December 10, 2009

Head of the Pack with CG Wolves

CGSociety :: Production Focus

As the New Moon rises, so do the stars at Tippett Studio. Charged with creating the Quileute Wolf Pack for the Twilight sequel, some of the industries leading character artists sunk their teeth into just under 60 shots ranging from three to twelve seconds that were pivotal to the storyline. And those shots are getting noticed.

Wolf Mountain and Frankenwolf
The challenge wasn't just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren't distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art Director, helped to make sure those requirements were fulfilled, combining real-world attributes and CG magic.
"At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable."

In Lucerne Valley, there is a sanctuary called Wolf Mountain where a dedicated group is trying to save wolves from extinction. This is where the Tippett artists traveled to spend personal time with the wolves, many tame enough to be approached and touched by strangers. There the artist could observe behaviors, pack interactions, hierarchy behaviors, and movement, and "closely examine the fur and its different lengths over the body, the coloring variations and markings, as well as the structure of the face, eyes, teeth and so on."

The trip was extremely fruitful, but Phil Tippett, with his honed eye for perfection, added a second method to study fur under different controlled lighting and wind. "We had a bunch of photographs of wolves that we were studying but Phil was insisting that we take it to the next level and have something to touch, walk around, and actually do your own," explained Fredenburg. This resulted in the creation of what became affectionately known as the "Frankenwolf".
Tippett bought wolf pelts and cut them up with an Exacta knife and pasted it onto a taxidermy blank "so that we could do a lighting lab in two conditions? controlled lighting on our stage where we could shine very specific lights and look at how the fur responded, then we took it outside on an overcast day, which was perfect for New Moon. We came up with strategies for how to artistically make the wolves look better in flat lighting, which is what we were dealing with and is a very difficult lighting situation."

For the full article visit CGSociety: Tippett Studio Jumps to the Head of the Pack with CG Wolves a Howling Success

Posted by dschnee at 9:10 AM

December 1, 2009

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Teaser Poster

Posted by dschnee at 11:08 PM

November 30, 2009

New Moon Box Office Update

The Twilight Saga: New Moon collapsed in its second weekend, as expected after the fan frenzy of its first weekend, but still narrowly led Thanksgiving weekend with $42.9 million for a whopping $230.9 million total in ten days.

Running on the sheer momentum of its massive opening, New Moon soared past the $200 million mark on its eighth day of release and, in the process, eclipsed predecessor Twilight, which had a final haul of $192.8 million. That, of course, also made it the biggest vampire movie on record, but it did fall 70 percent, the steepest second weekend Thanksgiving drop ever surpassing Twilight's 62 percent, and, by shedding nearly $100 million from one weekend to the next, it had the largest decline ever in terms of gross. The first Twilight, though, regained its bearings later in its run, ultimately holding up well for its genre.

(boxofficemojo.com)

Posted by dschnee at 10:52 PM

November 27, 2009

Modern Mages: Phil Tippett Interview

Posted by dschnee at 10:39 PM

November 26, 2009

New Moon' shines on special effects innovator

Special effects innovator Phil Tippett worked with some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s - including "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Jurassic Park."

But even those enormous hits didn't come close to last weekend's $142.8 million opening for the "Twilight" sequel "New Moon," with its snarling visual-effect wolves that were animated at the Berkeley-based Tippett Studio.

Tippett, whose creations include the AT-AT snow walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back" and the ED-209 robot from "RoboCop," took a break from working on the movie version of "Eclipse" (next in the "Twilight" series) for an interview in his conference room - surrounded by models, memorabilia and movie posters associated with the films he's worked on over the past three decades.

Q: Which movie had tighter security on the set, "Return of the Jedi" or "New Moon"?

A: For "Return of the Jedi," I was totally oblivious to all the fandom. I didn't notice anything, and most of the work was done on pretty secured sets. For "New Moon," it was unbelievable.

It was like a CIA operation. Some of the locations we would go to, the production would be so concerned about fooling the paparazzi, they would take the arrows pointing to the location and turn them the other way. We were actually getting lost.

Q: Did you do much wolf-related research for the movie?

A: We nailed it down early that these were not going to be traditional beast-y horror movie things. ... We watched a lot of documentaries and looked at every single picture book out there on wolves.

My co-supervisor, Matt Jacobs, took a bunch of the art department and animators to a wolf preserve outside of Los Angeles. They got into a pen about the size of this room with about 10 wolves and just spent the afternoon with them.

Q: This sequel was made in less than a year. Was your workload insane?

A: It was actually kind of fun. ... It kind of harked back a little bit to the Roger Corman days. With the vast amount of money these things make, we don't get paid much - and the speed with which you work, you have to rely on your skill and just get it done.

That's actually a lot more of a creative kind of milieu to work in as opposed to these hundred-million-dollar movies, where there are 50 executives worried about everything.

Q: What's your favorite Roger Corman memory?

A: I was working on "Piranha" and we were shooting all this mayhem, with all these swimmers. Dailies would go back to Los Angeles and Roger would call.

Joe Dante, the director, would be on the phone saying, (sounds exasperated) "OK ... OK ... OK, Roger ... fine, Roger ... OK, fine, thanks." After the conversation was over, we would immediately ask what Roger wanted. Joe would say "He just said 'more blood.' " He wanted more blood on everything.

Q: What's the last movie you've seen with no special effects or visual effects in it?

A: I don't think they make them anymore. Probably "The Informant," although I bet you there were visual effects and I just didn't notice it. I thought that movie was terrific.

Q: Is there a movie that you did good work on that no one talks about?

A: Probably "RoboCop 2," which was a terrible movie doomed from the very beginning, but I look back fondly now because it was the biggest stop-motion (film) since "Mighty Joe Young" in terms of number of shots and complexity. And Craig Hayes' design was so cool.

Q: You have the full-size ED-209 in one of your warehouses. Has anyone offered to buy it?

A: Some British group came by and wanted to buy a bunch of stuff. And I actually thought about it for 20 minutes. It was a lot of money.

Q: And you didn't do it?

A: No. It's my junk. Plus, if it's worth that much now ...

(sfgate.com)

Posted by dschnee at 10:21 PM

November 25, 2009

Why cloudy days are no good for the werewolves of 'New Moon'

Patrick Kevin Day spoke with effects legend Phil Tippett about creating the werewolf effects for "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," (and no, we're not talking about Taylor Lautner's supernatural 16 pack). You can read his previous Scene Stealer interviews and Liesl Bradner's Wizards of Hollywood series right here.

Darkness may be a visual effects artist's best friend, but his biggest enemy isn't bright sunlight -- it's the overcast day. So adding all those CG werewolves to scenes shot in cloudy Vancouver, Canada, was a particular challenge for "New Moon" visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his team. "On a sunny day, you get really nice contrasts, but with flat lighting and a furry thing -- the fur really soaks up the light and everything appears flat," Tippett said. "So to make it appear three-dimensional, we had to goose reality. We emphasized their shadows and used rim lights" to make the wolves stand out from the background. But that's not the only way Tippett and company played with reality. When that wolf checks out Bella, it's not a wolf's eyes, it's Jacob's. "We brought Taylor [Lautner] in and had him haul his eyelids back as far as possible and shot close-ups." They then added those eyes to the giant animated timber wolf used in the scene.

(latimesblogs.latimes.com)

Posted by dschnee at 10:31 PM

November 23, 2009

A New Moon for Twilight

(from a larger awn.com article) Meanwhile, Tippett Studio did 60 wolf shots, with five different characters, broken up into four sequences (under the supervision of Phil Tippett with Matt Jacobs serving as co-supervisor).

"The werewolves are kind of the sentinel protectors of the area," Tippett explains. "And there's nothing from the werewolf mythology of the past: it's a curse of responsibility as the indigenous people of this country. But this gave us a chance to continue doing the dance with the talking, furry animals. So getting these wolves to behave and be lit and act in a convincing manner was our task here. These things are not the classic beasty werewolves, either. They're Timberwolves that are scaled up to be the size of the horse. One of the biggest tricks was to logistically turn a 6-foot tall guy into an 8-foot-long, 1,200-pound wolf. And there are three of these transitions in the movie. Surprisingly, we figured it out early enough.

"We engineered the performances of the actors and their pantomime leading up to the explosive moment because it's anger that motivates these people to actually shape shift into werewolves -- and it has to happen quick and everyone was on the same page with that. The only design adjustment was Chris wanted to have the eyes of the actors in the wolves' heads instead of the very distinctive, golden, wolf eyes."

Tippett additionally worked on what MacLeod calls the "vampire speed" effect, which involves the vamps running at superhuman speeds. "What we decided to do, based on some tests that we did," McLeod explains, "was to shoot any vampire in motion, as light would allow, up to 90 frames-per-second. And then we would take that into the Avid and manipulate that, come up with a speed ramp and then potentially enhance that with some post processing.

"That's where Tippett's effects came in for about a dozen shots we decided to do as a post effect. We did a little bakeoff and had a couple of companies do a test and Tippett had a good-looking test and we went with them. It was based on a happy accident that happened when they did a varied speed for the trailer shot, actually. They ran a Shake script that had a bug in it and the render came back and had an interesting liquid, transparent effect that happened to Taylor's body that resonated with Phil and Matt and they sent it to me. It was the visual equivalent of the sonic boom, in mind, where the person is moving faster than the camera can pick up.

"Then we had a recipe of stuff that did with vampire speed: we shot them stacked because we found that foreground trees were helpful, so with the wolves, we added some foreground CG trees passing by; and, for the actress running through the woods, we shot her long lens with real trees in the foreground; and a few whip pan effects. The challenge was the wolves, so we tried not having wolves and vampires running in the same shot because that would necessitate either seeing the wolves running in slow-motion or speed up the vampires so that they're running at least as fast or faster than the wolves, but that looks silly, so when we ended up having wolves and vamps in the same shot, we used that Tippett post effect."

(awn.com)

Posted by dschnee at 9:45 PM

November 22, 2009

How Animators Tackled Werewolf Transformations in New Moon

To create an all-new form of werewolf transformation for The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which hit theaters on Friday, VFX house Tippett Studios turned to R&D, 3D scans—and real-life wolves.
By Erin McCarthy

In most werewolf movies, men endure a bone-cracking, skin-splitting transformation from human into wolf. But in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, male members of the Native American Quileute tribe—descended, according to legend, from wolves—phase into horse-size wolves by popping out of their skin. And that posed a unique challenge for Phil Tippett, founder of Tippett Studios, which created the werewolves. "We characterized it as the ‘5 pounds of crap in the 2-pound bag' problem," he says. "How to get a 160-ish-pound guy to turn into a 1200-pound wolf is a trick."

To pull off this bit of movie magic, VFX artists first took 3D scans of the lead werewolf actors, including Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob, and Alex Meraz, who plays Paul. "I was expecting to be in a green suit, with little pins everywhere," Meraz says. "They just had me stand on an apple box, and this big machine came up, down and over. I could watch on the monitor and my whole body was right there onscreen, a perfect scan of it."

The phasing that turned men into 1200-pound wolves was, naturally, one of the first things on the VFX artists' agenda. "The conceit for the transformation, for making the trick work, was that it had to happen quickly," Tippett says. "Our technical supervisor, Erin Boreland, came up with a system for this phasing, which she banged out in a couple of weeks. Everybody was surprised—we thought that would take months to hammer out."

