser pointer, I was on the stage floor with a long pole, and I'd raise the pole and yell 'Look at ME!!!' as loud as I could. Then I would run out of the frame and we'd do the take while things were fresh in people's memories.

"These shots are by no means subtle. With the beast's appearance, lots of floor effects went off. There was an explosion, and we yanked a bunch of actors out of the frame and all of the extras had to look up and imagine the Narissa character growing higher and higher. At the same time, we had a computer-controlled lighting setup and a repeatable head on the camera all synced together. We had on-set lighting effects for the fire and the camera tilted up in a pre-programmed move. Chandeliers and all kinds of set pieces were knocked back and forth.
"There was also lots of CG fire and smoke, which was built around the Maya fluid system. In order to fit the film's motif, we couldn't have an explosion that looked too real, like a bomb going off. So our effects animation team had to take the physics of the fire and smoke for this transformation and make them follow a Disney 2D composition approach. It looked real but was reminiscent of 2D animated films."

A constant challenge for Schelesny during the filming of Enchanted was deciding what could be gotten on set and which shots had to be done digitally. "You earn most of your pay in those split second decisions. Virtually anybody can go onto a set and come back with 80% of what's needed. It's for that final 20% where you need to go on set well prepared to avoid a problem or to recognize it when you're there, so you can let people know that something will take extra time."

Schelesny was committed to using real footage of actors whenever possible. Tippett Studio did employ significant muscle and cloth simulation to animate some digital doubles in Enchanted, working from modeling data of the actors captured by Realscan's mobile unit. But digital doubles were only used when absolutely necessary. This philosophy led Schelesny to design a "puppeteering" approach to the film's final sequence, in which the Narissa beast climbs Manhattan's Woolworth Building while clutching Patrick Dempsey's character in her claws.

"If we were going to see Patrick's face, why use a digital double? When we first discussed how to tackle this, it was on the heels of King Kong, and we considered whether we should have a computer controlled motion base with a robotic arm that moved Patrick around realistically. But I've done a significant amount of work with puppeteers, and one huge advantage of puppeteering is that you can change a performance very quickly. And humans naturally move smoothly in arcs." Schelesny decided that by working with the floor effects supervisor Steve Kirshoff, they could film Patrick Dempsey being "held" in a puppeteered greenscreen rig.

"I built a 3D model in Maya of how I envisioned the puppeteers would interface with the actor," Schelesny explains. "It was basically a long arm counterweighted on one side. Patrick Dempsey would be held on one end of that arm and there'd be a pivot two-thirds of the way down the arm and then a counterweight on the far side. That would allow us to swing the arm around with him on the end of it.

"Then we built a 3-axis 'wrist' to hold Patrick. Three different floor effects artists would control each axis, like turning a wheel. These were basically steering hydraulics for ships. They'd spin a wheel in one direction and the wrist would move. So they worked like x-y-z axes. They had to work in perfect synchronicity for it to have the proper drag and follow-through and weight of a real arm with somebody inside of it.

"I was working, in many cases, with stunt people who had never done this kind of puppeteering before. But after a couple of weekends rehearsing, they were very good at operating this arm. In some of those movements Patrick was 20 feet off the floor. He brought a lot to this. A visual effects supervisor's best friend is a good physical actor. We shot most all the work with Patrick Dempsey in that arm in one day, with zero malfunctions. And the footage never looked mechanical or programmed."

This footage of Dempsey was then tracked into the claw of the CG Narissa beast as she climbed the building. The camera following this ascent revealed a vista of NYC skyscrapers, all created digitally. Tippett's Matchmove Supervisor Eric Marco had gathered extensive references of the actual surrounding buildings, so that the camera could literally move anywhere. Schelesny notes, "That allowed us to build in a subtle level of parallax, so that as the camera was moving higher up the Woolworth building, we'd see the other buildings in the distance sliding against each other. We could have flown the camera in 360 degrees but we resisted the temptation. Audiences are sophisticated enough to know you can't go from a helicopter shot to the moon and back to the beast's eye."

The finale in Enchanted takes place on one physical set piece of the top of the Woolworth building; digitally extended and surrounded by a computer-animated lightning storm. "The rain was digital, and even was a 'character,'" explains Schelesny. "At first, the rain moves in a linear fashion and then as the sequence builds to the finale it begins to swirl around. And the lighting, which starts out quite far away on the horizon in the beginning of the sequence, is all around the spire of the building at the end. It wasn't just a simulation of a storm." (Disney's classic, The Old Mill was a major inspiration here.)

Describing how the look was carefully choreographed down to the frame, Schelesny says, "We did a rough 2D QuickTime animation that described where the bolts of lightning should go, and that served as a template for the compositors." The integration of all these elements was done with Apple's Shake, and Schelesny credits Lead Compositor Chris Morely and Compositing Supervisor Matt Jacobs for making the storm support the film's story. "There's nothing about a crafted film that is random," he observes.

Ellen Wolff is a southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in other publications, including Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.

-yanked from VFXworld's Article Enchanted: Conjuring Fairytale VFX

Posted by dschnee at 10:18 PM

November 26, 2007

An Enchanted Thanksgiving for Disney

So Enchanted charmed in $49 million over the 5 day holiday haul, marking the second-biggest boxoffice feast ever over the holiday-lengthened Thanksgiving weekend, this behind Toy Story 2's $80.1 million performance in 1999.

I went with the family, 15 of us in all on Friday night to finally see Enchanted... There was a early screening 2 weeks ago @ Pixar, but I was away in Tahoe that weekend unable to attend. It was definitely worth the wait though, we finished up last May, so it's one of those projects you almost forget about until you see it all again, complete, on screen, all the sounds, bells, whistles with a crowd, and one that's totally engulfed, it was so much fun to watch. Amy Adams gave an amazing almost freaky performance, and the rest were great too, James 'Cyclops' Marsden was pretty damn funny, and the jolly Timothy Spall was great. From Queen to Hag to Evil Queen to Evil Dragon, Susan Sarandon did exceptional job as well.

Our work? I thought it all looked great, truly. The "Happy Working Song" was so much fun. I was hoping I wouldn't cringe at the Queen's big arrival to New York scene, but I did... just a little. I worked really hard on it, but kept feeling as if it turned out a bit hokey. Then I remind myself that she has just emerged from the 2D world, and some of the look and elements involved a more traditional 2D style, while also achieving a level of realism. Anyhow the Dragon/Woolworth/Rain sequence looked really good too, it was great to see everything hold up.

Pip Rocked! The crowd loved him, cheered for him, laughed at him, and cared for him when he was in harms way, kudos to the Animators and Furrocious.

Check out a couple of great articles below about the animation and visual effects of Enchanted: (And I hinted to this in the previous post but I have to mention that we made the First Cut for the VFX Oscar race?!?)

Enchanted: Conjuring Fairytale VFX
Ellen Wolff discovers the charmed life of Enchanted from Tippett VFX Supervisor Thomas Schelesny.

and

Enchanted by Disney
Joe Strike talks to the creators of Disney's Enchanted, who blended new and old to achieve a style that's both fresh and familiar.

Posted by dschnee at 11:45 AM

November 20, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles Movie Trailer #2

Also Known As the Darker Trailer...

IN HD:
480p|720p|1080p
-via Yahoo! Movies

Posted by dschnee at 7:57 AM

Another Spiderwick Chronicles Poster

Posted by dschnee at 6:32 AM

November 16, 2007

'Enchanted' princess steps out of cartoon, into Manhattan

USA Today put out a nice spread on Enchanted...

"The masterminds behind the PG-rated Enchanted have set out to invent a new studio classic, one that not only recalls the cartoon wonders of Uncle Walt's golden age but also such later landmarks as 1964's Mary Poppins (that's Julie Andrews narrating at the start and finish) and 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (a similar groundbreaker)."

By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
Making the leap from "once upon a time" to "happily ever after" is hardly a waltz in the park for the average Disney fairy-tale heroine.

Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had to endure jealous crones, clingy animal sidekicks and gnarled little men in their quest for everlasting love.

WATCH: Check out a clip of 'Enchanted'

But Enchanted's Giselle has a few more pressing matters to overcome — including homelessness — as the strawberry-blond princess is rudely shoved out of her animated Eden and into the live-action chaos of modern-day Manhattan.

Cinderella never had to fret about tripping on her ballgown. The artists took care of that. But Amy Adams, the supporting-Oscar nominee from 2005's Junebug who brings Giselle to life in the romantic comedy opening Wednesday, wasn't as lucky. She wrestled with a wedding dress that enveloped her like a silk-and-organza nuclear explosion while negotiating the hustle and bustle of Times Square.

"It's definitely heavier than you think," says Adams, 33, who took more than a few tumbles in her 45-pound costume, causing her to half-jokingly refer to director Kevin Lima as "the Marquis de Sade." Giselle also has to bear the weight of both sending up and celebrating Disney's 2-D animation, a tradition that has been on the brink of extinction until recently.

The masterminds behind the PG-rated Enchanted have set out to invent a new studio classic, one that not only recalls the cartoon wonders of Uncle Walt's golden age but also such later landmarks as 1964's Mary Poppins (that's Julie Andrews narrating at the start and finish) and 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (a similar groundbreaker).

Says Lima, who has done animation (1999's Tarzan) as well as live action (2000's 102 Dalmatians) for the studio: "Shrek tends to beat up on Disney, but this is just the opposite. The ideas behind the fairy-tale movies might be somewhat antiquated, but put into the real world, they don't have to be cynical. They can still have that same joy."

What follows is the story of the key talents behind the birth of a postmodern princess, one who might help the Magic Kingdom rediscover its old-fashioned knack for enchanting audiences.

Chapter 1: The storytellers three

Long ago (circa 1997) and far away (in Hollywood), Bill Kelly's script for Enchanted cast a spell over producer Barry Josephson (Men in Black, TV's Bones), and a deal was struck with Disney.

Hitches and delays followed, however. The project was an ambitious one, with 14 minutes of animated segments plus elaborate musical numbers. Several writers took a stab at polishing the screenplay, while directors Rob Marshall (Chicago) and Adam Shankman (Hairspray) came and went.

It wasn't until 2005 that everything fell into place — after Lima was recruited and Kelly refocused his fantasy on Giselle's journey instead of cynical lawyer Robert (Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey), who rescues her and eventually falls for her smiling charms.

One of Lima's strengths: He understands the rules of a cartoon universe. "Kevin knows the world of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and Mulan," Josephson says. "He knows what princesses are like, what they want, how they sit down, how they talk, what their eyes look like. He knew exactly what Giselle should embody."

The filmmaker also realized what effect being fully dimensional would have on a make-believe creation whose destiny is centered on waiting for her prince to come.

"She is about 80% Snow White, with some traits borrowed from Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty," Lima says, "although her spunkiness comes from Ariel of The Little Mermaid. These characters expect things to happen to them, but being in the contemporary world forces Giselle to grow and become an active participant."

The magical if strangely romantic epiphany arrives for Giselle when she feels anger for the first time after arguing with Robert, and the sight of his chest hair peeping out from his robe awakens her sexuality as if from a deep slumber. AsLima explains, cartoon princes don't have hirsute bodies: "It's too difficult to draw."

Chapter 2: The pied piper

What's a Disney animated feature without snappy novelty tunes and swoony ballads? Enchanted boasts five such musical numbers, clever pastiches that borrow from fairy tales old and new.

Lending an air of authenticity is Alan Menken, who has made a career out of writing music for such films as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, collecting eight Oscars for his efforts.

Given that his previous cartoon score was for Disney's last 2-D feature, 2004's little-seen Home on the Range, Menken is all too happy to remind moviegoers why they used to relish such films.

"Spoofing what we do is the best way to win audiences back," says the music man, who re-teams with Stephen Schwartz (Broadway's Wicked), his partner on Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "They appreciate it when you appeal to the smarter part of their brains. This is a new start."

The first song, True Love's Kiss, a throwback to such Walt-era songs as Someday My Prince Will Come, proved the most difficult. "Kevin had a strong idea of what he wanted and, at the end of the day, it was a very good thing," Menken says. "But, oh, my God, was he involved."

More fun was mining his own legacy with the impossibly catchy That's How You Know. "Think of it as Under the Sea, but paying tribute to the melting pot of New York," the songwriter says. "It starts with salsa, moves to steel drums, then reggae, an oompah band, even some Bollywood."

Chapter 3: A king of cartoons

With the studio's 2-D animation division shut down, James Baxter, a Disney and DreamWorks alum who runs his own boutique company, was drafted to oversee Enchanted's cartoon sequences.

"Kevin wanted the animation to feel nostalgic, to have it feel familiar to the audience," says James Baxter, the creator of Jessica Rabbit and Belle. "But he also wanted it to have a style of its own, a unity. We used art nouveau as a jumping-off point."

Much effort was made to tweak clichés of past films. "It's done with a lot of love," he assures. "Kevin would say, 'I want Prince Edward to pick up Nathaniel (his servant) and dance with him.' That's like what Prince Phillip does with King Hubert in Sleeping Beauty."

For Giselle's look, Baxter says, "She had to be a cross between Amy and a classic Disney princess. She is a forest nymph, barefoot with flowers in her hair." As for Prince Edward (played by James Marsden): "We worked hardest on him to make him look enough like James. The princes are usually so bland, it was exciting to see Jimmy's audition. This guy nailed it with complete conviction."

Chapter 4: The princess and her prince

Giselle and Prince Edward may be from Andalasia, not Venus and Mars. But the accidental tourists could not react more differently to their new environment.

"Ultimately, she survives because she has an instinctual ability to adapt," Lima says. "She can follow her dream no matter what stands in the way, whether it's a houseful of rats or learning how to make a new dress. She can survive. Unlike Edward. He's all about entitlement and bravado. He doesn't doubt himself very much. The world is too much for him."

That this less-than-passionate couple is supposedly destined to be each other's true love just lends to the comedy of the situation, he says. Not that both actors weren't perfect for their parts.

Says Adams, who last sang and danced at a Chanhassen, Minn., dinner theater in such shows as Brigadoon: "My boyfriend always says, 'You're a cartoon, Amy.' I felt I understood Giselle. I already knew the movies embarrassingly well."

As for Marsden, 34, who previously had a chance to showcase the musical talent he honed in high school as Corny Collins in Hairspray this past summer, "Enchanted let me go back to being a kid again and to pretend. It's very liberating. There is no one saying you can't be too big with it."

He gladly did his homework, too. "I revisited the classic films with my daughter Mary (2) and son Jack (6). The princes didn't have much personality. So I borrowed a little of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, minus the evil intentions, and some Buzz Lightyear. Edward is always in love with being in love."

Adams enjoyed her time spent in Giselle's glass slippers.

"She is eternally optimistic and romantic, but she also is a little goofy. She gets herself in trouble in the tradition of Disney princesses. But she is very independent and true to her convictions. If I'm lucky, she rubbed off on me."

Chapter 5: The villainess

A princess is nothing without a nemesis. And Giselle has a doozy.

"Sexy and slinky." That's how Baxter describes Susan Sarandon's Queen Narissa, who wants to be rid of Giselle before the fair damsel has a chance to wed her stepson Edward and kick her off the throne.

"I felt like a drag queen marching across Times Square," says Sarandon, describing her heavily cleavaged schemer, who hunts down her girlish prey in the big city.

She knows she is as over the top as her blue eye shadow, which makes her appreciate Dempsey's grounded counterpoint: "It's great to have Patrick's character undercutting everything constantly, like a Cary Grant."

Sarandon, who also plays the toothless hag who is determined to persuade Giselle to bite a poisoned apple even if it's afloat in a martini glass, based her queen on the one in Snow White as well as Malelificent in Sleeping Beauty. But when the actress checked out the source material, she realized something about the animated wrongdoers.

"There is a lot of scary smiling and saying of horrible things. But no screaming," she says. "There is a whole tradition of relishing your power and evilness very softly, and not yelling all the time."

Chapter 6: A kick of a sidekick

Pip, the wisecracking chipmunk, is voiceless in the real world, forcing him to be the Marcel Marceau of the animal kingdom.

By the time the CG pipsqueak is reduced to doing a frantic mime to inform the clueless Edward of Narissa's plot, the furry fellow has earned a round of applause from the audience.

"My inside joke is that Pip is imitating Kevin just trying to direct the movie," says Josephson about Lima, who provides the chipmunk's nonsense chittering.

In the end, the rodent does what any animal sidekick does in a Disney fairy tale: steals scenes. "This is the first time I was upstaged by a character or actor who was never on set," Marsden says. "And I still have yet to meet Pip."

Chapter 7: Spellbound fans?

Ultimately, the ending to the story is up to moviegoers, who will decide whether Enchanted lives up to the promise of its title.

"We all want to believe in happily ever after in our souls," Lima says. "That is one of the hopes that Disney gives you. It has been a while since a movie this pure of heart has been attempted. That 20-year-old guys in their backward baseball caps and low-rise jeans are loving it at test screenings probably has something to do with the child that still lives in us all. "
-USA Today

Posted by dschnee at 6:49 AM

November 14, 2007

Enchanted opens in 1 week!?!

Here is a photo taken by a friend in London, down Oxford Street. The London Premiere was on October 20th. A few articles and a music video below, ~enjoy.

"Just as we're thinking there's no movie this holiday season where anyone stands a chance of living happily ever after, there's Disney's "Enchanted" to prove us happily wrong." -hollywoodreporter.com

"Six years after "Shrek" put a modern spin on the classic fairy tale with some not-so-veiled references to Disney animation, the Mouse House has once again found itself in the crosshairs. This time it's the target of "Enchanted," a movie that isn't afraid to have fun with some of old Walt's more famous characters." -mtv.com

"At a moment that finds the film industry in a bout of public hand wringing over the (un)bankability of female leads, Amy Adams may be the answer to a few prayers. Nobody's praying harder than Disney, who are deploying her (trailer here) as the energetic and exceedingly watchable ingenue in their Enchanted, a film that's meant both to summarize a lifetime of Disney movies and more to the point, set the studio up with an ongoing franchise." -portfolio.com

""Watch out, Hairspray," writes Gregory Ellwood for MSN. "That Golden Globe award for Best Musical or Comedy isn't locked up yet. Amy Adams and her new Disney movie, Enchanted, are appearing as a pleasant November bombshell in the awards season race." -hollywood-animated-films.suite101.com

Carrie Underwood's Music Video: Ever Ever After

Posted by dschnee at 7:40 AM

November 13, 2007

Movies Don't Make Money?!?

Son of a ..... this is interesting in a 'this sucks' way, check this out from Rotten Tomatoes and Variety:

In marked contrast to the music business, which has spent the last seven years dealing with declining profits and assorted bad news, the 21st century has seen the film industry repeatedly setting new records for ticket receipts. The movie biz is healthy, right?

Right?

Not if you believe "Do Movies Make Money?," the just-released report from Global Media Intelligence. In an article published yesterday, Variety takes a look at the numbers crunched by GMI, and according to the report, things aren't looking good. In fact, GMI says the Hollywood studios will post a $1.9 billion loss on the movies they released last year. Yes, that's a "b" in front of the "illion." Seriously, check out the Variety article HERE

Studios set to lose $1.9 billion
2006 releases suffer from high production costs
By ADAM DAWTREY

LONDON — The Hollywood studios will make a loss of $1.9 billion on the movies they released in 2006, according to the first report from Global Media Intelligence, a new division of media research firm Screen Digest.

The report, titled “Do Movies Make Money?,” says that production costs for mid- to big-budget movies have risen much faster than revenues over the past few years, leaving the studios’ business model deep in the red.

Analyzing the 132 pics distributed by the U.S. majors in 2006, it estimates a pre-tax operating loss of $1.9 billion after five years of exploitation across all global media. That compares with a profit of $2.2 million for all new studio releases in 2004.