Next, animators had to create the wolves. After determining what the wolves weren't—"beasty werewolf/wolfman-type things," Tippett says, "but timber wolves the size of horses"—animators had to think about conquering the uncanny valley, which occurs when something looks close to its real-life counterpart but not exactly alike, causing a feeling of uneasiness among viewers. "A lot of times, we're dealing with fantastic creatures, like the Cloverfield monster," Tippett says. "When you're doing something like that, you can get away with murder because nobody's ever seen it. But if you're doing a wolf … the audience has seen enough canine behavior to know if you make a false move. It stands out. So we immediately said, ‘We had better understand what timber wolf behavior is.' "

They started with research, analyzing documentary footage of timber wolves and reading books on wolf anatomy. But they didn't stop there. "Animators and guys from the art department went to a wolf preserve outside of Los Angeles," Tippett says. "Our guys got into a big cage with a bunch of wolves and spent the afternoon with them!" The animators filmed video of the wolves jumping, running, playing and fighting. The research helped them build computer models of the wolves from the inside out, starting with rigged skeletal systems that could move, then overlaying them with flexing muscles and, finally, layers of skin and fur.

Director Chris Weitz also wanted the wolves to have the eyes of their human counterparts. "There are a couple of extreme closeups of Jacob's wolf's eyes with Bella (Kristen Stewart) reflected in them," Tippett says. Eyes, which have to emote, are notoriously difficult to realistically pull off, so VFX artists got reference directly from the source. "When we were on the set, we got a closeup-lens camera and we asked Taylor to pull back his eyelids as far as he could stand to do and went in for a couple of closeups. That's what we used as a model for Jacob's eyes."

Key to the transformation was the action that came directly before it, so VFX artists worked closely with director Weitz and actors Lautner and Meraz to determine what that action would be. Both of Lautner's transformations happened in the air; for one, the actor was lifted 10 feet off the ground by wires, where he had to freeze in position so VFX artists could later replace him with the digital doppelgänger from his scan that would transform into the wolf. In another scene, Meraz's character, Paul, phases after Bella slaps him. "We spent some time working out the very precise level of pantomime that Alex [Meraz] would have to do," Tippett says. "It was very key into getting into the move that would allow us to make the transition into the wolf." On set, filmmakers used wolf stand-ins—stuffed figures and cardboard cutouts—to give both the actors and the animators a point of reference. Fur pelts were used to help animators determine what the lighting was so they could light the digital fur similarly, helping the CG wolves fit seamlessly into the scene.

Eventually, it was time to combine the elements. For the first transformation—when Meraz phases—"his body sort of goes out of control," Tippett says. "Then he recoils and springs out. And at that point we began to take over his forward momentum as the wolf. We had to make a digital model of Alex [using the 3D scan] that would allow for the in-between stages and, for lack of a better term, morph between the wolf shape and the human shape." The wolf head pops out first, then the rest of his body. His clothes are destroyed. "His trousers get torn off in a PG kind of way," Tippett laughs. "He's more wolf than human by that time." The entire transformation takes about half a second.

Aside from creating the transformation, the biggest challenge for the animators was making the wolf fur look realistic. "Our art department just spent months getting the fur groomed and painted and working with the animation," Tippett says. "The effects animation team spent months working out the dynamics of the fur [using in-house fur-simulation tools] so it wasn't stiff. In once scene, Jacob [as a wolf] ends up on a cliff overlooking the ocean on a stormy day, and all the trees in the background are blowing around—so all the fur has to blow around. Dynamically, figuring all that stuff out is really tricky."

Tippett's next challenge is tackling Eclipse, the third film in the Twilight series, which filmed almost immediately after New Moon. Tippett's digital wolves have several big fight sequences in the film. "It's huge," Tippett says. "We're ramping up on it. We're just starting to get shots now."

(popularmechanics.com)

Posted by dschnee at 1:35 AM

November 21, 2009

Another New Look for Tippett Studio

Tippett Studio has performed another overhaul from their previous website, and also showcases our 25 Years Logo.

Check it out @ www.tippett.com

New Moon currently takes center stage on the main page, lots of clips and content to browse through, and the quotes from the "Phil Says" section is sweet!

Posted by dschnee at 7:46 AM

November 20, 2009

New Moon is Released!

in the USA 1 November 2009

visit Twilight Saga: New Moon @ imdb.com

Box Office Results November 20-22, 2009
Number: 1
Opening Weekend Gross: $142,839,137
Theatres: 4,024
Theatre Average: $35,497
Weeks in Release: 2
Total Gross: $233,334,668 Million
Budget: $50 Million
Running Time: 2 hrs. 10 min.
Distributor: Summit Entertainmnt
MPAA Rating: PG-13

New Moon dawned with a hot-blooded estimated $140.7 million on approximately 8,500 screens at 4,024 sites over the weekend, charting as the third highest-grossing opening behind only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3 and the biggest of 2009. With the advent of New Moon, not to mention an excellent showing by The Blind Side, overall business surged 56 percent over the same weekend last year when Twilight and Bolt debuted and was the second-highest seen in history, behind the weekend that The Dark Knight opened.

$26 Million on the Thursday night Midnight showing alone...New Moon shattered the midnight opening record, raking in an estimated $26.27 million at 3,514 sites showing the movie starting at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

It sold a mind-boggling $80 million worth of tickets on Friday, according to preliminary estimates. That way surpasses the one-day record of $67 million set by "The Dark Knight'' last year.

BoxOfficeMojo.com's "Twilight Saga: New Moon" Statistics

Posted by dschnee at 6:31 AM

Shamless New Moon Plug

Posted by dschnee at 1:26 AM

November 19, 2009

Meet the Creator of Taylor Lautner’s Hirsute Alter Ego

Animation pioneer Phil Tippett knows a thing or two about creating movie monsters. His Berkeley, Calif.-based company, Tippett Studio, has conjured up creatures that run the gamut from the destruction-bent monsters in “Cloverfield” to the gluttonous rat Templeton in “Charlotte’s Web.” So when “New Moon” visual effects supervisor Susan MacLeod needed an fx house to step in and create the hulking werewolves in “New Moon,” the second installment of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” saga, which opens in theaters tomorrow, she knew whom to turn to.

Marching orders for Tippett’s crew consisted of creating wolves that looked realistic — well, as realistic as horse-sized timberwolves can be — but also stayed true to Meyer’s book, with each wolf’s distinguishing characteristics intact. (Alpha male Sam is the largest and has black fur, while others sport different colored coats.) “We approach all of these characters from cradle to grave,” said Tippett, who said his team researched wolves’ physicality before starting, with some animators crawling around with the fanged beasts at an animal preserve.

The company is responsible for making suggestions during the storyboarding process, being on set to monitor production and making sure everything’s shot properly — and then overseeing post-production, to make sure the color is being corrected. Given the frenzy surrounding the “Twilight” franchise, has Tippett heard from any extreme fans, either to praise to lash out?

“To be honest, the fans haven’t been on my radar,” he said. “We went directly from shooting “New Moon” to [third installment] ‘Eclipse.’ The studio is making these thing so fast, with such a quick turnaround.” In fact, Tippett said “New Moon” is the first film he’s ever worked on that was done start to finish in one year. “When we were halfway through the visual effects on “New Moon,” we started pre-production on “Eclipse.” Our heads are still spinning.”

And speaking of “Eclipse,” does new director David Slade differ in his approach to wolves than “New Moon” director Chris Weitz?

“Having a new director makes a huge difference,” said Tippett. “Chris was a more classically-oriented flimmaker. David comes from rock videos, so his temperament is more visceral and fast-paced.”

(blogs.wallstreetjournal.com)

Posted by dschnee at 12:18 PM

New Moon Biggest Premiere in Hollywood History?

The consensus from Tippett and the gang that went down for the premiere was that it was the biggest premiere in Hollywood's history, with more people coming out than in the great hay day of Hollywood with movies like Gone With The Wind...

An estimated 3,000 screaming fans were present. Some traveled from as far away as Canada, Minnesota and Florida to catch a glimpse of the New Moon stars. But even the uninvited came out in droves. Thousands of screaming fans holding signs and snapping pictures crammed the sidewalks hoping for a glimpse of their favorite fang-toothed characters.

Again, Online ticket sellers Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com reported this week that "New Moon" is their biggest advance ticket seller of all time.

Hollywood watchers think vampire romance "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" could take a nearly $100 million bite from movie theater box offices when it debuts this weekend, and score one of the biggest openings ever for a non-summer film.

Only 29% Rotten on rottentomatoes.com but is anyone expecting an Oscar from this one? ;) They will still come out in droves to see this thing... Tonight's are company screening, and I'll post something tomorrow about the event.

Consensus: The Twilight Saga's second installment may satisfy hardcore fans of the series, but outsiders are likely to be turned off by its slow pace, relentlessly downcast tone, and excessive length.

Posted by dschnee at 7:24 AM

November 16, 2009

"New Moon" Tops Pre-Ticket Sales

Tonight's the Premiere in LA, Thursday we have our studio's screening, Friday this damn thing will is released... and all the team Jacob, team Edward fans will go ape shit... I don't know that I've worked on a film that this many people will go and see... possibly King Kong, but I'm thinking this one will be more nuts.

Five days before its US domestic release, "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" has become the top-selling pre-release title in online ticketing provider Fandango's ten-year history.

The film, which is currently taking in 86% of weekly ticket sales on Fandango, has beat out "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", "The Dark Knight" and the first "Twilight" film in terms of pre-sales.

Thousands of Thursday night midnight showtimes for "New Moon" are already sold out across the country. The question now is what will the opening weekend be? The film is set to easily smash both the $35.9 million opening day and $69.6 million three-day opening weekend of the first film. By how much is the question.

(darkhorizons.com)

Posted by dschnee at 10:01 AM

November 10, 2009

New Moon "Battle" TV Spot

features even more of our wolf shots... great to see, but they show too much. ~enjoy

Posted by dschnee at 10:01 PM

November 6, 2009

Monster-maker rises to 'New Moon' challenge

Phil Tippett talks 'Twilight' werewolves
By DAVID S. COHEN
'New Moon'

After a long career creating creatures, Phil Tippett still enjoys sinking his teeth into new challenges like 'New Moon's' furry werewolves.

Master creature-maker Phil Tippett has been hard at work on the "Twilight" franchise, especially the werewolves for the upcoming "New Moon," which have proven especially challenging.

"A lot of the stuff we're shooting is in the worst conditions possible for computer graphics," he says. "The skies are overcast, so the lighting is very flat. Unlike something like 'Transformers' or 'District 9' where you have a lot of light kicking off hard-shell candy surfaces, we have ... wolves (with) fur, and fur soaks up light."

The "Twilight" pics are being made at a breakneck pace, with post on one overlapping shooting on the next. But even scrambling with the second unit to make their daily quota, says Tippett, "We just have a blast. We call it doing the Vulcan mind-meld thing, where we're reading each others' minds because we're working so fast."

Tippett gained fame among "Star Wars" fans for his "go-motion" animation for "The Empire Strikes Back" (Remember the Imperial Walkers?), then won an Oscar for "Return of the Jedi."