“We believe there is little chance of the negative revenue trend reversing in the coming years,” commented the report’s New York-based author Roger Smith.

“New technology will not deliver anything like the revenue initially predicted, and as DVD sales continue to decline and the cost of making movies increases, the message is simple: the Hollywood studios must begin a serious attempt to rein in costs, like News Corporation’s Fox has done, if they are to survive.”

GMI is dedicated to delivering research for institutional investors in the U.S. Its first report strikes a warning note for the hedge funds and private equity players that have been co-financing studio production slates over the past couple of years.

It suggests that DVD revenues, which rose by 75% between 1999 and 2004, have fallen for the past three years. In the first half of 2007, this decline accelerated further with a 12.5% drop in U.S. DVD sales, mirrored by a similar fall in international sales.

With DVD providing the lion’s share of studio profits, that has punched a hole in the business model for big-budget production, at a time when the cost of “gross participation” deals for actors, directors and producers has risen to $3 billion in 2006, double the level of five years ago.

According to the report, “While the studios are currently in negotiations with writers, actors and directors over fees, these salaries are not the main issue; the current cost of producing, casting and advertising in the present environment simply exceeds the likely returns.”

-source Variety.com

Posted by dschnee at 2:16 PM

November 7, 2007

The "Happy Working Song"

is in neato quicktime...
WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE BELOW CLIP
Download: "Enchanted's" "Happy Working Song"
care of the LA Times.com who released this article below today...

An early look at Disney's 'Enchanted'

Those longing for Walt Disney to return to the classic animated style of yore are in luck – in a way.

The studio's "Enchanted," due in theaters Nov. 21, is a throwback to Disney animated features "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty." "Enchanted's" opening 10 minutes, in fact, play-out like a long-lost 1940s animated film, complete with old-school, 2-D-style animation.

And then its main character, the Snow White-like Giselle, played by Amy Adams, is transported to modern-day Manhattan, where cute and cuddly forest critters are replaced by dancing, computer-animated roaches.

The fairy tale, directed by Kevin Lima (“Tarzan,” “102 Dalmatians”) is part homage to traditional Disney musicals, with references to everything from “Sleeping Beauty” to “The Little Mermaid” to “Beauty and the Beast,” in addition to a re-imagining of the classic, princess-finds-her-prince yarn.

Banished to New York by the jealous Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), who pulls the ol’ poison apple trick to reek revenge, Adams give a star-making performance as Giselle, playing the character’s naivety straight.

But as Giselle awaits the inevitable rescue by her Prince Edward (James Marsden), she’s forced to come of age away from her magic kingdom, and learns from handsome divorce lawyer Robert Phillip (Patrick Dempsey) that adult relationships aren’t always the happily-ever-after cliché.

But for all its modern twists, “Enchanted” fits firmly in the traditional Disney model. The film’s charm and innocence is an unabashed nod to a pre-“Shrek,” pre-“Alladin” era of irony and edginess.

“It’ll be nice if people feel nostalgia for 2-D animation,” says Steven Schwartz, who wrote lyrics for five original songs with composer Alan Menken. The pair collaborated on 1996's “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and 1995's “Pocahontas,” which won Oscars for Best Song and Best Original Score, and Menken has composed music for such Disney classics as “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast,” among others.

“Enchanted” presented the Schwartz and Menken with distinct challenges. The pair were directed to reference Disney favorites. In fact, “Enchanted’s” “Happy Working Song,” for instance, takes inspiration from “Snow White’s” “Whistle While You Work.” Yet, the writers had to be careful not to bombard the audience with plot-distracting allusions.

Additionally, as the musical moves to the non-animated world of New York, audiences will need to believe that Giselle’s way with a tune can get the denizens of Central Park dancing.

Here, Menken and Schwartz discuss the songs of “Enchanted,” and share clips of two of the film's non-animated numbers, “Happy Working Song” and “That’s How You Know,” for your viewing pleasure.

Talk about your objective in writing and composing the songs for "Enchanted," as they’re filled with references to past Disney films.

Stephen: We were trying to channel, I guess, classic Disney, and push it just a step further. We were trying to walk the line of both being an affectionate homage, but also poking a bit of fun at it. As one moves through the film, the music gets increasingly modern. Certainly for the beginning, with [opening song] "True Love’s Kiss," we looked at three Disney movies and how they were musicalized – "Snow White," "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty."

Alan: To start in the film in the Walt era, there was really this hyper innocence, this hyper escape. That made for the best possible contrast for when Giselle ends up in Times Square. Because we begin with this whole world where we exaggeratedly break into song, it gives us a real opportunity for the audience to go, 'We get it. We get the joke. We get the conceit and we’re with you.'

Did you have to check yourself, as in did you ever feel you were mimicking something from the past too much?

Alan: No. The whole conceit of this musical just made going right into those styles dead-on the perfect way to approach it. It was the situations in the film that would turn the songs on an angle, but musically, I went straight at it.

Let’s look at a song like 'That’s How You Know,' which is Giselle's big number in Central Park. How much of a song like this is written visually, as it’s really about her going through the park and bringing her world to New York.

Stephen: That was a song where we wanted to have a little fun with ourselves. There are references to "Under the Sea" and "Kiss the Girl," some of Alan’s stuff from "The Little Mermaid."

Alan: I wanted to go for a salsa riff at the top. I certainly didn’t want to ape those other songs. I just wanted the flavor of New York somehow.

Stephen: We wanted a moment where she inappropriately broke into song, but then it sort of infected -- if you will -- the world around her … I wanted to ask what would happen if one of these people just broke into song. In real life, people would be looking at you like you’re crazy. I thought that would be fun.

Since this film gave you opportunities to look back at other Disney films, was there anything in particular you wanted to dig up?

Stephen: Deliberate is the wrong word, but we were very clear about from whence we were taking inspiration from what songs. The prince riding on his horse in the forest in the beginning, and hearing the voice in the distance is directly from "Sleeping Beauty," and that was very conscious.

Also, there’s a song, "So Close," that refers to "Beauty and the Beast," and this is something I find very funny, and this is very ‘in.’ The camera moves in the original animated "Beauty and the Beast" were the first time in animation that they imitated live-action camera moves, and now in this live-action version, we’re imitating the imitation of those camera moves. There’s all sorts of geeky type of references like that for Disney geeks like me.

I wanted to ask you about 'Happy Working Song,' particularly what Amy brings to that. This is the first time she attempts to sing in Manhattan, and she sort of powers her way through it, even though the vermin of Manhattan are completely foreign to her. She's going to muscle through it no matter what.

Stephen: Exactly. And that song – full marks to Kevin Lima. When I came onto the project, that moment was there in the script, and that was one of the things that made me want to do the movie. What is wonderful about Amy's performance is that she understood the tone. She understood how to become that character, as if Snow White were brought into our world. And she does this all without commenting on it. She’s extremely charming and endearing, but she never once looks as if she’s trying to be funny.

The film gets very contemporary as it builds to a grand, fantasy finale, with Giselle even going shopping in Manhattan.

Alan: There was a lot of discussion about that sequence. At one point, we wrote a Queen Narissa song. We wanted to maybe have Narissa enter with a song called 'Nobody Gets in My Way.'

Stephen: I still would have liked to. I still think we should have done something for her … We were going to do like ["West Side Story's" pre-climax number] "Tonight’s Quintet."

As the film gets more modern, did you worry that it would be jarring for viewers, especially after beginning as an animated movie?

Stephen: The hope is that people will get what we’re doing. Giselle moves through time. She starts out as a 1940s animated girl, and becomes a 2007 contemporary woman. One hopes that people will understand that. If that journey isn’t landing, or people are thrown out of the movie, then we haven’t been successful.

(Photos and clips courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures)
-latimesblogs.latimes.com

Posted by dschnee at 2:12 PM

November 6, 2007

Das Heads Tech at Tippett

Sanjay Das has joined vfx power player Tippett Studio as Chief Technology Officer. Das previously served as director of R&D at DreamWorks Animation, where he was instrumental in the studio’s scaling up to release two CG movies per year. Prior to DreamWorks, he was director of research and engineering at Loudcloud/Opsware, and spent nine years at HP in various management and worldwide leadership positions.

Source -Animation Magazine

Das joins recently hired head of production Denise Minter, whose previous
experience includes stints at PDI/DreamWorks and Starz Ent. Tippett has also
fortified its R&D team with several engineers from Tweak Films, a San Francisco-based visual effects company which recently narrowed its focus to IP creation.

“With this kind of executive power, Tippett Studio is ready for the next step in its
corporate evolution,” comments Tippet Studio president Jules Roman. “We can leverage not only the artistic and creative strengths of our great employees, but also provide a strong but flexible organizational structure poised to take advantage of every opportunity in filmed entertainment.”

Founded in 1984 by animation pioneer Phil Tippett, Tippett Studio is an Academy
Award-winning visual effects company specializing in CG animation and digital effects for feature films and television commercials. The company has contributed to more than 50 films including Charlotte’s Web, The Shaggy Dog, Constantine, Hellboy, The Matrix Revolutions, Hollow Man, Starship Troopers, Blade 2 and Jurassic Park. Upcoming releases baring the shop’s mark include Disney’s Enchanted and Paramount Pictures’ The Spiderwick Chronicles. Currently in production is South of the Border for Disney.

Posted by dschnee at 3:31 PM

November 5, 2007

Writers Guild of America On Strike

There has been buzz over this for months now, and here it is... So how does this affect you? Your favorite TV shows like the Daily Show, Conan O'Brien, SNL, basically any show that does it's writing on the same day, with current events will go off air immediately and show re-runs. Next would be your comedy shows like The Office could start to see re-runs in the next week or so, depending on how many shows have all ready been taped. In the long term, and how this affects me is with screenwriters... no writers mean no movies going into production, which in turn means no visual effects, which could result in a drought in our industry. Most of the companies have work now and into next year, but depending on how long this strike will go on for will determine work or lack of work beyond that. Time shall tell...

So what happened? basically:
"The contract between the 12,000-member Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producer expired Oct. 31. Talks that began this summer failed to produce much progress on the writers' key demands for a bigger slice of DVD profits and revenue from the distribution of films and TV shows over the Internet."

I agree though, the writers have been under the same agreement since 1988 way before the lucrative sales of DVDs, based on VHS sales back then, wait what the hell is VHS? and damn straight they should get a piece of any material that goes out on the interwebs.

and as a result...

WGA strike on as talks with producers collapse
"A last-gasp attempt to stave off a strike by the WGA failed Sunday, and Hollywood writers launched plans to mount picket lines at studios and networks on both coasts.

A federal mediator who recently joined talks between the guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers convened a hasty last bargaining session Sunday amid speculation the AMPTP would deliver a new proposal to the guild. But despite that marathon session lasting well into Sunday night, when the parties emerged from the Sofitel hotel in West Hollywood it was clear the talks had broken down again."

One flashpoint involved the WGA East's refusal to halt the start of its strike after East Coast clocks struck midnight. Negotiations were still in session at the time, and the WGA West wasn't scheduled to strike for another three hours.

"Notwithstanding the fact that negotiations were ongoing, the WGA decided to start their strike in New York," AMPTP president Nick Counter said. "When we asked if they would 'stop the clock' for the purpose of delaying the strike to allow negotiations to continue, they refused.

"We made an attempt at meeting them in a number of their key areas including Internet streaming and jurisdiction in new media," Counter said. "Ultimately, the guild was unwilling to compromise on most of their major demands. It is unfortunate that they choose to take this irresponsible action."

The WGA also issued a statement after the meeting broke up.

"Early today, the WGA completely withdrew its DVD proposal, which the companies said was a stumbling block," the guild said. "Yet the companies still insisted on ... no jurisdiction for most of new media writing, no economic proposal for the part of new media writing where they do propose to give coverage, Internet downloads at the DVD rate, no residual for streaming video of theatrical product, (and) a "promotional" proposal that allows them to reuse even complete movies or TV shows on any platform with no residual."

The WGA also slammed what it called a management proposal for a distribution window providing "free reuse on the Internet that makes a mockery of any residual."

The WGA and AMPTP have negotiated on and off since July 16, holding just 17 sessions through Sunday as they sought to replace a three-year film and TV contract that expired Wednesday. The most troublesome areas have been DVD and new-media residuals.

"Our position is simple and fair," WGA West president Patric Verrone said Friday after the WGAW board and WGA East Council voted to approve strike recommendations for 12:01 a.m. Monday. "When a writer's work generates revenue for the companies, that writer deserves to be paid."

On Saturday, Juan Carlos Gonzales of the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service called the labor and management teams together for the Sunday session in an effort to forestall Monday's walkout.

It was also recently disclosed that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had connected with reps of the guild and the studio companies in an attempt to get talks back on track. The mayor met in person with Verrone and other labor execs Tuesday, and he subsequently discussed the situation with studios reps.

But it remains unclear how much muscle Villaraigosa might be willing to exert to force himself into the situation as an actual deal broker. For the present, any preliminary outreach involving the mayor's office appears to have fallen short.

One or more other interested parties also are serving as back-channel conduits for communications between the labor and management negotiators. It appears those include writer-producer John Wells, a former WGAW president who's well respected on both sides of the labor-management divide.

NBC chief Ben Silverman seemed to hint at just that Saturday when he introduced the "ER" executive producer at a party for the show's 300th episode by suggesting Wells "will save us all from the writers strike."

Asked about the reference later, Wells allowed, "It's not over yet."

He then huddled at length with "Law & Order" showrunner and former "ER" exec producer Neal Baer, who is a member of the WGA negotiating committee.

But for now, the immediate future will focus on the rollout of pickets.

Strike captains were coordinating teams to picket 14 sites throughout Los Angeles in shifts running 9 a.m.-1 p.m. and 1 p.m.-5 p.m. PST.

In Manhattan, WGAE leadership was expected to join a picket set for 9 a.m.-5 p.m. EST at NBC's headquarters at Rockefeller Plaza. The WGAE has also set a membership meeting for Wednesday night to update East Coast rank and file on the strike and why it's being mounted.

On Thursday night, WGAW brass told 3,000 writers it was recommending a strike action to the board. The AMPTP responded by suggesting the WGA had distorted the facts about bargaining to date.

"The WGA leadership continues to mischaracterize the current provisions for compensation in new media," Counter said Friday. "When a consumer pays to view a TV program or a feature film for a limited period of time, the writer gets a residual. When the consumer pays for a permanent download of a TV program or feature film, the writer gets a residual."

Writers do not receive extra compensation when ad-supported programming is streamed over the Internet for free.

WGAE president Michael Winship said Friday the decision to strike was not one "we take lightly."

With the membership meeting set for Thursday and the board and council meetings Friday, guild brass decided it would be better to hold off picketing until Monday rather than to mount a strike action over the weekend.

The last major strike by Hollywood writers was in 1988, when a 22-week WGA work stoppage effectively shut down the town. Economic impact on the L.A. economy was estimated to run as high as $500 million.

"Our sense is we can do some economic damage immediately," WGA negotiating committee chair John Bowman said.

The point of the strike is to "inflict as much damage as quickly as possible" in order to bring about a resolution," Bowman added.

Picketing plans were disseminated to strike captains but details of timing and location were closely guarded over the weekend. Studio security was boosted at lots all around town as soon as the strike decision was announced.

Guild rank and file again distributed flyers at studio and networks sites Friday, following similar earlier "informational" efforts.

A WGAE flyer read in part: "The studios and networks make billions from the content we create. All we want is our fair share. They have refused. We don't want to strike, but we must defend the standards of our profession. We ask for your understanding and your support."

Meanwhile, with writers now setting up picket lines, some will start wondering anew what the DGA will do.

The DGA, like SAG, is under contract until June 30. But many expect the directors to start early talks with the AMPTP on its own new film and TV deal.

If successful in such talks, a DGA agreement could set a template that the other guilds are effectively forced to follow--perhaps including terms on DVD and the Internet. A well-placed source confirmed strategy meetings are afoot already at the DGA, which has formed a working negotiations committee.

One thing under discussion: whether to pick up the phone and ring the AMPTP about starting early contract talks. The source suggested that could happen sometime this month.

Leslie Simmons and Nellie Andreeva contributed to this report.
-hollywoodreporter.com
-------

$1 Billion Damage Estimate For Writers Strike

(thecelebritycafe.com) Experts predict that a 22-week walkout will incur at least $1 billion in economic losses. This will affect over 200,000 employees that service the industry, which contributes over $30 billion of economic activity for Los Angeles County alone.

The major point of contention throughout the negotiations has been residual fees for writers from DVD and digital download revenues. The WGA says that the total compensation package sought by writers would cost the studios $220 million over three years, a small percentage of the $24.4 billion in revenues generated by U.S. DVD sales and rentals just in the last year, according to the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Posted by dschnee at 11:01 AM

November 2, 2007

The Enchanted Marketing Machine

is in motion... Enchanted has a myspace profile up full of goodies... actually it has the entire "Happy Working Song" sequence with all the vermin Tippett did, very fun sequence to work on, but beware that song can get stuck in your head. The official Enchanted movie website has been updated with a slick pop out book theme to it. There has been some buzz about Amy Adams outstanding performance, Oscar anyone? A number of positive early screening reviews are out there, box office predictions, I've seen posters at the bus stops, billboards in San Francisco, speaking of which The San Francisco Chronicle put out a nifty 22" x 44" glossy Enchanted Poster in with Friday November 2nd's paper! much more to come...

Enchanted on myspace.com

Enchanted — Very, very quietly, this precious little film is garnering a potentially huge following — big even by Disney standards, which is really, really saying something. The mixture of traditional animation and live-action footage, which will likely be totally new to a generation not raised on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, promises to draw massive numbers of preteens and their families, and word is that Enchanted is tracking so well, a sequel (or two) is all but assured. Never, ever underestimate the power of magic, especially when it comes courtesy of Uncle Walt's company.
BfYB's Projections for Enchanted: $93 million Total B.O. / 3 PTA points / 13 Top 5 points / 6.9 IMDb -fantasymoguls.com

Posted by dschnee at 2:22 PM

November 1, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles to Be Released in IMAX

Paramount Pictures' The Spiderwick Chronicles to be released as IMAX(R) Film February 15, 2008

LOS ANGELES, CA, Nov. 1 /CNW/ - IMAX Corporation and Paramount Pictures
announced today that The Spiderwick Chronicles, a fantasy adventure based on
the best-selling series of books, will be simultaneously released to both
IMAX(R) and conventional theatres on February 15th, 2008. Directed by Mark
Waters (Mean Girls, Freaky Friday), produced by Mark Canton (300) from a
screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and David Berenbaum and John Sayles, The
Spiderwick Chronicles will be digitally re-mastered into the unparalleled
image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience(R) through IMAX's DMR(R)
(Digital Re-Mastering) technology. Today's announcement marks the fourth film
agreement between IMAX and Paramount Pictures in the past five months.
Beowulf, the next Paramount film to be released in IMAX, opens November 16th,
2007.

"The grand scale and immersive nature of The IMAX Experience gives
Spiderwick a brand new level of excitement," said Mark Canton. "In IMAX
theatres, fans will be drawn into the movie even further and feel as if they
are actually part of the story."
"The Spiderwick Chronicles is an ideal fit for the IMAX brand and our
audience, and it is a terrific way to launch our slate for 2008," said IMAX
Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Richard L. Gelfond and Bradley J. Wechsler. "Paramount
Pictures' continued enthusiasm towards IMAX theatres as a distribution
platform is adding to the strength of our release schedule, which contributes
to the growing popularity of The IMAX Experience, and ultimately the growth of
the IMAX theatre network."
"We've had phenomenal success with Hollywood movies that are based on
best-selling books, and we are excited to work with Paramount Pictures and the
filmmakers to reach the millions of Spiderwick fans with a completely unique
way to experience the first film-adapted adventure of this beloved series of
books," added Greg Foster, Chairman and President of IMAX Filmed
Entertainment. "In IMAX theatres, audiences will feel as if they are actually
inside the Spiderwick mansion as the magical adventures unfold around them."
From the beloved best-selling series of books comes The Spiderwick
Chronicles, a fantasy adventure for the child in all of us. Peculiar things
start to happen the moment the Grace family (Jared, his twin brother Simon,
sister Mallory and their mom) leave New York and move into the secluded old
house owned by their great, great uncle Arthur Spiderwick. Unable to explain
the strange disappearances and accidents that seem to be happening on a daily
basis, the family blames Jared. When he, Simon and Mallory investigate what's
really going on, they uncover the fantastic truth of the Spiderwick estate and
of the creatures that inhabit it.
Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies present a Kennedy/Marshall and
a Mark Canton Production of a Mark Waters film The Spiderwick Chronicles
starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte with Joan Plowright
and David Strathairn and the voices of Seth Rogen and Martin Short. The film
is directed by Mark Waters from a screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and David
Berenbaum and John Sayles, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly
Black. The film is produced by Mark Canton, Larry Franco, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein
and Karey Kirkpatrick. The executive producers are Julia Pistor, Tony
DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. The director of photography is Caleb Deschanel,
ASC. The production designer is James Bissell. The editor is Michael Kahn,
A.C.E. The costumes are designed by Joanna Johnston. The music is by James
Horner. The special visual effects are by Industrial Light & Magic. Visual
effects by Tippett Studio.

About IMAX Corporation

IMAX Corporation is one of the world's leading digital entertainment and
technology companies. The worldwide IMAX network is among the most important
and successful theatrical distribution platforms for major event Hollywood
films around the globe, with IMAX theatres delivering the world's best
cinematic presentations using proprietary IMAX, IMAX 3D, and IMAX DMR
technology. IMAX DMR is the Company's groundbreaking digital remastering
technology that allows it to digitally transform virtually any conventional
motion picture into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX
Experience. IMAX's renowned projectors and new digital systems display
crystal-clear images on the world's biggest screens. The IMAX brand is
recognized throughout the world for extraordinary and immersive entertainment
experiences for consumers. As of June 30, 2007, there were 290 IMAX theatres
operating in 40 countries.

IMAX(R), IMAX(R) 3D, IMAX DMR(R), IMAX MPX(R), and The IMAX Experience(R)
are trademarks of IMAX Corporation. More information on the Company can be
found at www.imax.com.

This press release contains forward looking statements that are based on
management's assumptions and existing information and involve certain risks
and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from
future results expressed or implied by such forward looking statements.
Important factors that could affect these statements include ongoing
discussions with the SEC and OSC relating to their ongoing inquiries and the
Company's financial reporting and accounting, the timing of theatre system
deliveries, the mix of theatre systems shipped, the timing of the recognition
of revenues and expenses on film production and distribution agreements, the
performance of films, the viability of new businesses and products, risks
arising from potential material weaknesses in internal control over financial
reporting and fluctuations in foreign currency and in the large format and
general commercial exhibition market. These factors and other risks and
uncertainties are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for
the year ended December 31, 2006, as well as the Company's Quarterly Report on
Form 10-Q.

Posted by dschnee at 1:29 PM

October 30, 2007

ILM & Tippett Studio Show Off Spiderwick Creatures

On a recent trip up north to Industrial Light & Magic and Tippett Studio, VFXWORLD was treated to a sneak peek of the CG goblins, boggarts, fairies and sprites that inhabit THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES, from Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Movies, opening Feb. 15.

"Legendary animation and VFX pioneer Phil Tippett served as creature supervisor. He oversaw the design and development of Thimbletack, Hogsqual, the Troll, Red Cap and the army of goblins and bull goblins. On set Tippett worked first with ILM visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, who left to supervise INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL and was replaced by Tim Alexander."

-VFXWorld.com

Based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES is a fantasy/adventure involving the Grace children (Jared, his twin brother Simon, and his sister Mallory), who live with their mother in a secluded old house owned by their great-great-uncle Arthur Spiderwick. Jared finds a field guide by Spiderwick about the invisible, odd, magical and dangerous creatures that live on the estate, and the family is soon confronted with a monstrous ogre, Mulgarath, who wants the book to control the world.

"It's happening here and now," said director Mark Waters, in trying to distinguish SPIDERWICK from other children's fantasies. "These creatures are combinations of creatures that could've lived here. We raise the jeopardy and excitement because of CGI."

Legendary animation and VFX pioneer Phil Tippett served as creature supervisor. He oversaw the design and development of Thimbletack, Hogsqual, the Troll, Red Cap and the army of goblins and bull goblins. On set Tippett worked first with ILM visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, who left to supervise INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL and was replaced by Tim Alexander.

Tippett offered a naturalistic impression: "I provided a sense of observation of the natural world. To find the character, I got involved with sound design, voices, effects. I [looked for] concrete visualizations for characters, working with a dynamic reality." However, there was one unexpected revision in design: a water troll was changed to a land troll.

The team at Tippett Studio in Berkeley was responsible for the final animation of the Hogsqueal, the Troll, Red Cap, the goblins and bull goblins, and worked closely in tandem with the ILM crew for 15 shots in which the two companies shared characters. Tippett's team was comprised of VFX Supervisors Joel Friesch and Blair Clark, CG Supervisor Russell Darling and Animation Supervisor Todd Labonte.

ILM worked on Mulgarath, the ill-tempered Boggart, the majestic Griffin, a rapacious Raven, the Snake, Sylph and a host of magical and elaborately detailed Sprites. Alexander also oversaw the effects involved in creating the seamless interaction between lead twin characters Jared and Simon, both played by actor Freddie Highmore. In addition, ILM did some environmental work, including the Griffin ride through the fantastical world that encompasses all four seasons. ILM's team also included Tim Harrington, animation supervisor, and Christian Alzmann, visual effects art director.

ILM completed 341 shots, including 224 in 3D for 30 minutes of footage. There were 215 artists at the peak during the 15-month job.

Thimbletack transforms into the Hyde-like Boggart with full 3D geometry for each model during transformation and subsurface scattering for ears. He's like The Incredible Hulk, who turns devilish when angered. The only way to calm him is with honey. Thimbletack's facial animation was a challenge, too. Harrington said they pushed R&D for new tools:

* Facedon: a library of preset expressions or blend of expressions that they could cut & paste ("Evil Laughter").

* Face Select Interface: controls for intuitive interface for anatomical movements. This was very helpful with the Hyde-like transformation.

* Fat Shapes Tool: developed for staggered transformation shapes.

Byron the Griffin was rendered 26 hours-per-frame at 8K for more detail. The Griffin was the most difficult challenge for ILM because of feathers and hair. Muscle definition is improved over hippogriff from HARRY POTTER or dragon from ERAGON. It helped to previs the Griffin flight sequence too.

For the shape-shifting Mulgarath, ILM utilized quick changes for proportions in design phase and Rapid Prototyping animation. They did muscle and flesh simulations and remapped human anatomy on creatures through BlockParty, the proprietary modular rigging system.

Meanwhile, for Tippett's most ambitious project with a crew of 100+ (including 30 animators), they created a new pipeline. For the goblins they built one skeletal system with blendshapes and numbered packages that is Maya-based. They used brickmaps and global illumination development. The design of the goblins was a mixture of toads, pit bulls and gorillas and it took two animators to choreograph 40 goblins and 20 minutes to render 100 goblins.

-VFXWorld.com

Posted by dschnee at 7:13 AM

October 24, 2007

3 More Enchanted Posters!

Posted by dschnee at 11:07 AM

October 8, 2007

First look: Magical beings breathe life into 'Spiderwick Chronicles'

Sweet little spread on the wick, be sure to visit the USA TODAY's article to see the nifty images... or Click Here

Don't boggart that house brownie!

That is just one lesson learned about the little-seen realm of magical beings in the fantasy film The Spiderwick Chronicles, opening Feb. 15 and based on all five of the books in the popular series.

Freddie Highmore of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory stars as twin brothers Jared and Simon, who move with their older sister (Sarah Bolger of In America) and mother (Mary-Louise Parker) to a ramshackle Victorian estate that is besieged by strange beasties great and small.

"The authors, Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, wanted their books to be the first realistic portrayal of the fantastical world based on true fairy folklore," says director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls).

Unlike most recent make-believe movie fare such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, Spiderwick is a contemporary tale that unfolds in an everyday New England setting. "You should feel like this could be happening in your own neighborhood," Waters says.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Jurassic Park | Martin Short | Mary-Louise Parker | Nick Nolte | Industrial Light | Spiderwick | Mark Waters | Thimbletack

Creature chaos is unleashed with scary and humorous results when Jared, the more aggressive and adventurous twin, discovers a field guide to fairies, a book coveted by a 10-foot shape-shifting ogre, Mulgarath (Nick Nolte).

Phil Tippett (Jurassic Park, Star Wars), with an assist from Industrial Light & Magic, supervised the 500 or so digital shots of the magical beings.

Because each volume is only 100 pages or so and "is meant to be quickly devoured by a 10-year-old," Waters says, the decision was made to compile all the stories into what he calls "one kick-butt amalgamation."

But that doesn't mean there won't be sequels. The authors already are writing another screenplay based on a new trilogy, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles, about a Florida family's ordeal with those feisty fairies.

-Click Here for the Article By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY

Posted by dschnee at 8:45 PM

October 5, 2007

Enchanted Villains Featurette

They showcase a wee bit more of the evil queen's arrival in the smoke with the green stuff, that was my big tough shot on the show... :)

Posted by dschnee at 7:23 AM

September 25, 2007

Enchanted's Health-Conscious Promotional Campaign

Toon Tuesday: Will "Enchanted" 's health-conscious promotional campaign ultimately result in robust box office receipts for this new Walt Disney Pictures release? (jimhillmedia.com)

Jim Hill wonders: Can a feel-good movie actually be used to encourage healthier eating habits? For that seems to be a key component of the marketing plan that Disney has cooked up for its big Holiday 2007 release...

You want proof that this is a very different Walt Disney Company now that Bob Iger is in charge? Then take a look at the cross promotional campaign that Mickey's marketing staff has put together for the studio's big Holiday 2007 release, "Enchanted."

Gone are the days when the Mouse would use McDonald's Happy Meals to help get the word out about its newest animated feature. Starting the middle of next month, Walt Disney Pictures will be teaming with Nutrisodas®, a carbonated nutrient-enchanced beverage, to help raise awareness of this Kevin Lima film. These drinks -- which feature natural fruit flavors as well as a meaningful level of vitamins & minerals -- contain absolutely no sugar or caffeine.

Not only that, but Mickey has also gotten in bed with The Little Gym folks. You know? That international chain that uses gymnastics to help kids develop motor skills? Now through October 19th, any child who signs up for fall classes will automatically receive two free passes to "Enchanted." Plus anyone who takes part in a free trial class will then be entered in The Little Gym Family Getaway Enchanted Sweepstakes. Which features a grand prize where a family of four will be flown out to Hollywood to attend the world premiere of this new Walt Disney Pictures release.

Why the sudden emphasis on health when it comes to promotion of the studio's motion pictures? According to company insiders, this new initiative can be traced directly back to Iger. As one Mouse House exec recently told me:

"You have to remember that Bob's got two young kids at home. Which is why he recognizes that something really has to be done about childhood obesity levels here in the U.S.

Think of this as a companion campaign for that no-smoking pledge that the studio made back in July. Iger thinks that it's really important that Disney sets an example here. That we show that it's possible for one of the major players in Hollywood to actually be proactive when it comes to matters that effect our kids' health."

And from what I hear, the Mouse really is serious about including a health-conscious message whenever it can as part of "Enchanted" 's promotion. Take -- for example -- the role that ABC's hit series "Dancing with the Stars" will play in the marketing of this new motion picture.

With the hope that this particular promotional effort will help kids associate the obvious health benefits of physical activity with this live action / animated romantic comedy, Mickey's marketing staff plans on turning this ABC show into a real showcase for "Enchanted." With commercials for this film being prominently featured during every episode that airs now through Fall Sweeps. Not to mention (as we get closer to "Enchanted" 's November 21st release date) guest appearances by that film's stars: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden and Susan Sarandon.

Mind you, the Mouse House recognizes that not every would-be "Enchanted" fan is a health enthusiast. Which is why they asked Disney Interactive Studios to cook up an "Enchanted" video game. And given that this Nintendo DS game hits store shelves on November 13th (i.e. eight days before "Enchanted" officially opens) ... Well, it's hoped that "Enchanted: The Video" game will help make couch potatoes aware that this high profile project will soon be " ... coming to a theater near you."

But -- beyond that -- Mickey is hoping that "Enchanted" will be the very first feel-good movie that actually encourages people to start adopting more health-concious habits.

So what do you folks think? Should the Walt Disney Company be commended for trying to associate "Enchanted" 's release with healthier food choices & physical activity? Or is this just an empty gesture by a well-meaning executive that will ultimately have little or no real impact on the movie-going public?

-Jim Hill, Jim Hill Media.com

Posted by dschnee at 10:45 PM

September 24, 2007

Enchanted Soundtrack

The soundtrack will be released on November 20, 2007.

I guess that Carrie Underwood will be singing "Ever After" from the movie? Found a few images on her website. This one must be a set piece for the music video, but what's up with the chubby guy? here and especially here, creepy.

I have yet to find the soundtrack online or for pre-sale... but stay tooned.

Posted by dschnee at 12:23 PM

September 21, 2007

Spiderwick Chronicles ILM & Tippett Studio Visit Preview

"We had a great chat with Mr. Tippett about creating some of the actual monsters used in The Spiderwick Chronicles. Mark Waters joined the talk and the two joked about Phil running around on set with the monsters in his hands yelling at the kids. After that, some of the other animators showed us what parts of the film they worked on."

Click below for the full article from -comingsoon.net

See Also: Spiderwick Screening! (I was there!)

There's a book that has magical qualities – and not all for the good. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a world created by Arthur Spiderwick. There's goblins, Hogsqueals, snakes, monsters, trolls, and much more. When the book falls into the wrong hands, all heck is about to break out.

Thanks to Nickelodeon Studios and Paramount Pictures, The Spiderwick Chronicles is coming to the big screen. It stars Freddie Highmore, Sarah Bolger, and Freddie Highmore – yes, Freddie plays twins Simon and Jared Grace, while Sarah plays sister Mallory; Mary-Louise Parker plays their mom and David Strathairn is Arthur Spiderwick. Lending his vocal talent to the project is Martin Short as the helpful Thimbletack and his alter ego, Bogart; also Seth Rogen voices the lovable Hogsqueal. And Nick Nolte plays three different roles of the same character (don't want to give too much away, so I'll leave it at that).

ComingSoon.net was invited to the one and only ILM/LucasFilm complex in San Francisco, as well as Tippett Studio to check out what they're working on for the upcoming children's flick.

Our first stop on the trip was to ILM in the Presidio, George Lucas' new home for his company. The complex is split into three different sections – ILM, LucasArts, and LucasFilm. Now, there are some people who would give their right arm to walk the halls and see items from Ghostbusters (Slimer!), "E.T.," the "Harry Potter" films – oh, and a little film series called "Star Wars" (you may have heard of that). We strolled by pictures, figurines, and many of the actual items used in the films designed by Lucas' team.

It was then time to see what's in store for The Spiderwick Chronicles. We met up with director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls). He showed us a few clips from the film, mostly all complete with some of the amazing special effects created by Tippett Studio and ILM. One of the characters created by ILM was the Griffin, a half lion/half eagle; the animators explained how difficult it was to build that from scratch because of the intricacy of the feathers.

Tim Alexander and Tim Harrington of ILM gave us a history lesson of the 27 years of ILM that was so spectacular, I couldn't just write a one or two paragraph insert. A separate story on just ILM will be popping up in the very near future.

After Tim and Tim, we spoke to a couple more animators and then it was off to Tippett Studio. For those who don't know, Phil Tippett is the man behind the monsters in Starship Troopers, RoboCop, Dragonslayer, Howard the Duck, and he's one of the original visual effects artists who worked on "Star Wars."

We had a great chat with Mr. Tippett about creating some of the actual monsters used in The Spiderwick Chronicles. Mark Waters joined the talk and the two joked about Phil running around on set with the monsters in his hands yelling at the kids. After that, some of the other animators showed us what parts of the film they worked on.

For the film, ILM is designing the characters of Mulgarath, Thimbletack/Bogart, the Griffin, the Sprites (female flower creatures), and Stray Sod. And Tippett Studio is designing Hogsqueal, the Troll, Red Cap (voiced by Ron Perlman) and his army of goblins, plus the Bull Goblins.

All in all, a very fun adventure. Stay glued to ComingSoon.net for interviews with Mark Waters, Phil Tippett and the rest ofr the animating team behind The Spiderwick Chronicles, coming to theaters on February 15, 2008.

Posted by dschnee at 9:58 AM

September 18, 2007

Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles

The Nixie's Song was released today! - The latest book in the world of Spiderwick...

The Spiderwick Chronicles leave the old-fashioned charm of New England far behind and head south for some fiendish faerie fun in the hot Florida sun. Eleven-year-old Nicholas Vargas only thinks his life has been turned upside down after his developer father remarries and moves his new wife and daughter into the soon-to-be completed Mangrove Hollow.
But an "expedition" to a nearby lake turns up a little nixie with a giant problem - the huge, lumbering, fire-breathing variety - and it's up to Nick; his stepsister, Laurie; and his big brother, Julian (plus a familiar face from the original Spiderwick Chronicles) to figure out the best way to stop a host of rampaging giants before all of Florida goes up in smoke.

Check out Tony DiTerlizzi sketching the Nixie below: (click here)

Posted by dschnee at 8:42 PM

September 17, 2007

Spiderwick Screening!

Last night the Tippett crew on Spiderwick was treated to an early screening of the movie! This was a congratulatory gift to us working so hard on the film, and it's pretty darn cool and rare for this to happen, it was a special treat. Thanks to Mark Waters and the Spiderwick Production! The films producer and director Mark Waters were there to introduce the film to us, and we got to watch it at ILM's digs in the Presidio at the Premier Theater, Letterman Digital Arts Center.

I wasn't really ready to see the film yet... but since I had never been into the Presidio, and never been or seen a film at the fancy Premier Theater (Where ILM holds dailies every Friday) I had to go!

I can't really say much about the movie until it's released, but I for one enjoyed it! Better than expected even! They showed it to a real test audience the night before and it scored very well, got a lot of laughs, especially after a few of our shots, which is always a great complement!

I've heard some say it's a cross between The Never Ending Story and Gremlins, so that's pretty sweet right there, that's all I'm gonna say.

Once again, The Spiderwick Chronicles will be released in February of 2008.

Posted by dschnee at 7:12 PM

Onto the next show... ?????

Today I have started work on the next project.?. and we have hit the ground running, lots to do in a short amount of time, but it's going to kick a whole lot of F'ing a$$, and were all excited about that.

Posted by dschnee at 1:18 AM

September 14, 2007

Is Disney's ENCHANTED enchanting?

"I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to go into detail... but I don't really need to. The film is typically Disney, but typically GOOD Disney. Say what you like, you have to admit that when Disney does something well, they do it REALLY well and this is no exception."