In 1984, he opened his own shop, Tippett Studios. He switched to digital vfx, won a second Oscar for his digital dinosaurs on "Jurassic Park," and is still going strong as he celebrates his studio's 25th anniversary.

"I never imagined I'd be around this long," Tippett says, "but I did imagine, as a kid growing up in Southern California, that I would have my own visual effects studio in Berkeley, because that's where I was born and that's where my extended family was."

As for his work on "Twilight," Tippett can only smile. "Everybody tries to have fun," he says. "I hope that leaks out on the shots."

(Variety.com)

Posted by dschnee at 10:03 PM

October 30, 2009

"The Wolf Pack" Featurette

With Tippett Snippetts... nice.

Posted by dschnee at 12:47 PM

October 24, 2009

Snuffleupagus

Check out this new version of our Jacob transformation shot... hah, love it, final.
"You do not want to be on Sesame Street when there's a full moon" -Jimmy Kimmel

Posted by dschnee at 6:46 AM

October 23, 2009

New New Moon TV Spot

Is pretty much a Tippett Show Reel, check out our work over at Fandango it includes a number of our Jacob wolf shots and some vampire speed!

Posted by dschnee at 6:18 AM

October 13, 2009

Got Busy? New Moon Updates + Eclipse

It was summertime, new amazing baby, new projects around the house, leading on a super busy new project, and now some fantasy football action has left little to no time for meyemind updates... basically the website had to take backseat as life's been riding shotgun, but I'm slowly going to start rolling out some new and old updates, mostly related to New Moon, but some Drag Me To Hell stuff too, same old whatever the hell project I'm working on related plugs, ;)

I'm onto the next one, Eclipse, the third book/movie in the Twilight Saga, nearly finished shooting, currently in pre production(in house), and soon to be full on into shot production once again! Only this time I'll try and carve out some update time.

Posted by dschnee at 10:32 PM

July 24, 2009

Busy, Busy on New Moon, Panel at Comic-Con 09

We've been cranking on New Moon wolvery for some weeks now, it's been a crazy fast paced schedule, and that's not going to let up anytime soon but were chugging along quite well considering... We got our first handful of finals last week, with another giant handful hopefully early next week. I can't really say much more, but the work is looking pretty good.

The Twilight fans had a chance go geek out at Comic-Con 09' with this year's panel focused on New Moon, you can check out all of that coverage with video and such right here.

See Also: 21 Qs With 'New Moon' Director Chris Weitz

"When we were on set and talked to the producer, he was like, "Yeah, we’re still working on some of the designs for the Wolf Pack," then I think it was two weeks or three weeks later we saw the first trailer and that great shot [of the wolf] at the end. Is this the quickest you’ve ever worked?
CW: It is. I myself was surprised that Phil Tippett’s company was able to turn out that wolf shot. And I think they kind of did that as a matter of institutional pride that they could. Even that shot that was in the trailer has gone through 20, 30 iterations since then, but they have done a really extraordinary job. Phil Tippett is a complete genius. He was responsible for the walkers in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, and he’s kind of one of the legends of the visual effects community. And it has been really amazing what they’ve been able to do on very short notice.
"
" Tippett is going to do the wolves for Eclipse, so there’s a continuity in terms of the look of the werewolves and obviously the cast is going to remain the same. "

New Moon will hit theaters November, 20th

TWILIGHT FAN GIRLS IN SAN DIEGO - Most camped out overnight. Some spent two nights outside the San Diego Convention Center. They wore homemade T-shirts, made friends with fellow fans and talked about their allegiance to Team Edward or Team Jacob.

They are the "Twilight" fangirls, and they came to Comic Con by the thousands to see the movie’s stars in person at a panel Thursday for the film’s sequel.

Director Chris Weitz was joined by Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Kristen Stewart and Ashley Greene.

High-pitched screams drowned out the introductions.

Those same shrill screams (of joy) also threatened to overwhelm the dialogue during the clip filmmakers showed.

The clip shows Jacob (Lautner) teaching Bella Swan (Stewart) how to ride a motorcycle, but she’s distracted by visions of the vampire Edward (Pattinson) with whom she fell in love. She crashes, and Jacob takes off his shirt to soothe her wound, provoking more fangirl screams. Lautner famously gained more than 20 pounds of muscle since for the role.

Pattinson, who was greeted with adoring screams when made his Comic Con debut with "Twilight" last year, said the event was "an eye-opener, and it’s just gotten bigger and bigger since."

"None of us saw it coming," Lautner added.

"It’s a little overwhelming to have so many people here," Stewart said, "but I guess it’s a good thing."

Posted by dschnee at 5:54 AM

June 19, 2009

Visual FX from HELL

//:fangoria.com

One of the most memorable aspects of the much-loved (by both critics and fans) but sadly underseen DRAG ME TO HELL is the ending of Sam Raimi’s supernatural thriller (SPOILER ALERT: that conclusion will be discussed heavily in this piece, with photos from the sequence—so if you haven’t seen the film yet, read no further). Even if you see it coming, as some people have claimed to, it’s a hell of a note to end on, and has sent audiences out buzzing.

When it came time to bring this finale to the screen, Raimi (who also scripted the Universal release with his brother Ivan) looked to Academy Award-winning visual FX house Tippett Studios (CLOVERFIELD, BLADE II, STARSHIP TROOPERS), which also ended up contributing to the opening sequence and the moment in which heroine Christine (Alison Lohman) snorts and swallows a fly. Matt Jacobs, who has been at Tippett for 13 years now and served as co-visual FX supervisor on the project, found DRAG to be anything but one. “I was a huge fan of Sam Raimi’s pictures, like ARMY OF DARKNESS and the other EVIL DEAD movies. I didn’t actually realize when we were working on it, until we actually got to see it at the premiere, just how much DRAG ME TO HELL was like those films.”

It was actually DRAG ME TO HELL 2nd-unit director Bruce Jones who led the production to Tippett, as he also supervised the digital assignment alongside Jacobs and Thomas Schelesny. “[Jones is] somebody we’ve worked with often here in the past,” Jacobs explains. “He has produced shows for Tippett Studios and he knows what our strengths are. DRAG ME TO HELL needed rather large sequences—we did about 40 shots in total. There were a lot of elements that went into them. He wanted to come to us because we’re used to dealing with elaborate scenes like that.”

And elaborate that final setpiece is, as Christine, who has incurred the wrath and the curse of an aged gypsy woman (Lorna Raver), meets the fate promised by the movie’s title on railroad tracks. Jacobs explains just how much went into creating that one last spine-chill, between coming up with a visual scheme and crafting the precise moments that occur within it. Tippett Studios didn’t rely solely on pure CGI, but blended practical (including actors and a miniature) and digital elements to create the best look they could, each picking up where the other left off. “That was shot mostly against a greenscreen, after Christine falls back on the tracks,” Jacobs explains. “There were train tracks built, and actors with monster arms on who actually reached up and grabbed Alison. We ended up augmenting those arms, which were made out of rubber, and color-correcting them, as well as adding CG arms we built to augment the effect, trying to have more of them clutch at her at certain cues. And we also had to find a way to make the practical arms look longer. We ended up having limb extensions that kind of looked like burning stumps. They basically resembled charcoal in red-hot light, and could really extend out of the environment so we wouldn’t have the truncated arms just end.”

The detailing didn’t end there, as Raimi’s overseeing of the FX sequences involved specific notes about when and where everything should take place. “He definitely knows the picture he wants to make, and he’s got a really good memory for what he has shot and what was in each take,” Jacobs explains. “When we were making Christine’s skin look like it was peeling and blistering at the end, he had a definite idea of how much of the actress he wanted to see. He wanted her to look affected, but also very recognizable. A lot of the other back-and-forths between production and the visual effects department had to do with editorial decisions, such as, ‘What’s the proper time for him to come up and grab the girl?’, or when the effects should actually turn on in that whole ending sequence. There were certain cues that we had to address. When the train comes by and streaking over Christine’s head, Sam wanted to see her at certain phases of her desecration, so the train actually became a device to create this staccato effect over her. He had definite input on what those beats should be, and that rang true of the work we did for the entire picture.”

That’s not to say that Jacobs and his crew, including lead compositors Jonathan Knight and Joseph Bailey, animation supervisor Tom Gibbons, set constructors Andy and Bart Trickel and lighting TDs Jim Aupperle and Larry Weiss didn’t make their own creative additions to the film. “We heard that part of the effect of Christine and Juan [the boy who suffers a fiery fate in DRAG’s prologue] being dragged down would actually involve seeing into hell, so instead of going with a digital approach and doing a matte-painting type of thing, which is industry standard these days, we went for building a miniature,” Jacobs reveals. “We had some model-shop people come here to the studio and help us build a stage where we could shoot practical elements like that. We shot the miniature, supervised by Lorne Peterson, and that went into all the shots where you see down into hell, which was supposed to look like an infinite cavern with white-hot embers and fire, to give the impression that she’s really getting dragged down into an inferno.

“We used the RED hi-def camera [provided by Miguel Ortega, one of Tippett’s modelers] to shoot it,” he continues, “and that was great, because it gave us flexibility and more rapid feedback on what we had just shot. And we also shot some high-speed elements—mostly fire and smoke—which we filmed at several hundred frames per second. Using that made the flame effects actually look bigger. That was one of the more interesting parts of working on the picture, being able to shoot a miniature.”

The blending and cooperation of CGI and physical FX is heartening to hear about at a time when there still seems to be a struggle (and debate in fan circles) between the two approaches. Jacobs, a compositing artist for many years before becoming a supervisor, weighs in on the subject: “Well, there’s a time and a place for everything. And some things you can’t do practically all the time, especially today with the rapid turnarounds. Most of the talent pool these days is in the computer graphics side, and there are fewer people who have the knowledge of how to build and shoot a miniature and other practical effects. The design that goes into doing those two types is different, and so the talent pool for doing that kind of work has changed. To paraphrase somebody who was talking about this, there’s a certain sense that digital/visual effects look right but practical effects feel right, and that’s why you get away with a lot more when you actually shoot something practically. You know it’s a real thing. And the digital side—not to hate on it myself—sometimes suffers from being computer-generated. You’ll buy a lot when it’s actually shot with a camera.”

Jacobs and his team are currently firing away at their next gig: providing the look of the werewolves in this fall’s highly anticipated NEW MOON, the next film in the TWILIGHT saga, in which he says the creatures will be purely CG. For now, he takes pride in his talented crew’s fine DRAG ME TO HELL efforts, which take a step in the right direction of warming fans’ hearts toward the use of digital elements in genre cinema. (fangoria.com)

Posted by dschnee at 6:39 AM

June 13, 2009

Drag Me To Hell FX Guide Rundown

For the Hell sequences in Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, Tippett Studio augmented miniature photography with various digital elements. Visual effects supervisor Matt Jacobs gives Ian Failes a run-down of Tippett's work for the film. (fxguide.com)

fxg: Can you give me an overview of your work for the Hell shots?