-aintitcool.com

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Now, we've gotten some pretty leafy reviews for Disney films in the past and this one might be another one to add on to that pile, but it does jibe with what I've heard about ENCHANTED. The trailer is a little sweet, but it also looks really damn cheesy. However, I've heard from many insiders that the script is incredibly smart and funny and the film will be a big surprise. I hope so. I like the idea and it'd be good to see a good family film that works for more than just the 3 year olds again. Here's the review from an early screening. Keep in mind it is possible this is not the final version of the flick. Enjoy!

Hi Quint,

Saw your comment about Enchanted and though you might like to hear this:

I live in London; last week the Husbando and I went to see Bourne Ultimatum (good, but I still like Supremacy best), as we were staring at the refreshments board trying to figure out if we would need to re-mortgage the house for some popcorn, a man with a clipboard walked up and asked if we wanted to come to a free movie.

Free movie? we asked, suddenly very interested.

He explained that he worked for a research group doing a screening of a new Disney film to see how to market and edit it. He handed us a flyer and sure enough it was for 'Enchanted'. I'd seen the trailer for it before Harry Potter and dismissed it as something I wasn't going to see but see above re: free movie. It was then that Mr Clipboard mentioned who was in the film and I was actually interested.

So we called the magic number and got ourselves seats for the screening. I still figured that it would be one of those typical Disney films that you only really go to see because it is your 8 year old niece's birthday and she has cornered the market on Disney Princess merchandise.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to go into detail -but I don't really need to. The film is typically Disney - but typically GOOD Disney. Say what you like, you have to admit that when Disney does something well, they do it REALLY well and this is no exception.

Amy Adams is spot on as the animated princess turned real. I've loved her since Drop Dead Gorgeous and she is the primary reason I decided to see this. James Marsden (who I could only ever previously describe as 'wooden') proved that he is capable of turning out a really good comic performance as the charming Prince Edward. If I were his agent, I would seriously consider sending him out for more comic stuff in the future. Both of them manage to make their animated characters work, right down to their body language which carries over from the animated version into the real world and is the primary reason that the characters don't degenerate in parody. They move like animated people and it works. My one complaint about the film is that Susan Sarandon doesn't move like her animated counterpart and it makes her Queen Nerissa too camp.

The movie takes some standard fairy tale conventions (helpful talking animals, a supply of beautiful gowns for the peasant-turned-princess, etc) and turns them on their heads. The musical numbers are few but funny and the ending you expect, while still there, is satisfying when it comes.

The cut I saw was pretty long, and I'm sure that this will be trimmed for eventual release, but there isn't a lot there that NEEDS to come out, and I'd probably go see it again when it comes out, just to see what they do cut.

Husbando, who only agreed to go because it was free and I insisted, enjoyed it as well. Saying that while he wouldn't have gone without me, he would probably recommend it to other couples, ones with or without children, as a good night out.

All in all, I would say that if there is anything in the Disney animated back catalog that you enjoyed, almost regardless of how old you were when you saw it, Enchanted is worth seeing.

If you use this, call me Bug.

Posted by dschnee at 7:27 AM

September 13, 2007

Disney's Enchanted DS Trailer

~enjoy, because I'm willing to bet that I just wasted damn near 2 minutes of your life watching that fantastic game trailer!

Posted by dschnee at 11:06 AM

September 12, 2007

Final Week on the Wick

This week marks our final week of post production work on The Spiderwick Chronicles, the past few weeks have been a flurry of activity as everyone is scouring around to get all of our shots out the door.

Actually today is our last day, we delivered all of our shots on time this morning, it was a mad dash to get this one last shot out the door as a number of us teamed up and went on into the early hours this morning to take it across the finish line.

This was a fun show, I think we did some impressive creature, character, and animation work in this one, and look forward to it hitting theater's come February!

I'm completely excited for the next show I'm going onto. So what's next? You will most likely have to have an extended 'stay tooned' as I'm not at liberty to say... :(

Posted by dschnee at 9:23 PM

September 4, 2007

Disney's Enchanted International Movie Poster!

"Once Upon A Time and if Disney of Christmas became reality?"

Word on the street is the kids are saying 2 more International Posters are in the works... stay tooned.

Posted by dschnee at 7:21 AM

August 22, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles are on MySpace

In your Face...Book! The Spiderwick Chronicles are on MySpace.com! If your into the myspace thing, Go Nuts right over here!

The official page link is: http://www.myspace.com/spiderwickchronicles and don't be bashful, Geek Out and ADD Spiderwick on your MySpace.

"Mark Waters, director of the upcoming fantasy film The Spiderwick Chronicles, told SCI FI Wire that the film will combine scares, fantastical creatures and comedy."

;)

Posted by dschnee at 1:27 PM

August 15, 2007

Disney's Enchanted Movie Poster!

"THE REAL WORLD AND THE ANIMATED WORLD COLLIDE."

Posted by dschnee at 2:28 PM

August 11, 2007

Evolution of a Goblin

"Goblins are nasty, grotesque creatures which resemble lage toads. In place of teeth, they must use pieces of shattered glass or small, jagged rocks. They are fond of eating house pets."

This from co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles, Tony DiTerlizzi's Imaginoplis Blog

It was the first image completed (and is one of the designs I am most proud of) in Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide - and it was brought to life by the magic team of movie FX wizards at Phil Tippett's studio - the Spiderwick goblins. Or Diabolus vulgaris from the family Adentidae, as Arthur identified them in his Guide to the fantastical world.

But how did I arrive at a new design for a creature that has been rendered countless times in books, movies, games and toys?

I'd like to share some of the thinking that went into it as it exemplifies the philosophy I used when designing many of the creatures in the world of The Spiderwick Chronicles. My hope is only to inspire others to think out-of-the-box in keeping fantasy alive, fresh, and evolving through exciting design.

Evolution of a GOBLIN (part 1)

Evolution of a GOBLIN (part 2)

Evolution of a GOBLIN (part 3)

Evolution of a GOBLIN (conclusion)

Evolution of a GOBLIN (epilogue)

TONY D's Bio Acclaimed children’s book creator, Tony DiTerlizzi was born into an artistic household on September 6, 1969. Being the first of three visually adept children, it didn’t take long for his family and friends to realize that he was one talented kid. At an early age Tony began embracing the whimsical, the wondrous, and the fantastic, all of which sparked his wild imagination.

Young Tony grew up in South Florida amid palm trees and year-round sunshine. While he enjoyed being outdoors and nature, he also loved to draw, write, and create his own little books. During his childhood he was introduced to the work of Norman Rockwell, Arthur Rackham, Dr. Suess, Roald Dahl, and Jim Henson, all of whom inspired him and became major creative influences. With the support of family and teachers, Tony was able to cultivate his natural artistic talents. In college, he honed these talents at the Florida School of the Arts and later, at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale where he earned a degree in Graphic Design in 1992.

After art school, the young artist began a freelance illustration career, working for TSR's Dungeons & Dragons role–playing game. He continued to illustrate in the gaming field for most of the 1990s, working on games such as Planescape, Changeling, and the trading card phenomenon, Magic the Gathering, thus forging a place for himself in the field of fantasy art.

After seven years of successful work as a gaming and fantasy artist, Tony delved into the field of creating children’s picture books. With the publication in 2000 of Jimmy Zangwow's Out-of-this-World Moon Pie Adventure (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), he fulfilled a childhood dream of writing and illustrating his own book. Jimmy Zangwow, which was lauded by critics, was followed the next year by Ted (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), which also received high praise, including the 2002 Zena Sutherland Award. It was followed with his spooky picture book of Mary Howitt’s classic poem The Spider and the Fly (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2002) garnering him the 2003 Caldecott Honor and the moniker of New York Times best-seller.

In an effort to bring fantasy to younger readers, Tony created the The Spiderwick Chronicles with friend and author, Holly Black. Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing launched the series in 2003 where it was met with immediate success. Children and adults alike loved the adventures of Simon, Jared, and Mallory Grace in a world of faeries, trolls and goblins. Since then, Spiderwick has been published all over the world and translated in over 30 languages.

2005 saw the publication of Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You – a project Tony had been working on for years in an effort to bring highly detailed, naturalistic fantasy to children’s publishing. In 2008, Paramount Pictures will release a live-action movie adaptation of the series starring Freddie Highmore, Mary Louise-Parker, Nick Nolte and David Strathairn. And the Spiderwick Chronicles adventures will continue in the fall of 2007 with a sequel series, Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles, set to take place in Tony’s home state of Florida.

Tony lives and works in western Massachusetts with his wife (and manager) Angela, and their daughter. His latest picture book, G is for One Gzonk! (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2006), is not only a nonsense alphabet book, but an homage to the late Dr. Seuss–who inspired a young boy from Florida with dreams of one day becoming a children’s book creator.

Posted by dschnee at 11:04 AM

August 9, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles Video Game Announced

Los Angeles, CA - August 09, 2007 - Sierra Entertainment today announced development of The Spiderwick Chronicles, a video game based on the upcoming 2008 theatrical release of the same name by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Films. The game, which will recreate the fantastical world of the Spiderwick film and best-selling book series, is in development at Stormfront Studios and will be available for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system, Wii home video game system, PlayStation2 computer entertainment system, Nintendo DS, and PC in February 2008.

"Sierra Entertainment is excited to announce that one of the most anticipated family entertainment films of 2008 will be coming to the world of video games as well," said Al Simone, senior vice president, Global Marketing for Sierra Entertainment. "The Spiderwick Chronicles video game will authentically recreate the world of Jared, Simon and Mallory Grace, putting gamers in their shoes as they discover a hidden world of fantastical creatures - sprites, ogres, goblins, brownies and more. Fans of the Spiderwick books now not only have the movie to look forward to, but will be able to live in their favorite fantasy world in this adventure filled game."

The Spiderwick Chronicles video game is based on the upcoming film adaptation by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Films and will feature multiple playable characters, each with unique abilities. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a best-selling book series by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi in which twin brothers Jared and Simon, along with their sister Mallory Grace, embark on a perilous journey filled with adventure and danger.

The Spiderwick Chronicles video game is expected to be available at retail stores worldwide in February 2008. For more information on The Spiderwick Chronicles, please visit the game's official web site at www.spiderwickgame.com.

The Spiderwick Chronicles Video Game Announced

See Also: Screenshots

Posted by dschnee at 10:25 PM

August 7, 2007

Frank Oz comes clean about Stepford

C: Since your brought up STEPFORD WIVES, I think it's fair to say it was not a kindly received. What do you think happened there?

FO: I fucked up.

C: You blame yourself?

FO: Absolutely. I played it safe. For the first time, I didn't follow my instincts. And what happened was, I had too much money, and I was too responsible and concerned for Paramount. I was too concerned for the producers. And I didn't follow my instincts, which I hold as sacred usually. I love being subversive and dangerous, and I wasn't. I was safe, and as a result my decisions were all over the place, and it was my fault totally. And by the way, I'm very proud of many aspects of the movie. The people were great. But when you sense that there's no governing thought, or that the governing thought is kind of "Gee, I'm not sure where to go," you can sense it.

C: You said you weren't following your instincts. What were your instincts telling you to do with that material?

FO: My instincts were saying, “Don't do a big movie”. I had a very strong viewpoint to do the movie, but I didn't expect such huge stars. When the stars came, everything kind of ballooned up. My original instincts were to make it more intimate.

C: Do you feel like the presence of stars made you lose control of it?

FO: Not control, I was always in control. That's not the problem; I've done huge movies before. The problem was that it got so big that my instincts to make a small movie didn't mesh with how big it was getting, and I was losing my way a little bit. So it was completely me. I should have brought it all down and said, I'm sorry, I know we have all these huge stars but I don't care, I want to do something intimate. But I didn't, I went with the bigness of it and I didn't feel right about it.

read more of Frank Oz and What Went Wrong On STEPFORD (aint it cool news)

Posted by dschnee at 10:36 PM

August 1, 2007

Tippett Brings Spiderwick Critters To Life

"...Plus, I hired a bad-ass crew. - It was like, 'Let me kind of learn while we're doing this and let's just make the (biggest), fantastic version of this movie we can.' And now I'm looking at the effects shots as they come in final and I'm like, 'Wow, I can't believe I shot that!' It seems so easy now and I forget the struggle it was to get it in the can." said director Mark Waters.

And that's where visual effects legend Phil Tippett came in. With films like Star Wars and Jurassic Park on his resume, Tippett certainly had the know-how needed to bring Spiderwick's critters to life.

"All of this is going to be digital work," explains Tippett. "All of the visual effects work is split between Tippett Studio and ILM. That was our intention going in to the shoot, because a great deal of these characters have extended dialogue and that's a very, very tricky thing to get with a puppet or an animatronic. And we definitely didn't want to have people in outfits or suits. We wanted to create the world that Holly and Tony had created and depict that, so the best way of going about that was doing it all digitally. Stop-motion would've been fine, but we don't do that anymore!"

The authors say that their inspiration for the books came from the old fairy tales, like the original Grimm Brothers stories, but also from specific folklore involving Faeries.

"People would go out into towns and talk to people about their real experiences with Faeries," explains Black of such folklore. "And they have really fascinating stories about how the Faeries would interact with people quite commonly and very organically. They were just out there. And if you stumbled on them, then you could be in trouble. And that's the thing that Spiderwick is about to me."

In response to Black's comment, Tippett jokes that "our job was to make the Faeries organic!" He says that what he and his team are doing conceptually is create the world that "Arthur Spiderwick" -- the character who did all of the illustrations in the field guide in the stories -- actually observed in the field.

"That's what we're cooking right now," says Tippett. "So these are invisible characters that Arthur has actually been able to see by the use of special Faerie accoutrements that he buys. He's able to actually become a witness for this hidden world. So he chronicles the characters or the creatures just like a normal naturalist would out in the field, (and) we're just trying to bring those characters to life and make them feel as if they actually belong in that environment."

Look for Tippett's Faeries and more this coming February...

complete article-SDCC 07: Exclusive: The Spiderwick Chronicles Interviews @ IGN.com

Posted by dschnee at 11:03 PM

July 26, 2007

Spiderwick @ ComicCon 2007

During Paramount's Panel Event @ ComicCon...

*UPDATE* Audio from the Spiderwick Panel (right after JJ Abrams Cloverfield bits)
-movieweb.com

Phil Tippett Interview, The Spiderwick Chronicles
-movieonline.ca

On stage, original team behind the books, Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi, and VFX legend Phil Tippett. Tippett ran through an effects development slideshow, showing how DiTerlizzi's illustrations turned into realistic creatures by Tippett Studios and ILM. These aren't candy-coated faerie folk. They'd gobble up Tinkerbill and spit out her bones. Director Mark Waters described how the books felt real, like something that could be happening down the block. It's a magical story that's not set in Britain, or medieval times, or Middle Earth, but rather suburbia, echoing such '80s touchstones as Gremlins.
The Clip: Aside from VFX breakdowns, the teaser trailer.

An Interesting See Also:

At the The Spiderwick Chronicles panel, the writers say they want to do for fairies and goblins what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs. They're showing the process of taking the goblin animation from book to screen, as well as some great goblin test footage.

See Also, Also:
The Spiderwick Chronicles is next. Authors Holly Black, Tony DiTerlizzi talk about how they saw the film yesterday and how crazy it was to see their characters brought to life. Tony talks about making the book, and trying to create something special. They then showed some step by step character creation slides, to show the process of how they got from the book to the screen. They start off with Tony's field guide drawing from the book of a greater bull goblin. Tony explains what he was thinking when he created it. The special effects for these creatures are being split between Tippett Studio and ILM. They show the evolution from concept art to Marquettes, to painted life-sized models for use during filming. We see video footage of some of the preliminary computer animation. These creatures look pretty cool. We seem some of the previs which is used to block the action. It's essentially a moving storyboard. They then show how they block the scene with cardboard cutouts on the set. It looks really funny with grips running around on screen with cardboard cutouts. And of course we see the final shot of the goblins chasing the kids through the woods. It looks very Jim Henson-esque. I'm definitely more excited to see this film.

They only introduce the director Mark Waters. He talks about how the books grabbed him even though he was skeptical going in. It felt real, and if he could feel the world, than may-be it could be a great modern day fantasy film (comparing it to Gremlins). He said they didn’t worry about making a children’s film but instead the best movie they wanted to see.

They then showed the teaser trailer for the film which came out last month.

Posted by dschnee at 5:18 PM

July 18, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles Trailer 1

You can catch this trailer before the latest Potter flick out now. If your looking for some of our work from Tippett, this includes the sequence with the floor boards jumping up from some sort of creatures arms and hands, Goblins chasing the kids through the leaves, and lots and lots of goblins...

Trailer 1 @ apple.com

See Also:
www.spiderwickchronicles.com is up with the trailer, about the story, and some downloads including the poster, background, and a buddy icon, woo!

See Also, Also:
Details on Paramount Pictures Panel at Comic Con
Spiderwick Chronicles - Mark Waters, Holly Black, Phil Tippet and Tony Tetzelli present. Page to screen presentation.

Posted by dschnee at 10:17 PM

July 2, 2007

The Spiderwick Chronicles Movie Poster

Click on the pic to see it slightly bigger, still hard to see but the text at the top reads "Their World Is Closer Than You Think"

New Movie Posters From Cinema Expo!

Cinema Expo took place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands this week and on display were many new posters for upcoming movies, including Stardust, Iron Man, Bee Movie, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Horton Hears a Who!, The Simpsons Movie, Lions for Lambs, The Dark Is Rising, American Gangster, The Bourne Ultimatum, Atonement, I Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Enchanted, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, I Am Legend and Beowulf.

You can view them all by going here and clicking on the five studio links!

Posted by dschnee at 6:50 AM

June 29, 2007

Industry Legend Phil Tippett Joins // Adapt 2007

Opening the //ADAPT 2007 Conference line up at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Montreal (Sept. 24-28) will be award-winning visual effects supervisor and animation pioneer, Phil Tippett as the Keynote speaker. The conference will also feature sequence supervisor Todd Vaziri from Industrial Light & Magic, who will present segments from TRANSFORMERS, and supervising td Michael Fong from Pixar Animation Studios, who will present segments from RATATOUILLE.

Tippett is the founder of Berkeley-based Tippett Studio. His sophisticated knowledge of filmmaking and powerful ability to design and breathe life into complex animated characters has earned him two Academy Awards, two Emmys and a Special Achievement Award during the course of a career that has spanned over 30 years.

"I am honored to have been invited to this conference to share some of my experience as a filmmaker," Tippett said. "Having participated in the dramatic changeover from creating visual effects for motion pictures photo-chemically (and with models) to now, where nearly everything is being created digitally, I've been allowed a somewhat unique perspective. I intend to bring along fond memories from where we've been, advantages of the current digital age and some trepidation toward the future."

An estimated 2500 digital artists from around the world are expected to attend the industry's second annual creative event focused on inspiring and teaching advanced digital art production techniques for film, visual effects and videogame development. The program includes more than 40 digital art masters, an Art Expo, a Theatre, a Job Fair and much more, soon to be announced.

//ADAPT's Special Feature Presentations program will be open to all attendees. The Special Feature Presentations are geared toward the reveal or making-of a major blockbuster film or high-end videogames released this year. Industry experts will showcase their work and share their creative and artistic expertise.

//ADAPT 2007 tickets are currently available with limited seating. Receive a $100 rebate before Aug. 24. For more information and complete summary of events and tickets, please visit www.adaptmontreal.com.

-source VFXWorld.com

Posted by dschnee at 10:06 AM

June 27, 2007

"Enchanted" Opens the Portal to Video Game Adventure

Live the Modern Day Fairy Tale - Disney's "Enchanted" Opens the Portal to Video Game Adventure
Disney Interactive Studios

This fall moviegoers will discover Giselle, Prince Edward and Pip as they are magically transported from the animated land of Andalasia to modern New York City in the major motion picture release of "Walt Disney Pictures Presents Enchanted" starring Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey and Susan Sarandon. Disney Interactive Studios is introducing Enchanted, a video game inspired by the film for the Nintendo DS.

UPDATED: I just found some screenshots and a trailer for the game... fancy.

"With its playful cast of characters caught between an animated world and today's New York City, 'Enchanted' is a perfect setting for a great adventure game," said Craig Relyea, vice president, marketing for Disney Interactive Studios. "Players who always wished they could live in a fairytale princess world will experience adventures that go beyond the 'Enchanted' film."

Enchanted for Nintendo DS follows the story of Giselle, a princess banished from a fairy tale animated land to modern-day Manhattan. Players take on the roles of Giselle, Prince Edward and Giselle's trusted chipmunk friend Pip in adventures that span both mythical Andalasia and real-world New York City with film-inspired and original gameplay elements. Each character has their own magical skills and talents to get out of trouble as they try to defeat the evil Queen Narissa. As Giselle, players summon animals and gain powers by "singing" different songs. While playing as Edward, players can ride a horse and use their swords to battle enemies. As Pip, players experience the world from his unique chipmunk perspective and race against the clock in challenging mini-games. Players also have the option to play in English or Spanish and will receive a bonus strategy poster with their game.

Published by Disney Interactive Studios and developed by Altron Corporation, Enchanted for Nintendo DS is scheduled for release in conjunction with the film this fall.

-source mickeynews.com

Posted by dschnee at 7:05 AM

June 20, 2007

VES Festival 2007 coverage from VFXWorld

VFXWorld provides a glimpse of some of the highlights, including the VES 50 panel.

By Staff of VFXWorld

VES Festival: The 50 Greatest Visual Entertainments & More

Posted by dschnee at 8:18 PM

June 11, 2007

Just Visiting...

After Sunday's VEStivities, Monday morning, I walked down Santa Monica Blvd to my old pal Zach Lo's sleek place of employment @ Method Studios. Method is well known for super cool commercials (Sears Tools spots are great!), we both had an instructor while at the Academy of Art who used some of Method's material for comp instruction using Combustion, the cheetah Mountain Dew spot. It was cool see where they have been generating great work for so many years in person. Zach's been there for a number of years now and recently wrapped some cool work on At World's End. It was fun to meet, greet, and tour Method's very cool modern digs.

See Also: Method's Recent Work

Zach and I then took a short ride down the street to Digital Domain and meet up with Aruna for a tour d2...

We pretty much walked through the entire site side from the stage which was closed at the time. :( Lot's of miniatures, especially from The 5th Element dress up corners and walkways all over the place, another sweet section is the whale, there in lies a huge conference table that lives inside what looks like in the belly of an open ended whale, not literally but stylistically, great architecture left there before d2 moved in.

DD is pretty big, we toured through a few buildings, most of which were a bit of a ghost town, because it was lunch time, some on vacation, and others that filled up the desks just over a month ago on Pirates 3 and Transformers off somewhere else as contracts ended...

I saw a few of folks I knew there, always fun to see old colleagues. Later Aruna showed us a quick Nuke trick after we left for some good eats at a local alehouse. We saw where the artists go for shot reviews in smaller screening huts, Aruna showed a couple breakdowns being generated for siggraph from At World's End, and off to the main screening room which was cool. Other sections are in transition, the Nuke folks now with The Foundry are moving to another building down the street, some areas that were loaded with roto artists are going to be reworked to nicer digs, even though to Zach and I all the areas had a decent cool vibe and ambiance.

I've sent a few reels to 300 Rose Ave over the years, so it was good to finally see in and around d2, like 2 blocks from Venice Beach! All and all a fun laid back day hanging with Zach and Aruna.

See Also: www.d2.com Digital Domain has just revamped their site, and it's pretty tight. ~enjoy

Posted by dschnee at 7:55 AM

June 10, 2007

VES Festival Of Visual Effects 2007

So I flew down to LA for the final day of VES events this past Sunday. It was a short stint, but well worth it being able to catch up with a couple good friends, and geek out on some good panel action during the VES festival. I hadn't seen Aruna in what almost a year? since my wedding last July, he was kind enough to let me crash at his place and we hung out for the past couple of days down there. Aruna attended the entire festival of events so check out some of his summaries below:

Festival of Visual Effects: Day 1
Festival of Visual Effects: Day 2 - Part 1
Festival of Visual Effects: Day 2 - Part 2
Festival of Visual Effects: Day 3

So please go on into a few of my 'quick' thoughts on Sunday's lineup:

Shrek Through The Ages
I'll be honest, I could have saved my $20 bux and skipped this one. I have been to Shrek panels in the past, and they went over most of the same but with out going into great detail. The broad stroke was showing Shrek's progression over the 3 films and PDI's pipeline covering design (Guillaume Aretos), character td(Lucia Modesto), animation(Tim Cheung), and vfx supervision(Philippe Gluckman) on the 3 shows.

What most interested me was some of the first design and images of shrek and his evolution process. Otherwise the main bulk of the progression was in complexity. More characters, more environments and locations, more and diverse background characters, more clothing, more detail, etc.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: A VFX Voyage

John Knoll headed up this 2 hour voyage, and without going into great detail on any one topic, we were able to watch in awe the work on the 3 pirates films, especially on At World's End which was nothing short of fantastic.

Of most interest was the miniature work done, 1/4, 1/8 scale models of pirate ships used through out the films, these were used in account with full scale shop pieces, some floating on barges used to shoot on the deck and for a few long/wide shots. The shots where you would see the barge they would shoot the mini to get the rest of the bottom of the ship bits to composite in.

Knoll covered environments and matte painting work which was in all 3 films, used and executed masterfully. Also covered was the cursed crew of the black pearl in Pirates 1 shooting the performance plate with the actors, then shooting the clean plate without the pirates but with the other actors fighting nothing so they can toss in the cursed crew, still neat to see how they pulled that off.

So the cool work was with Davy Jones and his crew, and Knoll didn't go into any detail on the CG side of their creation,(only that they were a few guys short so they created 8 more characters for 3) but what was covered was the technique for shooting the crew and Davy Jones in camera wearing the track suit tracker duds for match move purposes, and this was using the same technique used in Pirates 2, the Imocap stuph, still damn nifty.

Ok so Davy Jones was cool, but the really cool work shown was the Malestrom, and I've talked about this briefly in my post At World's End. Complete CG ocean, and the trick getting the amount of detail in that whirlpool was to run the simulation flat adjusting all the forces on the fluid sim accordingly, then displacing the ocean south getting the pending doom of whirl back.

It was just a shit storm of elements during the sequence, the deck and crew of the ships were shot in a huge hanger with what Knoll said was just about the largest amount of blue screen fabric he'd ever seen surrounding the sets. Most of the elements you see in camera were shot in camera, smoke, rain, dust, debris,, this all looks fantastic in camera, but pulling a key? on uneven screens compositing back in Jones crew? and matching in camera elements with ones you might find in an element library, then the background with the CG environments? forget about it. They pulled it off though, sometimes using a drop of rain to hit the lens and covering up a screen pull that just wasn't going to happen, ;) I know a few folks who worked on t his sequence and it still amazes me, I feel their pain, but god damn!

Knoll showed us original plate to final comp wipes, impressive to say the least.

What must be mentioned during Knoll's presentation was his disgust for the trend of short schedules, back to that cheaper, faster, better trend... They had 4 months to do 2000 shots for At World's End, almost double that on Pirates 2, they moved up the release date up by 2 months, and Knoll expressed that they most definitely needed those extra 2 months on this one. I've already heard that they are re-working a number of shots for the DVD... it's just crazy, everyone suffers, all the artists working crazy overtime, it pushes the color timers, editors, everybody further down the chain, they hemorage money on OT, how is this cheaper? Yeah the initial number is lower, but by the end of the show? just pissing out money to get completed hopefully first time around works, because they don't schedule any time for adjustment, test audiences, and any betterment of the project, just rolling the dice while artists slave endless hours compromising family life and health. It's a truly F'd up situation. But what about the great money? yeah F' that too.

Knoll says he's going to fight for longer post-production schedules, telling the studios he's knows how to save you all money, give us more time in post!!!

The VES 50: The Most Influential Visual Effects Films Of All Time

A rare and completely satisfying treat, Knoll is back on stage moderating the panel made up of John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Ken Ralston, and Doug Trumball... The topic is of course the 50 most influential VFX films, but you are soon looking in on a roundtable of VFX legends, friends sharing stories, stories of the craft, the lifestyle, the people, the how they did this and that's.

After a really well done montage of the top 50 films, I mean very well constructed piece using similar themes and emotions that re-charged my love and passion for this industry and why it is I do what I do and love what I do, we were some what briefly introduced to the panel, off into stories, then as the time melted away into specific films that the legends themselves worked on.

Aruna and I looked at each other after all was said and done, and were both like damn it's over? We could listen to these guys all damn weekend. Hopefully someday they will just have a weekend of panel discussions made up of VFX legends and top supervisors. Fantastic event.

2001 - A Space Odyssey

Douglas Trumbull treated us to a rare treat once again showing us a ton of production stills and polaroids of Kubrick, the sets, the crew, the cameras, models, etc.

This one was a bit rushed, I think either Doug needed to get out of there, or they needed to start the screening of 2001, it's a long one. But what Trumbull was able to go over was amazing, you definitely take for granted what goes into those amazing shots... well most just don't know, I've read about some, but not nearly enough as Trumbull shared some of the fantastic ways to achieve what looked like impossible shots, especially for being almost 40 years ago! I'd go into more detail, but I'm not sure I'd to much justice at the moment... stay tooned though I'd like to do a 2001 post, I'll dig up some material for it and go into some detail about it, because it's simply amazing work.

Posted by dschnee at 9:05 PM

June 2, 2007

Enchantedmovie.com

is now live! - not much there at the moment, still though, right?

www.enchantedmove.com

This Thanksgiving... The Motion Picture Event Of The Year Arrives

so far all that's up are the links for the Trailer & Story summary...

Posted by dschnee at 8:53 AM

June 1, 2007

Blockbusters take toll on f/x shops

We have seen this trend of more shots, less time, cheaper, harder, better, faster, stronger! We all hope and need this trend to go away, or that a good project comes along more about the entire film itself, leaving room for concept, pre-production, through creation and not shoving some sort of cheap tight-budgeted "moneymaker" down our throats... this very interesting article came out earlier this week.
---
Hollywood puts pressure on techies
By DAVID S. COHEN

If the visual effects industry had its way, the Disney tentpole that sailed into theaters May 25 might have been named "Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wits' End."

Industrial Light & Magic topper Chrissie England, who's seen many blockbusters come through her shop, calls the editing/post-production race to the pic's delivery deadline "about the scariest thing I've ever seen." The film's vfx supervisor, John Knoll, calls it "a freakin' miracle" that the film was done on time.

"Pirates 3," warn England and Knoll, is just one tip of an iceberg that's sending a chill through the visual effects industry. Visual effects houses are worried about the increasing demand for more product, at higher quality, in less time. Some effects houses have been losing key workers, and a few are threatening to shutter, because of the shifting economics.

Studios are worried about the outcome. With increasingly frantic post-production schedules, there is less time to edit, test and recut a film, and a megamillion-dollar investment is in jeopardy if the tentpole is overlong or confusing.

Sony Pictures Imageworks' prexy Tim Sarnoff says, "This whole business -- not just visual effects, the whole film business -- is about managing risk. It's an area where you don't recognize the importance of good planning until you have a problem."

But, adds Sarnoff, "The looming issue isn't whether a facility is in trouble or not. The looming issue is whether a film is in trouble. We're all about creating an experience for the audience. If we don't present a compelling image, they won't have a compelling experience.

"The disaster (would be if) we didn't plan well enough to make an effect or a character sell a movie, and that's a disaster because you've spent a lot of money everywhere else to make that movie successful."

Call this increased pressure on effects houses the "War of the Worlds" effect.

Two years ago, ILM delivered eye-popping visual effects for Paramount's "War of the Worlds" only three months after the end of principal photography. That set the bar impossibly high, so that producers now routinely demand "the 'War of the Worlds' schedule."

In fact, that schedule was only possible because of unique circumstances, including the involvement of two men who are extraordinarily technically proficient: helmer Steven Spielberg and vfx mastermind Dennis Muren.

That movie, and the carefully planned, $60 million "300," which was almost all effects, have created increasingly high demands from studios.

The beleaguered f/x houses also find their pay eroding as rival shops open up around the world. Effects budgets may be soaring, but they're being spread over many more houses and many more shots. Effects houses are still paid by the shot, and per-shot fees have fallen 30%-40%.

The studios complain that the visual f/x shops always go over budget. Shops complain that they're asked to absorb costs of poor studio and producer planning.

One producer, according to a story making the rounds of vfx shops, is reported to have said, "If I don't put a visual effects shop out of business (on my movie), I'm not doing my job."

The shops also complain that short schedules and last-second changes drive costs up unnecessarily, and that studios end up paying more for less.

Chris de Faria, Warner Bros.' exec VP of digital production, animation and visual effects, says his studio deliberately avoids awarding whole shows to one f/x company, preferring a network of vendors across the globe.

"Any company would be taxed to do (1,200 shots)," he says. "We don't think it's good business to put that much work through a narrow pipeline."

Piecemealing a big f/x job is possible because the barrier of entry for small players in the field has fallen, and there is good work coming from houses around the world. Such basic work as wire removal and simple compositing can now be done cheaply by a two-man shop in a Van Nuys garage -- or a facility in India or the Philippines.The big shops are also looking overseas to cut costs. Rhythm & Hues has sent some of its work on "Evan Almighty" out to its India branch, which also includes among its credits "Superman Returns" and Disney's first "Narnia" film.

The facility that is now Imageworks India, in Chennai, contributed to "Spider-Man 3" and has long partnered with Sony's Imageworks.

But only a few shops in the world -- ILM, Sony's Imageworks and Weta Digital among them -- have the technology and experience to develop the never-before-seen jaw-droppers studios have come to rely on.

Visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun, who worked on last year's "Blood Diamond," explains: "If you go back to 1997, a big show had 300-400 shots. The standard today for a show that has no visible visual effects shots is 400 shots. For a show with visible visual effects shots, it's 800-1,200. A visual effects extravaganza is 1,800-2,000."

"Pirates 3," for example, has around 2,000 vfx shots, according to Knoll (many done by shops other than ILM). There are 3,000 cuts in the entire film.

And the shots are getting longer. Sony's "Spider-Man 3" had only 930 vfx shots, but the birth-of-the-Sandman sequence alone is about three minutes long. On "Pirates," there are significant sections of the film, notably the "edge of the world" sequence and the climactic ship battle in the maelstrom, where everything on the screen is computer-generated.

"The final instructions are arriving later and the work is being delivered sooner," says Sarnoff, "not just for the movie itself but for trailers, for teasers, for marketing, for campaigns, for overseas, for international vs. domestic, for different versions. Literally, the pressure is on all sides of this cooker."

One common complaint is that while studios ask for the "War of the Worlds" schedule, they also reserve the right to demand last-minute changes (something they wouldn't dare do on a Spielberg film without the director's say-so). That can turn a tight-but-attainable schedule into a crisis -- or, in the parlance of the vfx industry, a "911," where additional shops have to be hired for last-minute work.

To be sure, pressure is nothing new for effects pros. As the last link in the production chain, vfx shops traditionally have worked punishing hours in the run-up to release dates.

Now, though, there's evidence that things are reaching a breaking point. Experienced vfx artists are changing careers, and at least one highly regarded shop is getting out of the vfx biz. Even industry leaders like ILM and Sony's Imageworks are feeling the pain, worrying not only about their artists' quality of life, but about the quality of the films they are working on.

Says "Pirates" effects maven Knoll, "Often if a picture is in trouble one way or another, there are ways to salvage it, through reshoots or whatever." But he notes that it takes some time to edit, test and recut the film, even rewrite and reshoot if necessary, whether the problem is with the effects or with something else.

"When you go through these very, very short schedules you eliminate all those options," he says. "The chances are higher you will have a big flop."

"Pirates" helmer Gore Verbinski was working nearly around the clock to cut the film and had to lock some reels before other reels were even edited. This has become common practice on action-adventure films.

"He never had the chance to run the movie for a test audience, reflect on it and make adjustments," Knoll says.

That's aside from the more immediate danger that a film will simply miss a release date. It has happened before, but with soaring costs, greater competition for dates and ever more tie-ins, that would be a disaster for everyone involved, especially with some budgets now running above a quarter-billion dollars.

Sarnoff is careful to say that this is not yet an "on-fire" problem. "This is more like a grill getting hotter," he says.

Stu Maschwitz, co-founder of the Orphanage, recalls a movie where the bond company insisted on auditing his shop's books, having been burned by another vfx shop that went bankrupt in midproduction.

"They were going over our financials with a fine-tooth comb while at the same time the production was beating us up on price and delaying payments. It never occurred to them that there was a connection between the two."

Worse, says de Faria, producers aren't just asking for the "War of the Worlds" sked.

"What I'm hearing now is 'Can you do the '300' budget?" he says, referring to the modestly budgeted all-greenscreen sword-and-sandals pic.

Giant Killer Robots, a decade-old San Francisco-based vfx shop that employed around 50 people, worked on the first "Fantastic Four" and several other tentpole releases, and earned a good reputation, even among its competitors.

Co-founder John Vegher says that in recent years, post schedules shrank from 8-12 months to 3-5 months. "Every now and then, very infrequently, we get what we call a 'real schedule,' " he says. "At the same time, the studios have slashed the rate they're willing to pay for vfx work." Vegher doesn't blame the studios for taking advantage of the hyper competitive marketplace that's evolved as vfx shops have sprung up in Canada, in Asia and in California garages.

"It's such a sexy industry," he says. "Everybody knows there's a hundred people behind you just dying to get your job."

But the vfx industry is maturing. Digital artists have followed their work from London to New Zealand to California, but as the more experienced artists move into their 30s and 40s, get married and start families, they are less able to relocate and less willing to work 70-hour-plus weeks for months at a time.

"We haven't worked our staff harder," Vegher says. "If anything, we may have worked them less, because we've become more efficient."

But the handwriting was on the wall. "We saw we weren't going to be able to regulate that time anymore. It's not good for the company, and it's not good for our staff."

So six months ago, GKR closed its doors while its founders pondered their future. They have decided to reopen, but to get out of the visual effects business, turning instead to CG animation and developing their own projects.

In the meantime, many GKR artists wound up at ILM, where they were caught in the same kind of crunch.

After four or five months of punishing hours on "Pirates," there was still "Transformers" to finish. "The best artists," says Knoll, "the ones who are most in demand, who can do the most to help a show make its final push, go from one show to another."

Since they are also less likely to be recent college grads happy to subsist on ramen noodles, they are also more prone to family strains, divorces and even career changes.

Ironically, the man who may have done more than anyone else to put the industry under this pressure is something of a contrarian about it.

Muren may lament the "Monday-morning quarterbacking" from suits who aren't happy with some of the visual effects, and he acknowledges that Spielberg's decisive style was essential for getting "War of the Worlds" done so fast, but Muren generally likes working on a short schedule.

"Everybody is still in the emotional and mental zone of making the movie if you can do it in a shorter period of time. I think there are big creative wins with that," he says.

On the other hand, he's been writing a book and hasn't been on a film for the last couple of years.

The only time he's had to work on the "War of the Worlds" schedule -- was on "War of the Worlds."

-Variety.com

Posted by dschnee at 8:27 AM

May 22, 2007

The First Enchanted Trailer!!!

And it's back up again!!!