MJ: Tom Schelesny and I were the visual effects supervisors for Tippett Studio on the project. Tippett worked on two major sequences in the film. One was the opening sequence of the little boy who has been cursed and is dragged into Hell. Most of that work was doing augmentations to the set. Hell starts to open up and the earth cracks. We had to add light rays, smoke, embers and fire. In one shot, which didn't actually appear in the picture, there was a demon - this creature called the Lamia which resembled a goat and had a Hag's head. That was actually a shared model with other facilities that was given to us. We had to do some work internally for our Lamia shots, using shaders. It was basically taking this grand hall that the kid was in, cracking the earth as he is pulled down to Hell, while this gypsy woman watches. So there were several shots of the kid and then a couple of reverses of the woman trying to take the curse off of him.

fxg: What was the other main sequence you worked on?

MJ: It was the end of the movie, when the girl, Christine, is dragged to Hell. She thinks she is free of the curse. She and her boyfriend are going to take some sort of train trip. She gets to the train platform, and (this is a bit of a spoiler) comes to find out that she in fact hasn't because of this button her boyfriend produces. She realises that she hasn't passed on the curse to someone else because of the button and what the button actually means. So she falls onto the train tracks. We did a large set extension there. The train itself, the train station, and everything other than the girl and an eight foot square of railroad is a massive set extension. So the train is bearing down on her and at the same time the demons from Hell come to drag her down there.

Bruce Jones, the studio visual effects supervisor and producer on the film, shot Christine on a greenscreen stage with a section of train track inside of a trough. He had some actors with green coverings on and rubber arms that they used as demon arms to reach out and drag her down to Hell. We did some augmentation for the set and for the rubber arms, trying to make them look a little less rubber and little more demon-like.

We also shot a Hell miniature here at Tippett. Lorne Peterson, who used to be with the ILM Model Shop for 30 years, came over to help us out. The look that they wanted for Hell was a massive cavern. So the miniature involved a bunch of stalagtites hanging down. It's supposed to be a white hot core, almost completely blown out to the point where we're supposed to see the stalagtites, but it has the heat of Hell. So when we filmed the miniature we filmed with a lot of smoke elements and lighting passes. We had a couple of different kinds of smoke and we also used dry ice. Electric fans were used to try and get different characteristics like wafting out through the hole. We also tried different tricks and lighting scenarios on the miniature to give different rim light effects.

For the miniature shoot, lighting of the miniature was handled by Jim Aupperle, a lighting TD here at the studio with extensive experience in lighting practical and miniature visual effects. Andy Trickel and Bart Trickel wrangled set construction, lighting and grip. The miniature was supervised by Lorne Peterson. The RED camera was provided to us by Miguel Ortega, a Tippett Studio modeler and independent filmmaker.

We added fire and embers and smoke to the shots. We also added a lot of heat distortion ripples, which were basically just a warp effect. Those were the principal elements that went into making Hell. We put those underneath the train tracks. There's a whole idea that as Hell opens up, the rocks underneath the train track are pouring down into Hell. This is like a hole that opens up, demon arms reach up to grab Christine, fire's shooting out, embers are going everywhere and there's heat distortion.

Then, eventually, the hole closes up and the rocks begin piling back in on themselves as the train passes by. Christine turns into what we called the 'Desiccated girl'. It involved adding cracks and fissures to her face and then giving that to the compers to manipulate even further to make it feel like she was really drying up. Then in one of the last shots in the movie, you see her all dried up. Her skin's peeled back and her hand has turned into more of a husk. She's dragged down into these rocks and she disappears forever into Hell.

fxg: It sounds like there was a nice mixture of practical and digital effects.

MJ: For us, we wanted to use the miniature so we could have something photographic in our pocket as opposed to using just a CG approach. That gave us the ability to photograph this thing and immediately have something. It meant that everybody knew what we were making. To paraphrase someone else, there's this idea that while CG stuff might look right, photographed things feel right. It made more sense for the number of setups we had to do, for the time we had to do it in and the resources that were available to us. It was actually a really great experience to be able to work with some of the people like Lorne Peterson on making a miniature.

We were building this thing and dressing it to camera, as opposed to what you would do in CG. You know, 'What's the back of the cave look like?' Sometimes things get overbuilt in the CG world. We really just built what we needed. We've got a stage here at Tippett, with lights and the right gels and the smoke machines and the ability to film these elements here. It made perfect sense for us to go with that approach, as opposed to building it digitally and then wondering if it was going to look right.

fxg: It's great to hear that miniatures are still being used.

MJ: They get used a lot more than people think. I mean, Kerner Optical's up here in the Bay Area. They're still busy right now and we've worked on projects with them. Of course, Phil (Tippett) goes back to the days of ILM, so he's got a lot of relationships with people at Kerner. It opens us up to using those people's talents and their knowledge for what we're doing. It's not just locked into doing everything by modelling it digitally and then rendering it and all that stuff. Like I said, the photographic stuff just feels right.

fxg: What did you shoot the miniature with?

MJ: We used the RED camera to shoot the miniature. It was great because we were able to have instant feedback on what we were shooting. We shot a lot more footage than we ended up using, which was nice. The resolution was helpful too. We prevised out pretty well the dimensions of what we needed to build and the scale of it. That was an interesting process, again, to take what we knew we had to build in the computer based on our matchmoves to the plate and realise that we had to build everything down to one-fifth scale. We worked back and forth between the computer and what we had built on stage. When we brought the footage back into Shake, everything was lining up pretty well. You push and pull things a little bit, or you scale things up a little, but most of the footage dropped in relatively quickly in the comp.

fxg: What tools did you use to do the fire and smoke effects and the molten rocks?

MJ: We ended up shooting a bunch of high-speed fire elements with a Phantom camera. I think it was over 100 frames a second on most of the stuff to reinforce the scale and slow down the fire to make it look like it was travelling further. We did the same thing for the smoke elements for the miniature. We shot these mostly at 50 frames per second on the RED, and that way the smoke had the appearance of a larger scale. For the fire elements, once we'd filmed them at a higher rate, it was up to the compers to corner-pin, track them in and make them work for the shots. For the rocks, we mostly used nParticles which is Maya's newer particle simulation tool. Lead compositing was done by Jonathan Knight and Joe Bailey. Tom Gibbons supervised animation on the project, and Larry Weiss was the lead lighting TD for all of our CG assets.

fxg: What were some of the bigger challenges on this show?

MJ: Probably the biggest impact for us was editorial decisions, on what beat certain things might have to happen. The pace of the picture, and the pace of the end sequence really drove it. It was all about performance beats. That could even come with some of the elements we were putting in the shots - when a railroad pipe broke, when you saw fire, when you saw a CG hand come up and grab Christine. Those sorts of things were driven more by editorial to enhance the cut. (fxguide.com)

Posted by dschnee at 6:05 AM

June 9, 2009

NEW MOON Trailer Sets New Record Online + Reaction

Seth Meyers needs to weekend update with this shit, Really!?! Seriously, "the trailer views on MySpace set a new record for the site with a total of 4.2 million online views within the first 24 hours and a total of 7.8 million within the first seven days", wtf, really?

Film's First Movie Trailer Receives 10.6 Million Online Views in its First Week Through Launch Partners MySpace and MTV

LOS ANGELES, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The movie trailer for Summit Entertainment's THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON received 10.6 million online views in its first week from the trailer's domestic launch partners, MySpace and MTV. The trailer views on MySpace set a new record for the site with a total of 4.2 million online views within the first 24 hours and a total of 7.8 million within the first seven days. After being seen by 5.3 million viewers during its broadcast debut during the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, the trailer also received a total of 2.8 million online views on MTV.com within the first week.

The achievement is not only a record for MySpace, but also surpassed the views of the third and final trailer for the first film TWILIGHT, which received 3.2 million views in its first 48 hours online.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, and directed by Chris Weitz will be released November 20, 2009.

Posted by dschnee at 10:51 PM

June 7, 2009

Drag Me to Hell: Tippett Enjoys the Ride

Matt Jacobs of Tippett Studio divulges what it was like opening up hell for the new Sam Raimi shocker. Includes major spoiler images.

Beware: Major Spoiler Images Included Below

There was no kicking and screaming to entice Tippett Studio to work on the two hellish set pieces for Drag Me to Hell, director Sam Raimi's return to horror about a loan officer (Alison Lohman) cursed by an old woman after not getting her an extension on her mortgage.

"We did not have much direct contact with Sam Raimi (Bruce Jones, the overall visual effects supervisor, served as liaison), but this was a lot more fun to work on because I'm such a fan of Evil Dead and Army of Darkness and horror overall," admits Matt Jacobs, Tippett's visual effects supervisor on Drag Me to Hell.

"And now that I've seen it, I realize what a return it is to those pictures," Jacobs offers. "But Raimi is particular about what he wants and has a real sense of where he's going. I'd say one of the more interesting aspects of it was editorializing the effects: the beats that we knew to hit…"

The "drag me to hell" sequences Jacobs refers to consists of a floor opening up at the beginning and a child being grabbed by demonic arms; and a train mowing someone down at the end and, again, the person being pulled down by the same demonic arms.

"The most interesting thing we did on the show," Jacobs continues, "was we built a miniature for the shots where we're looking in hell instead of using a digital approach because of the resources we have here at the studio, and we incorporated the help of some of ex-ILM model builders. So we went about building a small prop -- these stalactites looking down into hell and it went underneath the train track. We also used it for the opening sequence when this boy is dragged into hell. And it was a good approach. We used the RED camera and we shot it here at the studio. And it actually made getting the hell look a lot more direct and a lot faster, I think, than going through the usual computer CG pipeline because when you shoot a miniature, you're a little more locked in to what you're doing -- it's more of a calculated approach."

When we shot the miniature, we pulled out our smoke machine and our lights and we dramatically lit it, we backlit it, we ran multiple passes of different types of smoke and then we relied on old comping tricks and brought those different passes back in and mixed them, moved them against each other and tried some remapping to reinforce the scale. And we used different elements to create this hell hole."

Of course, CG also figured prominently in the two sequences. It can be seen in the opening encounter with the creation of fissures in a marble floor along with some fire and ember elements. The whole aspect of opening hell up with the fissures, according to Jacobs, was so you would see the face of the rock underneath. Then there was a miniature shot down into hell. The opening of hell was subsequently blocked out in animation.

The end sequence, meanwhile, was comprised of everything in Tippett's arsenal. "We did a lot of set extensions shot on a greenscreen stage with a small bit of track. We used photographs of a train station that were provided to us, we created a CG train, train track extension, background, the other platform, photographic elements of other people on the platform that were provided to us, which we had to comp into the shot, and then there was this whole aspect of hell breaking open. For that, we did pretty extensive dynamic simulation of the bed of rocks that lay around the ties on a railroad track. And those had to be pouring into hell the entire time, so we used Maya's nParticles for that. We created CG demon arms that looked like the rubber arms used on set.

"One thing we did also to augment the rubber arms used on set because they looked truncated. So we went in and matchmoved those arms, we did some color correction to bring them down and look more demonic and then added a glowing stump to give it some visual interest and make it blend more into the background."

Oh, yes, Tippett also created a rather bothersome fly in CG: "Those were a little more complicated matchmoves and getting the fly to look right was a challenge. We did one shot, in particular, where the fly actually comes in and lands on the camera and we rack focus to the fly and rack away. It was fun to bring down the wall and see the fly interact with the camera."

(VFXWorld.com)

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.