Ok another update, head on over to www.enchantedmovie.com and Walt Disney Pictures website has put up a flash version of the trailer, best to View Larger!

see also: "The first official trailer for Enchanted, preceded by clips of Disney's animated classics of the '90s, will premiere at the beginning of their newest theatrical release, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The trailer has leaked to a few sites on the internet, but Disney has been working quickly to take them down. It will likely be made officially available for download after the Pirates movie reaches its peak in sales." -enchanted.wiki

is out! but for how long? - yeap, looks as if they have been taken down... even the youtube versions have been taken down "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Walt Disney Company"

pretty neat, and it's great to see I have a few shots in there with the evil queen Narissa in the smoke, and the manhole flying off and hitting the coke sign in Time Square!

If you want to watch the trailer in High Definition, here are the links thanks to filmick: 480p, 720p and 1020p. Enchanted hits theaters on November 21st 2007.

If those links don't seem to work, so click HERE

If your going to see Pirates 3 this weekend, (in a major city), look for the Enchanted trailer before At Worlds End!

Posted by dschnee at 1:06 PM

May 14, 2007

Disenchantment & The Chronicles of Spiderwick

So I was officially wrapped up on Enchanted... well damn 2 Fridays ago (5/4), and am now in my second week on Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's The Spiderwick Chronicles, the theatrical movie based on their popular children's books.

There are still a few folks tying up some loose ends on Enchanted but it's pretty much wrapped up! I've been doing a number of EPK (Electronic Press Kit) shots, where you breakdown the shot and showcase some of the bits it took to put the shot together. I ended up completing 23 shots on the show, which turned out to be middle of the road in terms of numbers, but I tend to get some of the more difficult shots which take longer to complete. All and all Enchanted was a good show to work on, sometimes a stressful struggle, other times a fun challenge. Disney is really excited about this one, they had their first temp screening that included some of the general public last month and the response was great! Disney is going to be marketing this one big time for the Thanksgiving weekend opener. I'm excited for it, hopefully this one will do well! :)

You can check out a couple of tiny gems from Enchanted with this poster and also a preview clip (at the very end) from the Disney Movie Surfers...

As I mentioned above I'm officially on The Spiderwick Chronicles! It feels great to be on another show after 10 months on Enchanted... Not much to report on Spiderwick as of yet, but if you know of the books, then you know about the creatures involved, were working with lots of goblins, goblins, bull goblins, more goblins, and a few more very cool creatures. More about all of this later...

That's all for now, I have had a few posts on Spiderwick thus far, check those out here

Posted by dschnee at 8:15 PM

May 4, 2007

The Enchantment is over!

Whew! My final shot (ww640) was finaled by the director yesterday! So today is my last day on Enchanted! All wrapped up and 10 months later it feels so good to be done with this one. Had a magical time on it!

Posted by dschnee at 8:25 AM

May 3, 2007

'Enchanted' Amy Adams falls under Disney spell

We are into our final week on Disney's Enchanted, and I am really close to completing my final shot of the show!!! (Wheeew!) If you've noticed the lack of updates, especially on anything related to Enchanted it's due to a couple of issues, the biggest of which is time! We've all been working hard helping bring this show to a close, one that has felt like 2 shows because of our 2 major sequences were so different. The second is how tight lipped this project has been... So enough of this for now, onto the USAToday article... stay tooned though, I hope to have a lot more Enchanted info in the coming months...
---
By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
Amy Adams is a little girl's dream come true. She stars as a living, breathing Disney cartoon princess in the romantic comedy Enchanted, a musical combo of hand-drawn animation and live action that opens Nov. 21.

The actress experiences the fantasy of many an older girl, as well. Her Giselle, who pops out of a Times Square sewer after being banished from the fairy-tale land of Andalasia by evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), is rescued by none other than McDreamy himself - Patrick Dempsey, the hot doc of TV's Grey's Anatomy.

"I grew up watching all the classic Disney movies," says Adams, 32, Oscar-nominated for her wide-eyed optimist in 2005's Junebug. "The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Mary Poppins. Those films are pure fun. To get to do this as an adult is a great opportunity."

For one thing, a fanciful 'toon come to life isn't bound by any dull, everyday logic. "Playing someone who has been animated gives you permission to do all sorts of things a normal person wouldn't do," she says. "Giselle is unflappable."

Adams also shows off her singing, which hasn't been exploited since she did Brigadoon at a Chanhassen, Minn., dinner theater.

Being a princess does require sacrifices. Since Giselle lands in the Big Apple on what was supposed to be the day of her wedding to Prince Edward (James Marsden), she is a puffy sight awash in white tulle and satin. "The dress is heavier than you'd think," Adams says.

Realizing his own dream behind the camera is Kevin Lima, who has not only directed animated features (1999's Tarzan) but also paid his live-action dues (102 Dalmatians). "I love both worlds," he says. "I'm not embarrassed by what most people consider juvenile entertainment."

When Disney first optioned the script about eight years ago, Enchanted was far from kids' stuff.

"It was a racier R-rated movie," says Lima, who signed on after other directors had come and gone. "It took the studio time to rediscover the heart of the story."

While the plot sounds like Splash (fish out of water) meets Shrek (fairy-tale mockery), the director says that Enchanted doesn't exactly poke fun. "Shrek has a tendency to beat up on Disney. This is just the opposite. We lovingly embrace Disney."

He always figured that youngsters and females might find it hard to resist Giselle's Manhattan exploits. But after the first public preview about two weeks ago, he was surprised that adult men were, well, enchanted, too.

"They were glowing when they left the theater," Lima reports. Though the attraction might be the story's "purity of heart," he says, we suspect another reason for the positive male response: that devilishly deep dip in Sarandon's royal neckline.

Posted by dschnee at 5:12 PM

April 3, 2007

Charlotte's Web DVD Released!

The DVD offers feature-length commentary by director Gary Winick; commentary by producer Jordan Kerner and visual effects supervisor John Andrew Berton, Jr.; deleted Scenes with optional commentary by Gary Winick; featurettes including "Making Some Movie," "Flacka's Pig Tails," "How Do They Do That?," "What Makes a Classic?," "Animatronics Is Not Just a Fancy Word for Puppets," and "Where Are They Now?"; music videos "Ordinary Miracle" by Sarah McLachlan and "Make a Wish" by Bob Carlisle and Lucy Kane; "A Day At The Fair"; farm photo album; and a gag reel.

All DVD Features:
Commentary by: Director Gary WinickDolby Digital 2.0,Producer Jordan Kerner and visual effects supervisor John Andrew Berton, Jr.Dolby Digital 2.0
Making Some Movie
Flacka’s Pig Tails
How Do They Do That?
What Makes a Classic?
Animatronics (That’s Just a Fancy Word for Puppets)
Where Are They Now?
Music Video: "Ordinary Miracle" by Sarah McLachlan
Music Video: "Make a Wish" by Bob Carlisle and Lucy Kane
A Day At The Fair
Farm Photo Album
Gag Reel
Deleted Scenes with optional commentary by Gary Winick
DVD-ROM:
Charlotte's Web Storybook Creator
Charlotte's Web Original Theatrical Web Site Archive
Charlotte's Web Sega Game Level Demo

Posted by dschnee at 7:13 AM

March 14, 2007

Enchanted Poster Art

Saw this poster and more tonight over @ aintItCoolNews.com... good stuph.

"Here's a look at some proposed promotional designs for the film (with placeholder credits and possibly stand ins for the actors). Keep in mind these are all works in progress - final product may vary. NOTE the classic Disney characters in the third poster down! This could be amusing provided they're actually in the film.

ENCHANTED should see release late this year." (November 21rst, 2007)

-aintitcoolnews.com - Behold Yourselves Some ENCHANTED Promotional Art!!

"..with a quick look at ENCHANTED, a title we frequently hear referenced but don't know much about.

It's a Disney film about an animated maiden named Giselle who is displaced from her fairy tale kingdom into the "real" (live action) world of New York City. We're confounded by Giselle's naive idealism (she sings about love & doesn't understand how couples don't always live happily ever after), and she's bewildered by a land in which animals don't talk back to her. Eventually, her fairy tale life also transitions to the real world - including her handsome prince, and an evil queen.

It's got music by Alan Menkin, and is directed by Kevin Lima (TARZAN). It stars Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, James Marsden, and Susan Sarandon."

Posted by dschnee at 10:02 PM

March 8, 2007

Enchanted Sneak Peak

Jim Hill offers a sneak peak at this highly anticipated Walt Disney Pictures release, which hits theaters on November 21st. WARNING ! There be spoilers ahead!

Will "Enchanted" clean up at the box office this Thanksgiving?

"FYI: All of the CG critters that help Giselle clean up Robert's apartment? They're being rendered by the effects wizards at Tippett Studio. That Berkeley, CA.-based FX operation is handling the computer-animated characters who appear in the live action portions of this Walt Disney Pictures release."

-Jim Hill

As for our(Tippett's) work on the show, I really can't say much at the moment, but we are all busy, busy, busy working hard to complete this one...

See Also:
Click on Enchanted over @ Disney Pictures - Enchanted is now in the Queue

Posted by dschnee at 6:59 AM

March 1, 2007

2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects

This years festival sounds like it's going to be unique, I'm looking forward to it!
----------------------------------------------
VES is thrilled to present the 2007 VES Festival of Visual Effects at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills on the weekend of June 8-10th. This year our commitment to innovative programming has crossed over to include the VES 50: The Most Influential Visual Effects Films of All Time.

The VES definition of "Most Influential" is those films that have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process'

In the coming weeks VES members will vote on which 50 films out of a list of hundreds should belong to theVES 50: The Most Influential Visual Effects Films of All Time. Following that, a distinguished panel of judges (which will include a wide range of filmmakers and members of the media, in addition to visual effects industry professionals) will put the VES 50 in ranked order. Some of the top films will then be presented and discussed at the Festival.

Some of the programs that will be showcased during the Festival include:

THE ART OF PREVISUALIZATION
Going far beyond conceptual artwork and storyboards, animatics are produced by dedicated previz companies and artists (as well as art directors, effects supervisors and the directors themselves), to help filmmakers zero in on their creative vision while providing studios and producers with a concrete guide for budgeting and production. Once seen as a luxury, previsualization has become a mature tool and part of most every visual effects production. Join a panel of previz veterans as they discuss the challenges of the design process, with plenty of eye-opening examples of how "visual drafts" are created.

BRAVE NEW WORLD: THE ETHICS OF VFX MANIPULATION
Visual effects technology has made virtually anything possible: long-dead actors can dance with vacuum cleaners or speak new dialogue; young actors can be inserted into films made before they were born; product placement can be added in post-production, circumventing the artistic stance of the directors; performances can even be altered without the input of the cast. While many of these techniques are being used to make films better and more to their creators' vision, it can be a slippery slope. Join the VES on a raucous and freewheeling journey through this digital frontier, with examples, opinions, and plenty of controversy.

THE ART OF THE MINIATURE: WHAT CAN YOU GET ME IN TWO WEEKS?
Learn how miniature effects are called upon like the proverbial cavalry to come riding in to save a picture with a visual effect. See when miniatures are built and shot on short schedules to give movies that "Wow" factor at the last minute. Also, a special surprise "Behind the Magic" featurette!

VES FESTIVAL SPECIAL SHOWCASE: THE FILMS OF MIKE JITTLOV
Mike Jittlov is a visionary experimental animator and creator of numerous short films, as well as the director/star of the 1989 cult feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time. Known to both VFX professionals and fans alike as a "living special effect", Mike is also the inventor of illusions that have astounded expert magicians, a skilled practitioner of origami, and a prime example of truly handcrafted animation and "personal" visual effects. Mike will be a Special Guest of Honor at the Festival's opening-night celebration, and newly-restored versions of some of Mike's short films will be screened before various sessions throughout the Festival, bringing his artistry to a new generation of fans.

The VES Festival will be open to the public. Information on programs and tickets will be released in upcoming months.
----------------------------------------------
-visualeffectssociety.com

Posted by dschnee at 6:38 AM

February 25, 2007

Oscar Booty for Dead Man's Chest

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
John Knoll, Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall

Check out all the winners below:
http://oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/

Complete list of winners at the 79th annual Academy Awards, presented Sunday night at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles:

Best Motion Picture: ''The Departed''

Lead Actor: Forest Whitaker, ''The Last King of Scotland''

Lead Actress: Helen Mirren, ''The Queen''

Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, ''Little Miss Sunshine''

Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, ''Dreamgirls''

Directing: Martin Scorsese, ''The Departed''

Foreign Language Film: ''The Lives of Others,'' Germany

Adapted Screenplay: William Monahan, ''The Departed''

Original Screenplay: Michael Arndt, ''Little Miss Sunshine''

Animated Feature Film: ''Happy Feet''

Art Direction: ''Pan's Labyrinth''

Cinematography: ''Pan's Labyrinth''

Sound Mixing: ''Dreamgirls''

Sound Editing: ''Letters From Iwo Jima''

Original Score: ''Babel,'' Gustavo Santaolalla

Original Song: ''I Need to Wake Up'' from ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' Melissa Etheridge

Costume: ''Marie Antoinette''

Documentary Feature: ''An Inconvenient Truth''

Documentary Short Subject: ''The Blood of Yingzhou District''

Film Editing: ''The Departed''

Makeup: ''Pan's Labyrinth''

Animated Short Film: ''The Danish Poet''

Live Action Short Film: ''West Bank Story''

Visual Effects: ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest''

———

Jean Hersholt Award (Oscar statuette): Sherry Lansing.

Honorary Academy Award (Oscar statuette): Ennio Morricone.

Posted by dschnee at 4:27 PM

February 11, 2007

VES Announces 2006 Winners

Los Angeles, February 11, 2007 – The VES Awards were given out tonight during the Visual Effects Society's (VES) fifth annual gala event at the Kodak Grand Ballroom. This year's event, garnering the best attendance for these events so far, attracted more than eight hundred celebrities, visual effects and animation artists, dozens of nominees and members of the film, television and games industries.

"There was some amazing 'snap, crackle and pop' effects work on display last night," said Eric Roth, Executive Director of the VES. "This past year -- with technological and artistic advances aplenty -- the 'did you see that?' bar was set higher than ever and this year's crop of visual effects winners cleared it with room to spare." For a complete list of winners click here.

Congrats to Aruna and his work on the outstanding supporting VFX in Flags of Our Fathers!

Also, Congrats to Dan Lemmon, Eileen Moran, Paul Story, Lyse Beck, Laure Lacroix, and the other folks at Weta for Travelers Snowball spot! (won for Outstanding VFX in a Commercial and Outstanding Compositing in a Commercial)

Templeton was Robbed!!!

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
John Knoll, Jill Brooks, Hal Hickel, Charlie Gibson

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
Michael Owens, Matthew Butler, Bryan Grill, Julian Levi

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special
NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES – BATTLEGROUND
Eric Grenaudier, Sam Nicholson, Mark Spatny, Adalberto Lopez

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA - Episode 303b “Exodus”
Gary Hutzel, Michael Gibson, Alec McClymont, Brenda Campbell

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program
ER - Scoop and Run
Sam Nicholson, Scott Ramsey, Adam Ealovega, Anthony Ocampo

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial
Travelers - SNOWBALL
Dan Lemmon, Eileen Moran, R. Christopher White, Paul Story

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Music Video
U2 and Green Day - THE SAINTS ARE COMING
Matt Winkel, Ben Looram, Wayne England, Graham Fyffe

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST – Flying Dutchman Sequence
John Knoll, Ned Gorman, Jakub Pistecky, Tom Fejes

Outstanding Real Time Visuals in a Video Game
FIGHT NIGHT ROUND 3 for PS3
Christopher Sjoholm, Kat Kelly Hayduk, Rob Hilson, Celia Jepson

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project
ROVING MARS
Alan Markowitz, Dan Maas, Jeremy Nicolaides, Johnathan Banta

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST – Davy Jones
Steve Walton, Jung-Seung Hong, Marc Chu, James Tooley

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture
CARS - Mater
Larry The Cable Guy, Mike Krummhoefener, Tom Sanocki, Nancy Kat0

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video
Geico - CHAT
David Hulin, Seth Gollub, Andy Walker, Jenny Bichsel

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
Chris Stoski, Susumu Yukuhiro, Jack Mongovan, Greg Salter

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video
ELISABETH - Episode 1
Dave Bowman, Jimmy Kidell, Russell Horth, Gurel Mehmet

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Motion Picture
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
Bruce Holcomb, Ron Woodall, Charlie Bailey, Carl Miller

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Broadcast Program
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA - Season 2, Episode 218 "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"
Steve Graves, Jose Perez, Mark Shimer, Chris Zapara

Outstanding Compositing in a Motion Picture
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST
Eddie Pasquarello, Francois Lambert, Jeff Sutherland, Tory Mercer

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video
Travelers - SNOWBALL
Laure Lacroix, Lyse Beck, Steve McGillen, Matt Holland

Outstanding Special Effects in a Motion Picture
CASINO ROYALE
Chris Corbould, Peter Notley, Ian Lowe, Roy Quinn

Posted by dschnee at 6:44 AM

February 2, 2007

Tippett Studio At The Superbowl

This was before my time at Tippett Studio, but we are still using that fantastic fur tool that helped create Carl and Ray for the blockbuster spots! Look for a spot called "Mouse Click" during the Super Bowl this year!

Loveable Pets 'Carl And Ray' Return for Blockbuster Total Access Super Bowl Commercial

"Animation was handled by Tippett Studio, credited for similar work in films including "Charlotte's Web" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." Campaign director Steve "Spaz" Williams also supervised special effects for Industrial Light and Magic on such films as "Jurassic Park" and "The Mask."

DALLAS, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Blockbuster Inc. (NYSE: BBI)(NYSE: BBI.B), a leading global provider of in-home entertainment, will bring back the loveable computer-generated rabbit "Carl" and his guinea pig buddy, "Ray," for a new commercial airing during Super Bowl XLI on CBS.

During the game, Blockbuster will air a new 30-second television commercial to raise awareness for BLOCKBUSTER Total Access, the only service that combines the best of both worlds - online and in-store DVD rentals.

"We're celebrating the early success of BLOCKBUSTER Total Access which we believe is the best movie rental offering in the marketplace by bringing back two popular characters, Carl and Ray, for America's biggest sporting event," said Margaret Landis, vice president, consumer communications for Blockbuster.

Links://
-Carl & Ray campaign Spots on Tippett's website
-Blockbuster 'Carl & Ray' Press Release
-Blockbuster Video / Siggraph 2002 (I think mouse click is at the end...:)

From November 1 through the end of December, more than 700,000 new members signed up for BLOCKBUSTER Total Access.

The original "Pet Shop" television campaign and the newest commercial, dubbed "Mouse Click," were created for Blockbuster by Doner. "Mouse Click" features three fully-rendered, three-dimensional, 100 percent computer- generated animals a rabbit named Carl, a guinea pig named Ray and a new sidekick simply named "mouse." The spot features the voices of James Woods (Carl), Jim Belushi (Ray) and Bob Goldthwait as the mouse, as well as a closing voiceover from Alec Baldwin. Animation was handled by Tippett Studio, credited for similar work in films including "Charlotte's Web" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." Campaign director Steve "Spaz" Williams also supervised special effects for Industrial Light and Magic on such films as "Jurassic Park" and "The Mask."

When Carl and Ray made their commercial debut during the 2002 Super Bowl, they scored the fifth-highest recall among consumers according to research from Ipsos-Reid Express Omnibus. The spot also ranked in the top 10 in popularity in USA Today's annual "Ad Meter" poll, and the campaign went on to win four CLIO Awards.

Posted by dschnee at 10:05 PM

January 29, 2007

Siggraph Encore

Browse and watch over 900 conference presentations from SIGGRAPH 2003, 2004 and 2005 with content from SIGGRAPH 2006 coming soon!

For a damn fine resource at your finger tips... check out: Siggraph Encore

my only request is that they add all of the shorts and reels that make up the Animation Theater(s) and of course the Electronic Theater Showcase!

I looked but they have yet to put up Jacob's (update your imdb will ya!) Effects Omelette Sketch Highway To Hell For "Constantine", but do include a couple of the effects omelette sketches from that day... hrrrummmph.

Posted by dschnee at 10:42 PM

January 27, 2007

Web Design

There have been an impressive amount of coverage on the visual effects work done on Charlotte's Web, and I'm so glad to see it!

here is yet another article on the visual effects work that helped bring this children's classic to the live action arena:

Computer Graphics World's | Web Design

"Tippett Studio faced when creating Templeton the rat, the two CG stars of Paramount Pictures live-action version of EB White's classic children's tale Charlotte's Web. Director Gary Winick was adamant that the characters not be portrayed as stylized, cuddly creatures, but instead wanted them to look photoreal so they would blend seamlessly with the rest of the animal cast. He also wanted the audience's reaction to the characters to mimic that of Wilbur the pig, which is averse toward Charlotte and Templeton at the beginning of the story but grows to like them as the story progresses."

A realistic CG Carlotte and Templeton act alongside a real baryard case in the latest iteration of Charlotte's Web
When most people see spiders and rats, they immediately think creepy, scary, repulsive, and gross.

So how do you get movie-goers of all ages to form a warm emotional attachment to a spider and a rat that look so authentic they could pass for the real thing?

That was what Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) faced when creating Charlotte the spider and Tippett Studio faced when creating Templeton the rat, the two CG stars of Paramount Pictures’ live-action version of EB White’s classic children’s tale Charlotte’s Web. Director Gary Winick was adamant that the characters not be portrayed as stylized, cuddly creatures, but instead wanted them to look photoreal so they would blend seamlessly with the rest of the animal cast. He also wanted the audience’s reaction to the characters to mimic that of Wilbur the pig, which is averse toward Charlotte and Templeton at the beginning of the story but grows to like them as the story progresses.

To tackle the challenge, the studios used a combination of top artistic talent and robust digital tools. The result is a photorealistic arachnid and rodent that viewers can’t help but fall in love with, just as author EB White intended.

Endearing Designs

Set to hit theaters in North America just before Christmas, Charlotte’s Web features a bevy of barnyard animals—geese, sheep, cows, horses, and, of course, a beloved pig named Wilbur. All of these animals are voiced by actors, and they appear in the film either as well-trained live-action critters whose mouths move thanks to CG mouth and face replacements, or as realistic-looking animatronic replicas. Even Wilbur is a real pig in all but a few stunt shots, where he appears as a CG pig created by Digital Pictures Iloura.

In fact, apart from the baby spiders, which debut at the end of the film and were created by Fuel International, only Charlotte (voiced by Julia Roberts) and Templeton (voiced by Steve Buscemi) are always portrayed digitally, primarily because both characters had to give numerous specific performances that were key to the story line and that would have been impossible to elicit from a real spider and rat.

To be true to the story, Winick wanted Charlotte and Templeton to possess an on-screen presence that would cause viewers to eventually form genuine feelings of affection for them, without breaking the illusion that they were as real as the rest of the cast. One way he sought to achieve that goal was to have each character go through a complete story arc. For instance, in her first scene, when she catches a fly and drinks its blood, Charlotte is viewed as somewhat of a monster, revolting to all the barn animals, including Wilbur. And the audience has to go from sharing that feeling, to becoming as enamored with her as Wilbur becomes, and then being completely shattered emotionally when she dies at the end of the film.
Likewise, in Templeton’s first scene, he lets out a huge belch, making his barn mates and the audience believe that he’s nothing more than a distasteful slob. But as Charlotte, Wilbur, and the audience get to know him, they see that deep down he has a heart of gold, going out of his way to find words for Charlotte to spin into her web in an effort to save Wilbur from becoming Mr. Zuckerman’s pork dinner, and eventually helping Charlotte save her babies.

The artists made Templeton photorealistic, but toned down the modelsomewhat to make him appear less gnarly yet defi nitely not “cute.”

The other way Winick sought to achieve his goal was to ensure that the characters looked real but didn’t repulse the audience. "That was our biggest challenge when creating Charlotte," says John Dietz, visual effects supervisor at RSP. "We had to ensure that she looked like a real spider, but make her appealing to viewers of all ages."

Blair Clark, who supervised the visual effects at Tippett Studio with Joel Friesch, concurs. "We had to get the point across that Templeton is a real rat, but not frighten people in the audience who may have rat-phobia."

To do that, both teams took the same approach when designing the characters: aim for photorealism, but slightly stylize a few features to make the characters more endearing. After several months of design work, countless meetings with the director, producers, and Paramount executives, and numerous sample models, the artists finalized their designs.

Charlotte would be a photoreal gray spider with eight eyes, a plump, hairy body, eight hairy legs, and a pair of blood-sucking chelicera. But because many of her shots are close-up performance shots, her photoreal facial features would be stylized slightly to make her more lovable and to enable her to convey emotion. For example, the designers gave her face a subtle heart shape, and they made all eight of her eyes almond-shaped to suggest femininity. In addition, above each of the two main eyes, they placed a pair of secondary eyes representing eyebrows, to help her emote.

The designers also took some liberty with the hair on Charlotte’s body and legs. "At the macro level, the hair on some spiders is kind of spiky, and we decided to keep that look for the wide shots. But for the close-ups, we designed a downy, fawn-like quality to her hair, to take a bit of the edge off," says Dietz.

Likewise, Templeton would resemble an authentic rat, with thick fur, a long tail, long gray whiskers, and sharp teeth. According to Clark, defining the color of Templeton’s fur proved somewhat difficult. "Initially the studio was leaning toward a cute, almost mousy rat, and at one point they talked about making him white or light gray," says Clark. "But Templeton is supposed to be a sloppy, greasy, filthy character, and we wanted him to look the part.

"Wilbur’s story arc is about not being judgmental, about acceptance," Clark continues. "And if Templeton was a cute, little, white lab rat, why wouldn’t Wilbur like him? Why would he view Templeton as untrustworthy in the beginning?" In the end, the artists got approval to make Templeton’s fur gray/brown in color.

As RSP did with Charlotte, the Tippett artists also toned down some of Templeton’s features. For instance, they didn’t make the toenails on his front feet as long as those on a real rat. "We had to cut them down so he didn’t look so gnarly," says Sven Jensen, modeling supervisor.

Jensen adds that to make Templeton more endearing, the team made his eyes a bit bigger than those of a real rat, and made his eyes turn inward slightly so that when viewers see him straight on, his eyes appear to be looking at them. Plus, his head is a bit broader than the long, thin shape of a real rat’s head, and they gave him a bit of eyebrow to make his eyes more expressive. "All of these very slight design tweaks were handled with a lot of forethought," Jensen notes. "We were extremely careful not to turn Templeton into anything even slightly resembling a cartoon character, or make him Disney-cute in any way."

Creating Charlotte

Once they had made all their design decisions, the teams began the process of modeling the characters. According to Dietz, RSP used Softimage’s XSI to model, groom, animate, and light Charlotte. While modeling her body was fairly straightforward, he says that modeling her face was more complicated.

"We built a standard rig for her body, but we did her face with blendshapes," Dietz explains. Although Charlotte is a spider, she talks and conveys emotions like a human would, so first the team had to figure out where the basic muscles beneath the skin of a human’s face would map onto a spider’s face. Then the group built blendshapes in XSI to drive those muscles, and combined them to form various facial expressions. In total, the team created about 500 blendshapes for Charlotte’s face, which they translated to a slider interface for the animators.
"It’s challenging to get a believable performance out of a CG character," says Dietz. "Charlotte isn’t running around, destroying a city. She’s on-screen for extended periods delivering pretty intense dialog. We did everything we could to ensure that she would deliver the performance the director was after."

While Charlotte looks like a real spider,the team at Rising Sun Pictures tweakedthe model, giving her a heart-shaped face,for example, to make her less scary.

As most modelers can attest, it’s hard enough to create a hairy critter. But add the complicated texture of a translucent exoskeleton directly beneath the hair and the task becomes more daunting. As such, determining how the hair and exoskeleton on Charlotte’s body would look was quite challenging.

According to Dietz, the team tackled that challenge using XSI’s hair/fur tool, grooming tools, and lighting system, as well as the 3Delight RenderMan-compliant rendering system from The 3Delight Team. All the hair modeling was done on a low-res proxy of Charlotte’s body. "Then we gave her hair systems that represent spiky hair, downy hair, leg hair, body hair—a variety of hair types," he says. With the hair/fur tool in XSI, hair is applied all over the character so it resembles a Chia pet, and then the artist grooms the hair to look the way he wants. "The software gives you guide hairs, and you define denseness, length, and other parameters for them. During rendering, the software interpolates what needs to happen between the guide hairs," Dietz says.

The biggest animation challenge with Charlotte, according to Dietz, concerned the way her face moved as she conveyed emotion and spoke. "Spiders don’t have human-like mouths, but there’s a line separating a spider’s face from its chelicera, and we felt that line would be good to use as a mouth line," he says. "To give the impression that she was smiling or frowning, we’d change the angle of that line slightly."
Of course, the process of conveying Charlotte’s emotions went deeper than simply tweaking the angle of the mouth line. As Dietz explains, the animators spent a lot of time learning the meaning of each shot and the emotions the director was trying to convey, and then they built an animation library of emotions in XSI. "The audience has to understand all of Charlotte’s emotions, and so did the animators. When she’s happy, what does that mean? What does she do with her posture? Her face?" he says. "Only after all the animators were clear on how Charlotte would convey emotion were they allowed to touch a shot. It was quite a process."

Charlotte is complex, both inpersonality and in structure.Pictured here are the variousstages that eventually resultedin the fi nal look (far left).

Just as spiders lack human-like mouths, they also lack anything resembling lips, so the animators didn’t have to contend with lip sync. However, they did have to give the illusion that Charlotte was talking. To do that, they implied that a mouth existed behind the chelicera. "As Charlotte speaks, the chelicera flare out a bit and you get the feeling from the movement of those fangs that there’s a mouth moving behind them," Dietz explains.
Yet, it was difficult to determine how much to animate the chelicera as Charlotte spoke. "Our first reaction was to hit every phoneme, but real speech doesn’t work that way, so we made only the major phonemes result in movement," Dietz recalls. "The hardest part was to not be tempted to treat the chelicera as lips and end up moving them in an exaggerated way, but instead to pretend that an imaginary mouth was behind the chelicera and that they would move as a by-product of the movement of that imaginary mouth."

Not only is Charlotte hairy, but she also has a translucent exoskeletonunderneath the hair, which was created with Softimage’s XSI.

To light the character, the artists used the lighting tools in XSI. To get the data from XSI to the 3Delight rendering system, they wrote a proprietary RIB exporter called Affogato. All the compositing was done in Apple’s Shake.

Tackling Templeton

As with Charlotte, modeling Templeton’s body was fairly straightforward. For reference, the Tippett team used pictures of rats, as well as a real rat, named Splinter, which they brought to their offices just for this project.
After the modelers built a completely bald Templeton in Autodesk’s Maya, the model made its way to the paint department, where the team painted a basic skin layer onto it, primarily in Adobe’s Photoshop, Right Hemisphere’s Deep Paint, and Maya. Then it went back to the modelers, who used Tippett’s in-house proprietary tool called Furocious to create and groom Templeton’s fur.

(From top, l. to r.) Matchmovers create a CG duplicate ofthe set to properly place the rat. The furless rat, with colorand markings similar to the fi nal, lets artists see the model’sform during animation. The animated model is furredand lit. A close-up lets the team examine their work.

Once the modeling and fur grooming were complete, Jensen built a facial rig in Maya consisting of approximately 280 blendshapes. The animators, using Maya, were able to combine and tweak those blendshapes to create all the different facial expressions needed for realistic speech. "In animation, we’d make poses—combinations of those blendshapes—to represent phonemes and different emotions," says Todd Labonte, animation supervisor. "Then we could bust through that combined phoneme list and quickly create an initial face pass without having to animate every muscle on the face."
Templeton comprises a variety of different blendshapes. For instance, the ones on his face resemble sliders that move the corners of the mouth and the eyes to convey emotion. But the ones on his body comprise corrective blends. "Instead of a muscle system in Templeton’s body, we used a lot of corrective blends to give him a baggy rat look. So, when he raises his knee, for example, his knee blends into the fat in his belly. That really added to his realistic look," Labonte says.

In this scene, the CG Templeton bathes in digital buttermilk. The realistic liquidwas created using a mixture of Maya, Syfl ex, and photographic elements.

In addition to using Pixar’s RenderMan for rendering and lighting and Shake for compositing, the team also used Syflex LLC’s Syflex and Next Limit’s RealFlow for dynamics simulation. Syflex, for instance, was used in a shot in which Wilbur is being bathed in buttermilk in anticipation of his appearance at the county fair. "As Mrs. Zuckerman bathes Wilbur, she wrings out the sponge and the milk flows down Wilbur’s back," Clark recounts. "We tilt into the pail and you see Templeton lying on his back, floating contentedly in the buttermilk." According to Clark, the buttermilk was created using a combination of Maya, Syflex, and photographic elements of various liquids, and compositor Chris Morley handled the compositing in Shake.

Effects animator Konstantin Promokhov, meanwhile, used RealFlow extensively in a shot in which Templeton winds up covered in the contents of a rotten goose egg. In this shot, Templeton cons one of the geese into letting him have an egg that failed to hatch. He rolls it into his lair, and he eventually gets it positioned exactly where he wants it. But then the egg comes loose from its position and breaks over Templeton, covering him in a gooey, smelly mess. "It was challenging getting the yolk to flow realistically over the rat and [his] bedding," Clark says. "But [Promokhov] handled it well in RealFlow."

Another challenging effects shot involved Templeton saving Charlotte’s egg sac. "In this shot, Templeton uses his teeth to gingerly pull the egg sac from the middle of a web and then carry it away," Clark says. "This required a lot of complicated layering of effects animation, but Rosa Lin, lead effects animator, created several layers of webbing [in Maya] that had the gorgeous diaphanous gauzy look we were after."

Webs and Crows
In addition to Charlotte and Templeton, RSP and Tippett also used their talents and tools for other elements in the film. One of these was Charlotte’s beautiful webs, which RSP created using XSI and some proprietary web tools the team developed for the project. "Creating Charlotte’s webs was difficult," says Dietz. "Humans have tried to re-create web material for its tensile strength, and they haven’t been able to do it. It was hard to create in CG something that people have failed to create in the real world."

The crows, like the rest of the animal cast, are mostly real, with CG mouthreplacements. But sometimes the crows are CG, crafted in Maya.

According to Dietz, the team used their web tools to assign the different strands of the web different properties. "Webs are made up of anchor lines, which are very strong; spoke lines, which are strong but aren’t of the same consistency and quality as anchor lines; and orbital lines, which are very loose and are the parts of the web that bugs stick to," explains Dietz. "All three are different, and we needed to create a complex dynamics system to get them to interact realistically with one another, to animate realistically in a breeze, and to react appropriately when a fly gets stuck in the orbital lines, or when Charlotte walks around on the web and her feet stick to the lines and pull them, and they snap back when her feet let go."

Dietz adds that the team also treated the webs as a character in the film. A major part of the story concerns the words which Charlotte spins into her webs in an effort to save Wilbur’s life. In the beginning, when she comes up with the plan to save Wilbur by spinning "Some Pig" into a web, she’s at the top of her game and she’s good at what she does. "When the web is complete, it has a special quality to it lighting-wise [created in XSI] to give you the feeling that it’s a special web," Dietz says. As she ages, however, her webs lose some of that special quality to imply that she can’t spin as well as she used to.

Even after Charlotte is gone, her webs remain, but they are old, gray, and tattered. "These webs also required special dynamics, which we created using our web tools to make them sag and move like they’re aged," Dietz says.

Tippett, meanwhile, also was responsible for animating the crows in the film. According to Labonte, the group used Maya on beak/head replacement shots of live crows, to make it look like they were chatting with one another.

Other times the team worked on shots in which the crows are entirely CG. As Clark explains, Templeton and the crows don’t get along. In one scene that takes place at the fairgrounds, Templeton coerces some crows to fly at him, but instead they fly into a scarecrow. When they do, a net falls on top of them. "In this series of shots, effects animator Uma Havaligi had to combine the real plate with a greenscreen element of the scarecrow that we shot, with two CG crows on it flapping around, covered by a CG net that had to conform to their bodies," Clark recalls. All of the CG models were built and animated in Maya. To create the feathers on the crows, the team developed a feather tool within their Furocious software. All compositing was done in Shake.

A CG net also played a role in another complicated shot, in which Templeton traverses a bridge made of a ping-pong net. "It was a complicated shot because we have Templeton walking over a bridge, bouncing up and down on this net surface," says Labonte. "We found ourselves in a chicken-and-egg scenario where the lead animator, Jason Armstrong, animated Templeton and simulated the net, but then the net was bouncing differently than Templeton, so he had to re-animate Templeton to the net, and then re-sim the net, and then the net was bouncing differently than Templeton—it was a crazy infinity loop of insanity."

To solve the problem Labonte says the crew stopped simulating the net freely and began deforming it locally to Templeton’s specific actions. "[Armstrong] provided a rough animation of the bridge, and the effects animation department then simulated small surface ripples in it," he says. The net was built and animated in Maya, while all the compositing was done in Shake.

All told, the folks at RSP and Tippett Studio note that bringing this latest incarnation of Charlotte’s Web to the big screen was truly a labor of love for everyone involved. "It was hard work, but we’re very proud of the results," says Tippett’s Clark.

"Charlotte’s Web was a great movie to work on animation-wise," concludes RSP’s Dietz. "Having the opportunity to create a CG character that has personality was an outstanding experience. And I am very proud of how our team got into the character and into the process of making a movie, and not just doing special effects."

-Computer Graphics World's | Web Design

Audrey Doyle is a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World.

Posted by dschnee at 10:56 PM

January 23, 2007

79th Oscars VFX Down to 3

Nominations for the 79th Academy Awards

Hey even though Tippett Studio went un-credited on Dead Man's Chest, we still got to work on this blockbuster! and It looks like I will have worked on 2 Consecutive Best Visual Effects Oscar Winning films!!! awesome...(see also: from 2005 Winner: Visual Effects - KING KONG)

Posted by dschnee at 9:13 AM

January 18, 2007

VES Has Plenty to Show and Tell

-taken from VFXWorld.com

The Visual Effects Society (VES) hosted its annual Show and Tell on Jan. 13 at the Skirball Cultural Center, as nominees discussed the making of their projects.

Here are just a few highlights at the all-day event:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture

* PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST presenters John Knoll and Hal Hickel of ILM talked about the condensed schedule and raising the bar with nearly 20 more CG characters, including the villainous Davy Jones, and how they created the Imocap performance capture system for onset data capture.

* CHARLOTTE'S WEB presenters John Andrew Berton, John Dietz (Rising Sun Pictures) and Todd Labonte (Tippett Studio) discussed the challenges of bringing these computer-generated characters into a live-action world and were gratified to be recognized by the VES after being overlooked by the Academy.

Aruna, Do Tell! How was the VES show and tell!?!

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture

* BLOOD DIAMOND presenter Jeff Okun talked about how the phrase TIA (This is Africa), which is used throughout the movie, also applied to the vfx process. TIA meant that doing something "just now" could take anywhere from five minutes to all day, so it was a difficult shoot all around. He showed an illustrative breakdown of a scene that required military helicopters that were supplied by an African nation, but since they were brand new and shiny black, so they had to be dirtied.