Posted by dschnee at 9:35 PM

June 1, 2009

New Moon Trailer + 1rst Day Back

So you can actually watch something in good quality on youtube now? I'm into that, here's the New Moon Teaser Trailer shown on the MTV Movie Awards last night...

OK, as of today, I'm now officially and fully on board working on the Untitled Sports Movie, aka whatever, it's New Moon! I've been out since the first week of April on baby duty while my wife needed to return to work for a short time. It's been amazing having so much time with the little man, seeing him grow and change so much in such a short time, I'm very fortunate. I'm also super excited to be back at work though, went a little stir crazy? you bet'cha.

Anyhow, lots of work to be done, enjoy the animated gif some fangirl created, it's our shot from the teaser trailer, a solid delivery of our transformation and cg wolf, don't fret, it's gonna be bettah! :)

Your thoughts on our CG Wolf and Transformation?

Posted by dschnee at 9:05 PM

May 29, 2009

Drag Me To Hell is Released!

in the USA 29 May 2009

visit Drag Me To Hell @ imdb.com

Box Office Results May 29-31, 2009
Number: 3
Weekend Gross: $16,628,000
Theatres: 2,508
Theatre Average: $6,630
Weeks in Release: 1
Total Gross: $28,534,000 (Domestic Total as of Jun. 7, 2009)
Budget: low
Running Time: 1 hrs. 39 min.
Distributor: Universal
MPAA Rating: PG-13

UP floated to the top with 68.2 million this opening weekend, despite all the positive reviews (93% Fresh / 83 on Metacritic) Drag Me To Hell only dragged $16.6 million worth of souls into the theaters, we'll see if word of mouth keeps or breaks DMTH's box office curse...

BoxOfficeMojo.com's "Drag Me To Hell" Statistics

Posted by dschnee at 8:22 AM

New Moon Trailer will Debut at the MTV Movie Awards

Why is this exciting? Well we put together a shot for the trailer... We hope the MTV/Twilight kids will dig it.

So the premiere of the 'New Moon' trailer will air on the MTV Movie Awards, sometime around 9:00 pm ET on Sunday. Then at 10:45 p.m., the high-definition video will debut online.

MySpace Movies announced they’ll be premiering the trailer on Sunday, May 31st at 7:45pm PT / 10:45 ET. bleh, get it on apple.com/trailers

Posted by dschnee at 7:37 AM

May 26, 2009

Drag Me To Hell Screening

Who said being cursed and punished, gummed and punched multiple times by an old mysterious gypsy women isn't a great time? Mrs. Ganush made Drag Me To Hell for me one hell of a time!

I won a couple of tickets to an advanced screening of Drag Me To Hell from HorrorYearbook.com. It was a fan and press event at the Metreon in San Francisco. Pretty much packed full and the crowd was really into it, lots of energy with lots of people jumping, shrieking and laughing.

I had a blast, plenty of 'ohhly shit' and great 'haha, no way' moments when that feeling of fright and startlement rushes over you, even if you tried to look away, the sound elevates with so much intensity, your heart can't help but race until the pay off hits!

Drag Me To Hell is a simple fun thrill ride that takes us along this 3 day curse set against a young women working as a loan officer at a local bank. Her choice to make the tough decision denying another extension for an elderly women's mortgage, (in hopes to gain a promotion) as a result a dark curse is brought forth brutally by the old 'gypsy' women. Alison Lohman who plays the loan officer Christine Brown, did a good job, she was fun to watch. It's pretty much non stop awesome once she enters the parking lot to leave for the night... the gypsy women is there waiting for her and all hell breaks loose!

Our work held up pretty well (low budget style), we book ended the movie with the visuals in the very first scene with the boy being 'enter movie title here', and the final sequence at the train station. We also did a handful of shots with the pesky fly, it all looked great. I don't want to ruin anything from the movie, so I won't talk about any of the shots I worked on, but at some point I will...

fantastic thrill ride, loved it, and proud to have been able to work on it!

Drag Me To Hell opens this Friday, May 29th, definitely check it out!

Ohh BTW, curently Dragged has a 94% Fresh Tomatometer Reading, nice.

Posted by dschnee at 11:57 AM

May 20, 2009

Economy hits high-end VFX, Studios Concerned

VFX cuts may affect upcoming films...
Visual effects now vie with stars as box office draws in summer tentpoles. But a possible shortage of visual effects shops could be a brutal blow to the next wave of f/x-heavy tentpoles.

Studios depend on outside vfx shops to deliver ever-larger amounts of first-class work on ever-shorter schedules. Some leaders of the visual effects business, both at vfx shops and at studios, are warning there could be a shortage of vfx capacity within a year -- a shortage that could drive up costs and even threaten release dates.

The combination of Hollywood's production slowdown and the recession have already driven some California vfx shops out of business, with more threatening to shutter.

Warner Bros. exec VP of digital production, animation and visual effects Chris de Faria says his studio is taking the threat so seriously, "We're looking at advancing R&D and development work on projects, and the corresponding cash flow, to make sure that some of our valued vendors can get through this time," he says.

Here's the dire scenario: As pics now in production wrap, vfx work slumps, killing off more midsized and small vfx companies. Then a new wave of tentpoles arrive, wanting more and bigger vfx, only to find insufficient capacity to complete them at the breakneck pace -- and with the sometimes huge last-minute additions and changes -- the majors now favor.

When this scenario may play out is the subject of some debate. Some expect the crunch to come late this year. Recently, though, tentpoles including Warner's "Green Lantern" and Marvel's "Thor" have been pushed back. That could push the potential crisis back to 2010 but may actually make things worse, as it means the lull would last longer.

"The studios need to be concerned about this," says Industrial Light & Magic exec producer for marketing Gretchen Libby. "Their options could start to run out for finishing their projects. There could be fewer companies that can help out at the 11th hour."

Underlying this warning is the fact that vfx shops are under financial pressure from several directions.

They were hurt by the prolonged slowdown after the WGA strike and prolonged SAG talks, then hurt more when production financing dried up, exacerbating the slowdown.

Even in the best of times, feature vfx aren't lucrative for the companies that make them despite their importance and the typical tentpole's huge f/x budget. As de Faria notes, "The feature film business, for most vendors, can be a boom or bust business. It's glamorous, and it's work done at the highest level, but it's hard to survive just on that."

Many shops rely on commercials to provide an extra revenue stream. The recession, however, sent commercials production off a cliff.

Jeff Barnes, co-founder and executive producer of CafeFX, has been warning of a crunch for some time, as he sees some of his competitors, such as the Orphanage, shutter for good.

His own company dropped benefits and cut costs to stay afloat, and he warns that other vfx shops will need to restructure as well. In the short term, says de Faria, "The question I have is not where am I going to get the work done; it's where am I going to get the high-level work done -- the ground-breaking work that can be the center of a marketing campaign."

Many companies can do low-end work, with more springing up all the time worldwide. There is also no shortage of companies that the studios trust to do a modest amount of high-end work. French shop Buf and Germany's Pixmondo fall in that category.

There are only about a dozen companies in the world that can handle the large number of shots with digital characters and other complex effects in today's tentpole pics -- the kind of work that concerns de Faria.

London, which has become a world center of vfx due to favorable exchange rates and tax incentives, is booked solid for at least a year, according to multiple sources. Projects looking to save money on vfx no longer have that option.

Universal, for example, is looking for cost savings on the vidgame-based actioner "Bioshock." It might have gone to London but the project is now on hold.

Marvel has "Iron Man 2" in production now and three big vfx tentpoles on its slate for the next few years: "Thor," "Captain America" and "The Avengers." They could be affected should capacity get tight, but Victoria Alonso, exec VP of visual effects for Marvel Studios, is confident that, even after a contraction, the vfx industry can bounce back to meet the challenge.

"If you have a company that's shrunk, that means they will find it internally to grow again," she says. "I've seen that happen at every facility I've worked with."

Barnes agrees that shops have no choice now but to expand and contract, but he and others counter that rapid expansion can lead to quality control problems, as people who have never work together adjust to a new company while trying to meet tight deadlines.

Alonso says another solution lies in finding smaller companies anywhere in the world that have a specific skill set, then putting them to work on a contained sequence that uses those skills. The Embassy, she says, had done robots on a short film, so it got the job of doing the "Mark I" suit for Iron Man.

Ironically, when the next big wave of work arrives, vfx companies that are still standing stand to do well. There will be lots of work, and simple supply and demand could lead to higher-than-usual margins for long-suffering feature vfx companies.

"We might get a fair rate for the work for a change," says Barnes.

By DAVID S. COHEN (variety.com)

Posted by dschnee at 3:55 PM

May 19, 2009

New Moon Teaser Poster + USM?

So this is the teaser poster for New Moon aka Untitled Sports Movie or as the kids on the street like to call it 'USM', this was the title they were using during the shooting of principal photography, and now that's a wrap. The cat was out of the bag back in February. Were still calling it USM at work, but were working on New Moon. I'll be the lead compositor on the project, and I officially start work on it June 1rst, all though I've been on the project since April. (I've been on paternity leave playing Mr. Mom with my new son!) At this point, I'm ready and excited to really get going on it, there's going to be some great wolf work ahead... in the meantime here are some New Moon tid bits.

See Also: First New Moon Footage @ the MTV Movie Awards

Footage from the Twilight sequel will be shown for the first time during the upcoming MTV Movie Awards.

An action-packed, minutelong clip from Twilight showing Edward battling bad-boy bloodsucker James (Cam Gigandet) made its debut at last year's awards. It was also the first time Pattinson and Stewart walked the red carpet together in support of the movie.

"Fans can tune in to the show to see sneak peeks from three of the most highly anticipated movies of the year," Burnett tells me. "These clips have never been seen before, and we're very excited that The Twilight Saga: New Moon is one of them." (eonline.com)

See Also, Also: First Official 'New Moon' Movie Trailer Releases on Aug 14
Sounds like it's set to be shown in theaters during the previews before this new family, musical, movie, thing "Bandslam" (trailer) which is due out on August 14,2009.

Lastly,
Summit Entertainment has announced that the studio will present The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the San Diego Comic-Con:

On Thursday, July 23, Summit Entertainment will hold a panel for THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. Come see our stars and exclusive new footage for THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON — there may be even be a surprise or two in store!

Posted by dschnee at 7:14 AM

May 13, 2009

Drag Me To Hell Updates

Drag Me To Hell is featured in FANGORIA #283 May 2009 - (Out Now!)

Sam Raimi Interview, Drag Me To Hell (moviesonline.ca)

New Clip: Sam Raimi's 'Drag Me To Hell' (cinematical.com)

Finally, a handful of gents from the studio (Tippett) were invited to the Drag Me To Hell Premier last night in Hollywood (Grauman's Chinese Theatre)

"Oh yeah! The movie was great. Our stuff, although very quick, looked great and fit into the story really well. Our work both set up the story from the first minute and closed the movie in the last, which was awesome." -jKnight

Nice one, I'm looking forward to it!

See Also: dragmetohell.net has been updated!

Posted by dschnee at 6:53 PM

May 5, 2009

Even Nice People, Can Go To Hell

dragmetohell.net is live
Not much to it yet,
Story | Trailer | Gallery
and some links to facebook/myspace, still though, ~enjoy

http://www.dragmetohell.net/

On May 29th, EVEN NICE PEOPLE,
CAN GO TO HELL.

Posted by dschnee at 9:54 AM

May 3, 2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Reviewed

So I went out to breakfast with some good friends of mine, and after some discussion, we decided to up and go see Wolverine this afternoon... I read the script many months ago and my feeling was that of a good solid action piece, something fun and entertaining, but no real depth, not much origin focus, no true Logan character development. They say a movie is made 3 times... once when it's written, once when it's filmed, and once again when it's all edited together. So I let the script slip away from memory and kept a little hope along with me as we worked on the post production.

I watched the leaked copy last month, and I wasn't impressed, I didn't hate it, but I didn't like it at all. I was very interested in seeing how that end cooling tower sequence ended up though, and to be fair, even your favorite movies looked rough at a work print stage, so seeing the finished product vs the work print is something that should to be done.

Now as far as a finished piece is concerned vs the work print, they pretty much pulled it off, sure there were a handful of really bad VFX work, but the rest of it was pretty tight and came together nicely. In particular was the that cooling tower sequence at the end... what can I say, considering I know what they had to work with, with those horrible plates, with the time constraints, again, they pulled it off, and in that respect I was impressed. At least I think this was the case, now that I think about it I found myself looking at the tower itself 90% of the time... :) So I'd have to watch it again to see how it all really looked and felt, how did you all feel about the look of that sequence?

I was excited to see they 'did' indeed use the 5 shots I was able to complete when young Scott Summers is beside Diamond Girl. Summers removes his eye cover and blasts the soldiers behind the windows with his laser beamage right before the end battle vs Deadpool. I worked pretty hard on those, so it's nice for use to have something in there despite how things ended up. I think they also used another of our shots when young Scott Summers is being chased by Creed in the high school, he jumps and spins with his beam tearing through the hall. So by my count, they used 6 Tippett shots in the film but no credit to this shall to be found.

As for the story, I really wished they would have focused more on developing Logan's character, rather than a sequence of events to shallowly tell the tale, take some time and reveal the true nature of who Logan is and how he becomes the Wolverine. I don't know, in an origin story you just might want to tell the us about his mutant healing factor and how it works, maybe touch upon his acute sense of smell, sight, and sound... ohh yeah, and those bone claws of his?

All and all, It in now way comes close to 'The Dark Knight' territory, not nearly as effective as 'Iron Man', but it's not 'Daredevil' either.

Maybe someday a great director will take on 'Wolverine' leaving behind any crappy 'X-Men Origins' setup the next film / slash spin-off angle of the bangle...

Posted by dschnee at 9:18 PM

May 1, 2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not a Wolverine film

This pretty much sums up my sentiment as well, nicely done Elisabeth.

by Elisabeth Rappe May 1st 2009 // 8:02PM

I don't care what's in the title. I don't care that the hero sports muttonchops and adamantium claws. He isn't Wolverine. Any resemblance he has to the Marvel character or the snarling beast Hugh Jackman played in X-Men 1, 2, and 3 is entirely coincidental.

It really hurts to say that. I love this character, and I know Jackman loves the character. I know he loves the fans, and he wants us to be happy with his work. He has gone on record as saying this is the Wolverine film he always saw in his head. But did he really see something so clunky and milquetoast as this?

Logan is a man constantly at war with himself. His gruff exterior hides a man who can be gentle, who enjoys the beauty of the Canadian Rockies and the simplicity of a Japanese tea ceremony. But he also possesses the animal senses and brute force that makes him willing to kill if threatened. He doesn't enjoy killing, he's often haunted by the blood he's shed, but it's his grim destiny.

He's also a guy who has been truly dealt a crappy hand. Everything he loves is taken from him. He's been betrayed and tortured, and he's lost his mind on more than one occasion. But he deals with it by fighting the good fight, and indulging in a cold beer if he's got a chance. None of this makes him particularly complicated for adapting to the big screen. If anything, he's been done a million times before. He's Charles Bronson, he's the Man with No Name, he's Martin Riggs, Harry Callahan, and Bud White.

With a million comic books, three films, and a ton of inspiration before him, this should have been easy. Instead, this is a film that treats a motorcycle jacket as a Tremendous Moment, one that's bigger than a child's discovery that he's packing a pair of bone claws. This is a hero who is more daunted by air travel than the adamantium bonding process. When you prick him (or in this case, slash him) he doesn't even bleed. Our hero looks around with anguished eyes, he suffers nightmares, he assures us that he's "been through worse," and he probably has somewhere in his long life, but it certainly isn't in this film.

Now, I tried to remove myself from the comics and see this through fresh eyes. I tried to pretend the rapid pacing was a homage to comic panels. I told myself that whatever moment Gavin Hood was racing the film towards might actually be worth it. But there's no master plan here. Instead, they just filmed whatever they wanted, crammed it together, and called it a film. There's no point to any of it. It's like looking through a Viewmaster. Click, Wade Wilson. Click, Team X. Click, Gambit. Now you're at the end of the disk. There's not even mindless spectacle. It's just random and useless to establishing anything except a Deadpool spinoff. (Seriously, this isn't Wolverine's origin story, it's Deadpool's.)

You'd think they could have at least rewatched the X-Men films they were making an "origin" story for. Wolverine was pretty well established in the X-Men films, especially in X2. There we see the gory Weapon X scene and it was gorgeously done. In five minutes, we know that Wolverine has been traumatized, and that those claws are alien to him. He's in pain, he's bleeding, and he's desperate to get away from whoever has done this to him. Origins ignores that. Now, he's just angry and cold, but he is fully aware of the procedure he just underwent (after all, he volunteered for it) and he knows he has adamantium claws. In fact, he thinks they're pretty terrific. I refuse to call that nitpicking, or the complaint of a "difficult" fan. If you're going to mess with the comic mythology, fine, but at least honor what was already established onscreen, if only so you don't have to invent the stupidest memory-loss MacGuffin ever to rectify it. (Oh and for those who remember my Weapon X piece, the way they handle the "volunteering" is worse than I feared. But that I'll freely admit is fannish nitpicking.)

There's so much potential here – and anyone with a faint interest in the material could have exploited it. Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool was a stroke of genius, and the few minutes he's on screen convince you this film will be worth your time. Liev Schreiber is a fantastic Sabretooth despite his lousy motivation. When the sloppy story actually allows Jackman to be Wolverine, he's as good as he's always been, especially when onscreen with Schreiber. I long to see these two actually go head to head as Sabretooth and Wolverine. There are flashes of true cutthroat savagery between them, but it's purely accidental. They're like outtakes.

Whew. I apologize for writing such a rant, believe me, it was so much more poetic when I started writing. But you know, I could have forgiven a lot if it had just done right by the Old Canucklehead. I went in with very low expectations. As someone who reads anything with Wolverine in it, I'm already fairly easy to please when it comes to the character. He just has to show up most of the time, and I enjoy it as the pulpy stuff it is. So, I could forgive goofy dialogue, I could forgive the sloppy action, I could forgive an awkward story and pointless cameos. Just give me the guy who tries to forget his animal side, and carves his and his girlfriend's name on a tree. When that is taken away show me the man who, when taunted by an adversary, sticks his claws under the guy's chin and pops them. Give me the hero whose claws hurt every time they pop out through his skin, but who grimly unsheathes them anyway. That is the mutant they call Wolverine ... and he's not anywhere to be found in this movie. (cinematical)

For more punishment, See Also: /Film's What Did You Think?

Posted by dschnee at 7:45 PM

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is Released!

in the USA 1 May 2009

visit X-Men Origins: Wolverine @ imdb.com

Box Office Results May 1-3, 2009
Number: 1
Weekend Gross: $85,058,003
Theatres: 4,099
Theatre Average: $21,225
Weeks in Release: 1
Total Gross: $160 Million
Budget: $150 Million
Running Time: 1 hrs. 47 min.
Distributor: FOX
MPAA Rating: PG-13

$35 Million on Friday night alone...

BoxOfficeMojo.com's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" Statistics

Posted by dschnee at 7:03 AM

April 30, 2009

Ohh Wolverine Why???

So what the heck, FOX SUX, you have marketed the shit out of this movie, you are said to distribute multiple secret endings on different prints and theaters, so you will be showing different versions to boost geekple ticket sales, Rotten Tomatoes currently meters you at %35 (22% Top Critics) and metacritic at a mere 42, so the reviews are bad bub! Yet, with this film you will probably take in $80 million even after the big 'workprint leak' with well over 1 million + downloads, what a mess. I don't like it, I don't like you, are our shots in the final cut? who knows, who cares, We'll never get credit for it anyhow.

Kindest of Regards,

Ohh yeah so, X-Men Origins: Wolverine hits theaters tomorrow... good luck with that.

P.S.
"I have been powerfully impressed by film versions of Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man and the Iron Giant. I wouldn't even walk across the street to meet Wolverine." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

Posted by dschnee at 9:43 PM

April 16, 2009

Principal Photography has begun on 'New Moon'

SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT STARTS PRODUCTION ON THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON

Los Angeles, CA April 15, 2009 — Principal photography has begun on Summit Entertainment's THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON, it was announced today by Erik Feig, Summit's President of Production. Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner reprise their roles as Bella Swan, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. Academy Award-nominee Chris Weitz (THE GOLDEN COMPASS, ABOUT A BOY) is the director. NEW MOON is filming on locations in Vancouver, BC and Tuscany, Italy.

Also rejoining the movie are Ashley Greene as Alice, Peter Facinelli as Carlisle, Elizabeth Reaser as Esme, Kellan Lutz as Emmett, Nikki Reed as Rosalie, Jackson Rathbone as Jasper, Edi Gathegi as Laurent, Rachelle Lafevre as Victoria and Billy Burke as Charlie Swan.

New cast members include the legendary Volturi, a venerable coven of vampires who weigh and impose the laws of the vampire world, as well as two new members of the Quileute Indian Nation. The Volturi include Charlie Bewley as Demetri, Jamie Campbell Bower as Caius, Daniel Cudmore as Felix, Christopher Heyerdahl as Marcus, all Volturi enforcers. Dakota Fanning plays Jane, a high ranking and powerful Volturi member and Cameron Bright is Alec, her brother. Noot Seer plays Volturi member Heidi. Michael Sheen plays Aro, the Volturi leader. Graham Greene appears as Harry Clearwater, Quileute tribal leader and old friend of Bella's father Charlie. Tinsel Korey is Emily, the fiancé of Sam Uley.

In NEW MOON, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is devastated by the abrupt departure of her vampire love Edward (Robert Pattinson) but her spirit is rekindled by her growing friendship with the irresistible Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). Suddenly she finds herself drawn into the world of the werewolves, ancestral enemies of the vampires, and she finds her loyalties tested.