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture

This was an all-ILM category...

* M:i:III presenter Richard Bluff showed a lot of footage about the scene in Shanghai. One of the fun facts was that since all lights are supposed to be out after 11:00 pm, the nighttime city scene required all the high rise buildings' lights to be painted back in.

* DEAD MAN'S CHEST presenter Susumu Yukuhiro told a bit about how Knoll shot his own lens flares because they couldn't create them digitally, even with Knoll's own software package that's commercially available.

* POSEIDON presenter Mohen Leo talked about ILM's collaboration with Stanford scientists on fluid dynamics and showed a great visual illustrating how Stanford's work was on fluid in a small cube, less than 1/100th the size they needed for POSEIDON.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial

* Sears Tools ARBORETUM presenter Laurent Ledru showed a reel in which items such as flowers open in time lapse but then petals or stamens are actually tools from Sears. For instance, imagine the inside of a flower with all its intricacies being a bunch of electric drills.

Final voting for all categories will take place via an online view and vote between Jan. 22 and Feb. 6.

Winners will be announced at the 5th Annual VES Awards gala on Feb. 11 at the Kodak Grand Ballroom in Hollywood. Academy Award-winning visual effects pioneer Dennis Muren from Industrial Light & Magic will receive the VES Lifetime Achievement Award. A complete list of all the nominees for the 5th Annual Awards is available at www.visualeffectssociety.com.

Posted by dschnee at 8:23 PM

January 17, 2007

The Spider and The Rat

THE RAT
"Tippett Studio's animated dogs, cats, bears, bunnies and other animals have starred in many films and TV commercials, so creating yet another furry creature wasn't the challenge; the studio's "furocious" software, which works with Autodesk's Maya and is rendered through Pixar's RenderMan, would be up to the task. The challenge for the studio was in making the rat believable in scenes with the live action animals, even though Templeton talked and behaved in ways a real rat wouldn't."

"Because filming took place in Melbourne, visual effects supervisor Blair Clark worked on set with Berton and director Gary Winick while Co-VFX Supervisor Joel Friesch managed the crew in Berkeley who built Templeton. Once the show moved into production, the two vfx supes shared the challenges."

"For reference, they bought a real rat from a snake vivarium, which they named Master Splinter. "The rat looked like Templeton," says Friesch. "But Paramount wanted a white rat. We explained that white rats are lab rats." Eventually, they compromised by giving Templeton a warm gray coat. Meanwhile, the real rat helped animators develop Templeton’s performance. In the film, Templeton scurries through the barn, drops down into his rat hole, runs across a net, through a tunnel, drinks from a wax soda bottle, wallows in buttermilk, and covers himself with caramel corn and mustard."

Crawl on over to CGSociety.org for the good looking article:

At the studio, because the Tippett crew wanted to see real rat behavior, they didn’t attempt to tame Master Splinter. Sometimes to a painful degree: “We fed him through the cage to see how he tried to grab with his mouth and front legs,” says Friesch. “I got bitten six times and infected once. He bit everyone.”

But, by filming and observing the real rat, the crew developed a sense of a rat’s heart rate and breathing, how a rat ran and crawled, and how he moved his muzzle and cleaned himself. Todd Labonte, Tippett animation supervisor, twice bitten by Master Splinter, also used video reference of New York City rats to develop Templeton’s gross body movements.

“Todd and the animators were always walking a fine line,” says Clark. “Templeton is anthropomorphic - he interacts with props in a humanistic way. But he had to read as a real rat. They didn’t want him to act like Stuart Little, and yet he looks at mirrors and plops on beds.”

Labonte drew that fine line by attending to tiny details, from the tail to the ears. “His tail was tricky,” he says. “A rat’s tail is extremely stiff and unappealing. A rat holds its tail off the ground and it looks fake, like a tree branch. We wanted it to be pleasing to the eye, to add follow-through. So, sometimes we stuck his tail in the ground or obscured it with straw and put on another next to it.”

To control Templeton, animators working in Autodesk’s Maya used multiple rigs. With these rigs, they could, for example, move the rodent’s rear without affecting the front of his body and could give his tail inverse kinematics for ground contact, but forward kinematics for flopping.

Labonte springs out of his chair to demonstrate some rat behavior. “Like all animals and babies, the rat leads from the head,” he says, looking left and right, his shoulders following. “The eyes lead everything with a slight delay.”

Then, he continued describing how they animated Templeton. “When he decides to stop, his back legs pull up and he becomes a furry ball,” Labonte says. “He never stands; he pushes back on his haunches and sits. And when he’s walking on four legs, he has a particular waddle. He has a ton of butt motion - lots of junk in the trunk.”

To create the waddle, the animators pushed Templeton’s pelvis up with each step. The rat would scoot, his pelvis would roll, and then the animators would pop his back legs quickly. “There’s a scene when he’s walking along the trough with that big butt that’s fantastic,” Labonte says. “His tail is there just for leverage, he couldn’t wag it like a dog or cat.”

Templeton didn’t express emotion with his ears, either. “They’re just listening devices,” says Labonte. And, unlike Stuart Little, he didn’t gesture with his hands. “The finger work on Stuart Little was really cool,” Labonte says, “but it doesn’t work in the barnyard. We kept his hands like little mittens in front of his body.”

For Templeton’s face, the animators used a series of small, incremental blend shapes. “There aren’t any brows, so we used a lot of sliding flesh on the forehead,” Labonte says. And, to keep him from looking too rat like and scary, the animators played him nose down - no teeth.

“He has to do a lot with his nose,” says Labonte. “He has extremely small whites in his eyes. We didn’t make him wide-eyed, so we couldn’t do any eye rolls. And, his facial performance was often deadened by fur. It’s like if you cover your face in three-inch thick paste. It doesn’t telegraph subtlety.”

When animators blocked out Templeton’s actions in low res, they could toggle a shell that gave them a sense of how much the fur would affect the silhouette. “We’d have him do his rat thing,” Labonte says. “He’d sniff, talk, move his nose back and forth. We’d make sure his metabolism matched the [voice track], and then we’d nail the lip synch. Steve Buscemi’s performance was so juicy that we never had to overplay the performance.”

Although Templeton often appears in shots with other animals, usually the camera switches from one to the other because the scale is so different - particularly, when Templeton talks to Charlotte the spider. Sometimes though, characters created in various studios shared shots. Berton managed the compositing chaos at Paramount.

“Everyone played ball,” Berton says. “Everybody understood that it was necessary to share images. We were very clear about what we wanted from the vendors so that everyone was sending the same file sizes.” Berton used iChat and CineSync, developed by Rising Sun Research, which allowed the studios to view dailies using QuickTime over the Internet - a particular advantage once Berton moved back to California while work on Charlotte and other characters continued in Australia.

-care of CGSociety.org

Posted by dschnee at 7:24 AM

January 16, 2007

Event Shows VES Trends To Great Effect

The fifth annual Visual Effects Society Awards nominees showcased their prowess during Show and Tell 2007 -- essentially the VES counterpart to AMPAS' visual effects bake-off -- Saturday at Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

The event allowed the presenters to explain their work to VES membership before final voting. The Show and Tell also underscored industry VFX trends, notably the extensive use of synthetic environments and the creation of increasingly sophisticated digital characters. These trends were evident in the presentations of the nominees for outstanding visual effects in an effects-driven motion picture, which featured a behind-the-scenes look at the making of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Charlotte's Web" and "The Fountain."

Industrial Light + Magic visual effects supervisor John Knoll related that the big step in "Pirates" was the realistic performance of the CG Davy Jones and crew. This was accomplished using an ILM technique called iMoCap, which allowed the effects team to shoot and reproduce the actors' performances used as the basis for the CG characters on set during the actual shoot, rather than separately on a motion capture stage. Knoll also placed emphasis on digitally enhanced backgrounds, from Cannibal Island to the sea.

Visual effects supervisor John Andrew Berton Jr. described "Charlotte's Web" as a "tremendous example of how visual effects can be used most powerfully. The story could be told the way the author wanted it to be told. ... It takes place in a live-action world." He also said the digital characters, including the fully CG spider Charlotte, represented a "notable move forward in more realism in synthetic surfaces. The faces of the animals that speak are much more complex than they would have been previously. The animation was very subtle because it had to match the live action."

The team from "Fountain" described a massive compositing job to create painterly environments that began with the microphotography of Peter Parks combined with CG and practical elements. The goal was to create a unique "outer space" that looked timeless and served as the emotional core of the film.

VES members will participate in final voting for the VES Awards online from Monday-Feb. 6. The competition includes 21 categories for outstanding work in features, broadcast television, commercials, music videos and games.

The VES Awards will be presented Feb. 11 at the Kodak Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland, where the society also will bestow its lifetime achievement award on visual effects pioneer Dennis Muren.

The VES Show and Tell kicked off a big week for the visual effects community. AMPAS' bake-off is set for Wednesday. "Pirates" was the only VES finalist in the visual effects-driven motion picture category to also make the Academy's shortlist. The VES finalists do not typically mirror Academy Award nominees, though in three of the past four years the same film won each.

-thehollywoodreporter.com

Posted by dschnee at 11:08 PM

January 9, 2007

5th Annual VES Awards - Nominations List

Aruna was selected as a VES Judge this year! and recently attended voting at the screening facilities of FotoKem in Burbank, read all about his adventures here.

Charlotte's Web is up for 2 Noms! including:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
Congrats to Blair Clark! along with: Karin Joy, John Berton, and John Dietz

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture - for Templeton in Charlotte's Web
Congrats to Todd Labonte, Jason Armstrong, Sven Jensen, and David Richard Nelson!
-------
Los Angeles, January 8, 2007 - The Visual Effects Society (VES), the entertainment industry's only organization of visual effects professionals, today announced the nominees for the 5th Annual VES Awards recognizing outstanding visual effects in twenty-one (21) categories of film, television, commercials, music videos and games. Nominees were chosen on Saturday, January 6, 2007 by a panel of over eighty (80) visual effects professionals, all VES members, who viewed hundreds of entry submissions at the screening facilities of FotoKem in Burbank. The announcement was made by Eric Roth, VES Executive Director, who says "This year we had 30% more submissions than last year, and from seven different countries. Along with this growth, we've also seen our awards show grow in industry stature. It's very gratifying to know that companies all over the world want to get one of our trophies. Clearly, they see the value in getting VES recognition."

On January 13, 2007, the VES holds its heralded annual event - the VES SHOW AND TELL EVENT 2007 - which will afford an opportunity for VES nominees to demonstrate the secrets behind the visual effects "magic" that earned each artist a place for this year's awards. "The sophistication of the work increases constantly," says Jeff Okun, VES Awards Committee Chair. "We're now at the point where even the industry professionals can't tell what’s real and what's a visual effect. Our Show and Tell gives the artists a chance to show their colleagues and the public what the current state of the art is. I know I always learn something new at this event and that's what makes it vital to the concept of competing for awards. Our voters are educated."

The SHOW AND TELL EVENT 2007 is free to VES members and is also open to the public at $20 per ticket. Tickets to the event, which will be held at the Skirball Cultural Center, are available by calling the VES office at (310) 822-9181 or may also be purchased at the door. Final voting for all categories will take place via an online view and vote between January 22 and February 6, 2007.

Winners will be announced at the 5th Annual VES Awards gala on February 11, 2007 at the Kodak Grand Ballroom in Hollywood. Academy Award-winning visual effects pioneer Dennis Muren will receive the VES Lifetime Achievement Award. A complete list of all the nominees for the 5th Annual Awards follows and is also available on the VES Awards website at www.vesawards.com

The nominations are:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
Charlotte's Web
Karin Joy, John Berton, Blair Clark, John Dietz

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
John Knoll, Jill Brooks, Hal Hickel, Charlie Gibson

The Fountain
Jeremy Dawson, Dan Schrecker, Mark Soper, Peter Parks

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture

Blood Diamond
Jeffrey Okun, Thomas Boland, Tim Crosbie, Neil Greenberg

Children of Men
Lucy Killick, Frazer Churchill, Timothy Webber, Paul Corbould

Flags of Our Fathers
Michael Owens, Matthew Butler, Bryan Grill, Julian Levi

The Da Vinci Code
Barrie Hemsley, Angus Bickerton, Gary Brozenich, Paul Riddle
small
Children Of Men

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special

Fight Science
Mat Beck, Kymber Lim, Manny Wong, Jack Matsumomto

Nightmares and Dreamscapes - Battlegound
Eric Grenaudier, Sam Nicholson, Mark Spatny, Adalberto Lopez

The Hogfather - Episode 1
Oliver Money, Simon Thomas, Kim Stevenson, Stephen Jolley

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series

Battlestar Galactica - Episode 303b “Exodus”
Gary Hutzel, Michael Gibson, Alec McClymont, Brenda Campbell

Prehistoric Park - Episode 4
George Roper, Matt Fox, Laurent Hugueniot, Kevin Spruce

Smallville - Season 6, Episode 1 "Zod"
Mat Beck, Brian Harding, Trent Smith, John Wash

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program

Alias - Reprisal/All the Time in the World
Kevin Blank, Jay Worth, Steve Fong, Kevin Kutchaver

Commander In Chief - EP 112 “The Wind Beneath Her Wings"
Mark Kolpack, Adam Ealovega, Mark Spatny, Mike Enriquez

ER - Scoop and Run
Sam Nicholson, Scott Ramsey, Adam Ealovega, Anthony Ocampo

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial

Rexona - Go Wild
Andy Boyd, Stephane Allender, Dan Seddon, Abby Orchard

Sears Tools - Arboretum
Rich Rama, Cedric Nicolas, Laurent Ledru

Travelers - Snowball
Dan Lemmon, Eileen Moran, R. Christopher White, Paul Story

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Music Video

Killers - Bones
Chas Jarrett, Dave Child, Paul O'Shea, Andrew Bell

U2 and Green Day - The Saints are Coming
Matt Winkel, Mark Glaser, Wayne England, Graham Fyffe

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year

Children of Men - Birth Sequence
Tim Webber, Lucy Killick, Andy Kind, Craig Bardsley

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
John Knoll, Ned Gorman, Jakub Pistecky, Tom Fejes

Poseidon
Boyd Shermis, Rhonda Gunner, Kim Libreri, Philippe Rebours

X-Men: The Last Stand
Eric Saindon, Cyndi Ochs, GG Heitmann, Roger Shortt

Outstanding Real Time Visuals in a Video Game

Assassin’s Creed X06 Trailer
Jade Raymond, Nicolas Cantin, Raphael Lacoste, Christophe Martin

Fight Night Round 3 for PS3
Sjoholm Christopher, Kat Kelly Hayduk, Hilson Rob, Jepson Celia

Outstanding Pre-Rendered Visuals in a Video Game

Assassin’s Creed E3 Trailer
Jade Raymond, Thomas Giroux, Raphael Lacoste, Anne Mai Le Bouyonnec

Hellgate: London 2006 - E3 Trailer
Tim Miller, Jerome Denjean

Warhammer Fantasy
Tim Miller, Jerome Denjean

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project

Fields of Freedom
Sam Nicholson, Scott Ramsey, Adam Ealovega, Jon Craig

Greece, Secrets of the Past
Craig Barron, Ken Rogerson, Glenn Cotter, Chri Evans

Roving Mars
Alan Markowitz, Dan Maas, Jeremy Nicolaides, Johnathan Banta

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture

Charlotte’s Web - Templeton
Todd Labonte, Jason Armstrong, Sven Jensen, David Richard Nelson

Charlotte's Web - Wilbur
Grant Adam, Daniel Fotheringham, Avi Goodman, Paul Buckley

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest – Davy Jones
Steve Walton, Jung-Seung Hong, Marc Chu, James Tooley

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture

Cars - Mater
Larry The Cable Guy, Mike Krummhoefener, Tom Sanocki, Nancy Kato

Monster House - House
Umberto Lazzari, Mike Kimmel, Kui Han Lee, Owen Demers

Happy Feet - Mumble’s Banishment
Damien Grey, Tim Gibson, Carl Prud’Homme

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video

Battlestar Galactica - Episode 217 "Downloaded"
Ryan Cronin, Louie Hinayo, Andy Asperin, Trevor Adams

Dr. Who - Episode 2, Series 2
Nocolas Hernandez, Jean Claude Deguara, Neil Roche, Jean Yves Adouard

Geico - Chat
David Hulin, Seth Gollub, Andy Walker, Jenny Bichsel

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture

Mission: Impossible III
Russell Earl, Richard Bluff, Giles Hancock, Dennis Martin

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Chris Stoski, Susumu Yukuhiro, Jack Mongovan, Greg Salter
Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Motion Picture

Poseidon
Mohen Leo, Daniel Pearson, Willi Geiger, Matt Brumit

Outstanding Created Environment in a Live Action Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video

Coke - The Greatest Gift
David Hulin, Nathan Hughes, Jenny Bichsel, Andy Walker

Elisabeth - Episode 1
Dave Bowman, Jimmy Kiddell, Russell Horth, Gurel Mehmet

ESPN - Monday Night Football Remote Open
Luke McDonald, Danny Braet, Minory Sasaki, Josh McGuire

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Motion Picture

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Bruce Holcomb, Ron Woodall, Charlie Bailey, Carl Miller

The Good Shepherd
Matthew Gratzner, Forest Fischer, Enrico Altmann, Leigh-Alexandra Jacob

V For Vendetta
Jose Granell, Nigel Stone

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Broadcast Program

Battlestar Galactica - Season 2, Episode 218 "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"
Steve Graves, Jose Perez, Mark Shimer, Chris Zapara

Commander In Chief - EP 112 "Air Force One"
Mike Enriquez

Dodge - Fairy
Matthew Gratzner, Forest Fischer, Jon Warren, Scott Schneider

Outstanding Compositing in a Motion Picture

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Eddie Pasquarello, Francois Lambert, Jeff Sutherland, Tory Mercer

Poseidon
Pat Brennan, Mark Hopkins, Nelson Sepulveda, Mark Nettleton

The DaVinci Code - Saint Sulpice Sequence
Mathew Krentz, Jordan Benwick, Enrico Perei, Rafal Kaniewski

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program, Commercial or Music Video

Battlestar Galactica - Season 2, Episode 218 "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"
Lane Jolly, Don Kim, Matt Smith, Chris Zapara

Coke - The Greatest Gift
Murray Butler, MaryAnne Lauric, Nathan Hughes, Pedro Sabrosa

Sports Heaven
Geoff McAuliffe, Yafei Wu, Robert Sethi, Jimi Simmons

Travelers - Snowball
Laure Lacroix, Lyse Beck, Steve McGillen, Matt Holland

Outstanding Special Effects in a Motion Picture

Casino Royale
Chris Corbould, Peter Notley, Ian Lowe, Roy Quinn

Superman Returns
Neil Corbould, David Brighton, David Young, Robert Higgie

Posted by dschnee at 6:24 AM

January 2, 2007

Top 10 F/X Scenes in Movie History

This is from popularmechanics.com
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Today, many digital effects are so subtle that movie audiences often don't notice them — but it wasn't always so. We asked industry insiders to pinpoint the biggest breakthroughs in digital F/X history.

BY Erin McCarthy
Published in the January, 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics

Click here for the list...

1. STAR WARS (1977)

2. TRON (1982)

3. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991)

4. CLIFFHANGER (1993)

5. JURASSIC PARK (1993)

6. FORREST GUMP (1994)

7. THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

8. LORD OF THE RINGS (2001)

9. THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)

10. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004)

What are your thoughts?

Posted by dschnee at 9:32 PM