Jamie Campbell Bower was last seen in Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd" and is the lead singer of the band The Darling Buds. Daniel Cudmore played Colossus in the "X-Men" films, "X2" and "X-Men: The Last Stand." Dakota Fanning was last seen in Summit Entertainment's sci-fi thriller "Push" and provided the lead voice in the animated feature "Coraline." Graham Greene earned an Academy Award nomination for his work in "Dances With Wolves," and has appeared in such films as "The Green Mile," "Die Hard: With A Vengeance" and "Transamerica." Chrisopher Heyerdahl has appeared in such films as "The Chronicles of Riddick," "Catwoman" and "Blade: Trinity." Tinsel Korey has worked on numerous films and television shows, from "Into The West" to "The Lookout," opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt. She is also a singer/songwriter. Vancouver-born Noot Seer began modeling at age 13 and has lived in New York, Barbados, Guyana and New Zealand. She was a champion horseback rider prior to her modeling career. She made her film debut in the comedy "Head Over Heels," starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Monica Potter. Michael Sheen last starred opposite Frank Langella in Ron Howard's film "Frost/Nixon," and played Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair to Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth in "The Queen." The award-winning actor was recently seen in "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans."

Posted by dschnee at 10:47 AM

April 15, 2009

Drag Me To Hell UK Quad + International Trailer

In Cinemas May 29th, 2009
This trailer is awesome.

Posted by dschnee at 8:54 PM

April 9, 2009

Wolverine Workprint Downloaded Over 1 Million Times!

"Fox's leaked copy of Wolverine has been downloaded over one million times in the past week, according to BitTorrent news blog TorrentFreak."

Yeah it has... I say god damn. Have you seen it? What did you think? If you have seen it, will you go see it in the theaters?

"It has the early cut of "Wolverine," without special effects or final music, ranked at no. 1 on its download chart. PirateBay, the world's top directory for downloads from the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol, has "Wolverine" ranked at no. 6. It's the only film on any of the charts that hasn't yet been released.

Fox has certainly been diligent about trying to minimize the damage. It is issuing takedown notices to any websites it finds linking to a BitTorrent download, though as TorrentFreak notes, "new ones are already uploaded before the requests are processed." And of course Fox News columnist Roger Friedman apparently lost his job for reviewing the pirated version of the film (meaning he also downloaded it... uh oh).

In a sense, though, all that may be victory enough for Fox. The fact that links to the movie aren't exactly stable and nobody in the mainstream media dare touches a pirated copy means the leak should be limited to those who are already active in the piracy community.

And will it keep them out of theaters? Not if a highly unscientific survey is to be believed. TorrentFreak has received 6048 responses to its poll asking "Will the ['Wolverine'] leak hurt the movie's success?" of which only 392 people replied, "Yes, I will download it and won't it in the theater / on DVD."

Sure, there's no reason people have to be honest in an online poll. But there's no reason not to be honest either. If anything, the piracy community is famous for wanting to thumb its nose at Hollywood as much as possible. So if only 6% of them say the leak has hurt "Wolverine's" business prospects, Fox might just be OK." (Variety.com)

Posted by dschnee at 4:03 PM

More Wolverine TV Spots

Seems like there still using some of our work, especially the Scott Summers laser shots, I have a good feeling those are going to be in the movie... sadly no one at Tippett will get any credit for it though.

In Spot #8 "Sit up and take off those glasses!" then two of my finaled laser shots, "That's cool." yeah, that's pretty cool.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - TV Spot #8

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - TV Spot #9

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - TV Spot #10

Posted by dschnee at 1:11 PM

April 7, 2009

Bedtime Stories DVD Released!

Ohhh Bugsy why...

Bonus Features:
"In "It's Bugsy" we meet the three guinea pigs used to film the part of Bugsy, the guinea pig with googly eyes. He's really one of the stars of the film, so it was fun to see behind-the-scenes footage of the actors with the guinea pigs. (Having had a guinea pig in the past, I was impressed that the sounds made by the animated version and the real version all sounded very realistic.)" -Fitz (blogcritics.org)

Live a little... grab your copy of Bedtime Stories (2 Disc DVD + Disneyfile) | Bedtime Stories (Plus Standard DVD + Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]

Posted by dschnee at 2:54 AM

April 1, 2009

Wolverine Leaked!?!

Karma, It's everywhere your going to be.

Today an unwatermarked, time code free workprint of X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked on the internet. Within hours thousands of people had a version of the upcoming Fox release, and once a file like this is in the wild it can never be fully brought back in.

How the hell did this happen? (Karma?)

I got in touch with a friend of mine who works in a post-production facility here in Los Angeles and he seemed to think my question was funny. "I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often," he said.

While studios bend over backwards to police film critics at press screenings (I've become used to security guards with night vision lenses staring at me while I'm watching a movie), the post-production process is apparently porous. Burned DVDs are swapped around with aplomb in this world; in fact I was told that the Wolverine DVD was switching hands for the last couple of weeks. It's hard to nail down where in the post-production process the Wolverine leak originated; it could have been someone working in digital FX, someone working on the titles, or even someone working on the trailer. Hell, it could be somebody working on the DVD release, for that matter.

|chud.com|

See Also:

Statement from 20th Century Fox regarding the online leak of X-Men Origins: Wolverine
"Last night, a stolen, incomplete and early version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was posted illegally on websites. It was without many effects and had missing scenes and temporary sound and music. We immediately contacted the appropriate legal authorities and had it removed. We forensically mark our content so we can identify sources that make it available or download it. The source of the initial leak and any subsequent postings will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law - the courts have handed down significant criminal sentences for such acts and the last person who committed such a crime is still in jail. The FBI and the MPAA also are actively investigating this crime. We are encouraged by the support of fansites condemning piracy and this illegal posting and pointing out that such theft undermines the enormous efforts of the filmmakers and actors, and above all, hurts the fans of the film."

See Also, Also:
FBI called in over Wolverine leak
FBI investigating film leak of X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Radically Recut 'Wolverine' to Be Released

(continued from chud.com)

My source told me stories of people blithely taking home DVDs of major upcoming studio blockbusters - some with watermarks, some without - so that they wouldn't have to work overtime at the office. And it's not just the honchos who have this access. My source told me about interns bringing DVDs home to watch with their friends. Even he seemed incredulous about the lackadaisical security at most of these post-production houses.

I've experienced some of this stuff first hand. I had someone from a post house meet me at a coffee shop and show me the Cloverfield trailer on a laptop. I've had files emailed to me that are clearly watermarked with post house names. I know a filmmaker who had his film pirated in the post-production stage, and who managed to nail the guy who was handing out DVDs to his friends. And I've come across some of these DVDs myself, although I never knew that they were so rampant.

Post isn't the only source of major leaks; these days getting a script to an unmade movie isn't even a badge of insider honor. They seem to be available to anyone who wants them. Someone told me that the security on the script for Cabin in the Woods was so tight no one would get it. Just to prove him wrong I got it three days later. I don't say that to boast but to explain how lax security is on the script end; once something hits an agency, PDFs of it may as well be deposited in the mailboxes of the biggest movie site writers. But while that's a problem - the mass leak of the script to Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds being one example - it's not half as damaging as the leak of an actual movie. Very few people will read a script. Many more will watch a DIVX file.

I have a feeling that the Wolverine leak is the tip of the iceberg. My source tells me that he suspects the person who leaked it may have been motivated by a grudge against the house where they work - perhaps someone who has been laid off or had his hours reduced (although to be fair he did also say that it's just as likely that this leak came from a dumb intern who simply made a copy for a friend. My friend has no actual knowledge of the particulars of this specific leak). The ease with which a DVD can be ripped and disseminated makes it child's play, and the ubiquity of laptops make it simpler and simpler for someone to rip a movie without even taking the disc off premises. Studios can keep being worried about someone sneaking a Flip camcorder into a press screening, but the real problem is right in their own system. So far they've been amazingly lucky, but how long can that luck hold out?

|chud.com|

Posted by dschnee at 10:03 PM

March 31, 2009

Drag Me To Hell Poster

Christine Brown has a good job, a great boyfriend, and a bright future.
But in three days, she's going to hell. me likes this.

Posted by dschnee at 8:07 PM

March 28, 2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine Posters

Posted by dschnee at 6:09 AM

March 24, 2009

New Moon Howls For New Werewolves

They have been shooting New Moon off the rugged Vancouver Island coastline... some Tippett folk will be joining them there shortly. Filming will wrap up at the end of May and the movie will premiere Nov. 20th 2009.

Summit Ent. has rounded up its wolf pack for THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON. Chaske Spencer, Bronson Pelletier, Alex Meraz, Kiowa Gordon and Tyson Houseman have been hired to join Taylor Lautner as the film's Native American werewolves.

In the sequel, when Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is heartbroken over the abrupt departure of her vampire love, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), she strikes up a new relationship with Jacob Black (Lautner). As she is drawn into the centuries old feud between the vampires and werewolves, she finds her loyalties torn.

Chris Weitz is directing NEW MOON, which will be released domestically Nov. 20th.

The new wolf pack members are all Native Americans. Award-winning casting director Rene Haynes (DANCES WITH WOLVES) heading up the wolf pack casting.

Posted by dschnee at 3:26 AM

March 21, 2009

Red Cliff Spears a Best Visual Effects Nom

* Update, Craig and Red Cliff won!

| At the 3rd Annual Asian Film Awards (AFA)

Congratulations Craig! along with The Orphanage, nice one.

:// Red Cliff
:// Asian Film Awards
:// Visual Effects Supervisor Craig Hayes

Posted by dschnee at 7:16 AM

March 20, 2009

Latest Wolverine TV Spot

Looks like my cyclops shots are still in there... (fingers crossed that they still make it into the movie)
"The TV spot names all the main characters: Wolverine, Sabretooth, Emma Frost, Agent Zero, Cyclops, Silver Fox, Blob, and Gambit." (firstshowing.net)

Posted by dschnee at 6:10 AM

March 19, 2009

New Playback and "New Moon" for Tippett Studio

Tippett Studio Adopts Tweak RV for Playback and Review
Tippett Studio is integrating Tweak Software's RV company-wide as its playback tool of choice. RV will replace Flipper, the proprietary playback software developed at Tippett Studio, as the backbone of its VFX digital pipeline.

Tippett Studio was founded 25 years ago and has earned a reputation for groundbreaking animation and visual effects. The studio has launched a major initiative to retool its pipeline to accommodate increasingly complex artistic and technical demands -- without disrupting existing workflows.

"RV is an industrial strength image playback tool, and the only solution out there robust and customizable enough to replace Flipper," said Sanjay Das, Chief Technology Officer at Tippett. "Supporting a proprietary homegrown playback solution is expensive and not the best use of R&D resources, but before RV there was no good alternative."

According to Scott Liedtka, VFX Supervisor at Tippett, "Above all, RV is a tool for artists. It is clean and elegant and adaptable to however you want to work." Tippett Studio turned to RV as part of an effort to build the facility's capacity to handle upwards of 2,000 shots per feature. Other features that attracted Tippett to RV include:

-- Customization -- RV is a very open platform, not a black box application. It can be modified to integrate tightly with the rest of a pipeline or to support proprietary workflows.

-- Color Correction -- RV does real-time color correction using the graphics card, and RV's color management is scriptable so a facility can automate and customize the way images are presented based on scripted rules.

-- 3D Stereo -- RV has advanced 3D stereo support built in. RV's stereo is resolution independent, like the rest of RV, so the left/right eyes can be different resolutions or image formats, and you can zoom, pan, adjust offset, flip/flop, and swap eyes.

Tippett Studio is currently using RV on CATS & DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE and will have RV integrated into the entire facility within three-to-six months. The facility is currently ramping up for VFX production on the sequel to TWILIGHT entitled NEW MOON.

Posted by dschnee at 6:19 AM

March 18, 2009

Drag Me To Hell SXSW Reviews

A whole slew of em' and the general consensus sounds good...

SXSW: Sam Raimi Shows Off Drag Me To Hell!
Universal brought Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell and blasted into the Paramount Theater unfinished; confident that no matter the format we’d all show up, love it, and then turn around and tell you how awesome it is. They were right. Here I am. It’s awesome. (cinemablend.com)
SXSW Snapshot: Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me To Hell”
Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell” feels like the director blowing off twenty years of steam. The slapstick/horror duality that he mastered with his brilliant “Evil Dead” movies, repeatedly and explicitly referenced in the new feature, marks a crowd-pleasing return to form.(indiewire.com)
SXSW Day Three: "Drag Me To Hell" (Work-in-progress)
Look, "Drag Me To Hell" is slight. It's not about anything. It's not trying to make a larger statement about the real world. This is just plain fun. It's a haunted house movie. It's a curse movie. It's a ridiculously fun movie, and in May, you'll be able to see it for yourself. (hitfix.com)
Harry begs, 'DRAG ME TO HELL again Mr Raimi... PLEASE! PLEASE!'
As we were leaving - People throughout the PARAMOUNT were exclaiming phrases like, "I've never screamed in terror at a movie in my life until tonight!" And these exclamations were legion. As the final moment of the film concluded - It was a sonic assault of cheers, screams, hoots & hollars and there was this swoop of wind as people leapt from their seats to signal approval of the highest degree. THIS WAS SAM RAIMI and we were all his bitches tonight(aintitcoolnews.com)
SXSW 09: Drag Me to Hell Review
All too often films get labelled with the phrase "rollercoaster ride," but that sums up Drag Me to Hell in a nutshell. It's a visceral assault on the senses and will have you gasping for breath as the laughs and scares mount. Raimi directs with the confidence and flair of a genre master, while his cast attacks the material with such gusto that it's impossible not to be swept away by the kinetic energy of it all. The result is the most fun I've had in a theatre this year, and an experience I can't wait to repeat when it hits screens this May. (movies.ign.com)
SXSW Review: Drag Me to Hell
Watching Drag Me to Hell felt like watching an old friend relax and stretch his muscles. Welcome back to the realm of horror, Mr. Raimi, and thanks for making a convulsively funny movie with chills and thrills, suffused with genuine affection for the genre.(cinematical.com)
SXSW Review: Sam Raimi's 'Drag Me To Hell'
Drag Me to Hell that Raimi still holds a lot of love for the horror genre. Better still, the man is still able to tap into the creepy, the nasty, the violent, and the unpleasant ... while always maintaining a wonderfully welcome tongue-in-cheek attitude.(fearnet.com)
SXSW: Early Reaction to Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell
I will confidently say that it's an experience unlike few other and vintage Raimi through-and-through. The camp, the scares, the art, the gross-outs - it's all there, and then some.(firstshowing.net.com)
SXSW Review: Drag Me To Hell
At the end of the day, Raimi has made a pretty good comedy, but a really shitty horror film.(filmschoolrejects.com)

Posted by dschnee at 8:38 AM

March 14, 2009

Where is Meyemind?

It's been busy these past few months, and the lack of updates show for it... I found some time to remedy this so there should be a few posts going up over the next couple of days that make up for the lost time.

I'm a Daddy now! we had a little Schneebie not that long ago, (our first) born on February 23rd, 2009. This is the main reason I haven't found the time to update the site, while at the same time busy finishing up on Drag Me To Hell and starting work on Cats and Dogs II(The Revenge of Kitty Galore?).

I'm finding that sleep is a distant relic of the past with our new little man, he does a great job keeping us up at night and drawing all our energy his way. While he sleeps, I should be sleeping, but I type... see also: knee deep in season 2 of The Wire (so awesome)

I've missed a slew of bits I usually post about, the VES Awards, Beverly Hills Chihuahua was released on DVD, what I'm working on, trailers and posters for shows I've worked on and related tid bits... the Filmography(imdb) section has been updated, the Comp Dept has been updated, but not all of the show pages are up yet (in progress) and I know, my Demo Reel section has greatly needed new material... in time, in time. :)

All is well, still working on silly movies with the occasional gem thrown in for good measure.

Posted by dschnee at 7:33 AM

March 12, 2009

Drag Me To Hell Trailer

Nice. This should be a fun ride! There are even a few Tippett shots in there... none of which I worked on though, they don't want to give it all away now do they?

Posted by dschnee at 7:03 AM

March 5, 2009

Wolverine Feature Trailer

So here it is, the second trailer which now features Tippett shots... some we hope to make it into the movie, others we know there is no way they will use let alone hold up... it is nice to see they used a couple of the Scott Summer's laser shots I did, there were the only ones out of a handful that finaled before the bull shit went down.

It's going to be very, very interesting to see how things turn out come May, until then ~enjoy!

Posted by dschnee at 7:15 AM

March 3, 2009

Beverly Hills Chihuahua DVD Released!

Can you imagine I still haven't seen this one? In fact, the DVD is still sitting below my TV patiently waiting for me to crack it open, pop it in, and endure the adventure that awaits... (It's March 14th) heh.

There is one shot in particular I'm looking forward to watching, and that's this shot I did as a 'joke' daily. (a version or take sometimes we do just for shits and giggles) So we sent it off to the client along with a shipment, and they liked it so much they decided to use it in the movie?!? There are 2 dogs swimming to shore in a water/river bed scene, and instead of the one little doggy paddling it's way to shore, I had her get caught in the current and sucked down a water fall... and they used it, hah.

You know you want to pick up Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Widescreen Edition) | Beverly Hills Chihuahua [Blu-ray]

Posted by dschnee at 8:14 AM

March 2, 2009

Drag Me To Hell to screen at SXSW

South by Southwest has added Sam Raimi's "Drag Me to Hell" as a work in progress...

Raimi will introduce "Drag Me to Hell" at a midnight screening on March 15. The Universal horror project stars Alison Lohman and Justin Long in a story of young woman's desperate quest to break an evil curse.

The SXSW Film Conference and Festival runs March 13-21 in Austin, Texas. It will open with a screening of "I Love You, Man," directed by John Hamburg and starring Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Rashida Jones.

-Variety.com

Posted by dschnee at 12:16 PM

January 19, 2009

7th Annual VES Awards - Nominations List

Tippett Studio received 2 VES Nods this year:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture
CLOVERFIELD
Kevin Blank, Chantal Feghali, Michael Ellis, Eric Leven

AWESOME!

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture
THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES - Hogsqueal
Todd Labonte, Michael Brunet, Nathan Fredenburg, Aharon Bourland

Niiice.

We also sent a submission in for Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture for Cloverfield, and I was on that list/team for it, but the compositing work we did on Cloverfield must not have impressed enough folks this time around... :(

Congrats once again to Phil Tippett as he's to receive the VES George Melies Award.

Lastly, I'm pretty excited because I get to vote this year now that I'm a member of the VES... :p

-------
Los Angeles, January 19, 2009 - VES today announced the nominees for the 7th Annual VES Awards ceremony recognizing outstanding visual effects in over a dozen categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games. Nominees were chosen Saturday, January 17, 2009 by numerous panels of VES members who viewed submissions at the FotoKem screening facilities in Burbank.

The nominees for the 7th Annual VES Awards are:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN
Wendy Rogers, Dean Wright, Andrew Fowler, Greg Butler

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Eric Barba, Edson Williams, Nathan McGuinness, Lisa Beroud

HELLBOY II THE GOLDEN ARMY
Michael J. Wassel, Lucy Killick, Adrian de Wet, Eamonn Butler

CLOVERFIELD
Kevin Blank, Chantal Feghali, Michael Ellis, Eric Leven

IRON MAN
Ben Snow, Hal Hickel, Victoria Alonso, John Nelson

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture

CHANGELING
Michael Owens, Geoffrey Hancock, Jinnie Pak, Dennis Hoffman

EAGLE EYE
Jim Rygiel, Jim Berney, Crys Forsyth-Smith, David Smith

VALKYRIE
Richard R. Hoover, Maricel Pagulayan, Peter Nofz, Daniel Eaton

NIM'S ISLAND
Camille Cellucci, Scott Gordon, Fred Pienkos, James Straus

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
Mark Russell, Richard Friedlander, Eric Robertson, Brett Miller

Outstanding Animation in an Animated Motion Picture

BOLT - The Chase
Chris Williams, Byron Howard, John Murrah, Doug Bennett

KUNG FU PANDA - Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting - The Animation of Kung Fu Panda
Markus Manninen, Dan Wagner, Alex Parkinson, Raymond Zibach

A MATTER OF LOAF AND DEATH - Piella's Mansion
Nick Park, Steve Pegram, Dave Alex Riddett, David McCormick

WALL-E
Andrew Stanton, Jim Morris, Lindsey Collins, Nigel Hardwidge

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or Special

DOCTOR WHO - "The Next Doctor" - Cyber King
Dave Houghton, Marie Jones, Matt McKinney, Murray Barber

GENERATION KILL - "Episode 2"
Adam McInnes, Anthony Bluff, Stephane Paris, David Sewell

JOHN ADAMS - "Join or Die"
Steve Kullback, Erik Henry, Robert Stromberg, Jeff Goldman

KNIGHT RIDER - "Prometheus"
Sam Nicholson, Scott Ramsey, Chris Martin, Mike Enriquez

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Season Four - BSG Space Battle
Gary Hutzel, Michael Gibson, Doug Drexler, Kyle Toucher

SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES - "Episode 108"
James Lima, Raoul Bolognini, Andrew Orloff, Steve Meyer

GHOST WHISPERER - "Ghost in the Machine"
Armen Kevorkian, Arthur J. Codron, Matt Scharf, Stefan Brederock

HEROES - "The Second Coming"
Eric Grenaudier, Mark Spatny, Diego Galtieri, Michael Cook

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program

FRINGE - Episode 101 - "Pilot"
Kevin Blank, Jay Worth, Andrew Orloff, Barbara Genicoff

JERICHO - Episode 7 - "Patriots and Tyrants"
Andrew Orloff, Blyth Dalton, Chris Jones, MIchael Cliett

LIFE - "Frozen Solid"
Max Ivins, Jenny Foster, Danny Kim, Shawn Lipowski

PUSHING DAISIES - "The Legend of Merle McQuoddy"
William Powloski, Elizabeth Castro, Melanie Tucker, Eric Chauvin

Best Single Visual Effect of the Year

CLOVERFIELD - Statue of Liberty Crash and Woolworth Tower Collapse
Michael Ellis, Chantal Feghali, David Vickery, Ben Taylor

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - Benjamin's Secret
Eric Barba, Lisa Beroud, Steve Preeg, Jonathan Litt

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL - Newborn Klaatu
Jeffrey A. Okun, R. Christopher White, Thomas M. Boland, Ben Thompson

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL - Valley Destruction
Stephanie Hornish, Pablo Helman, Jeff White, Craig Hammack

IRON MAN
Ben Snow, Wayne Billheimer, Victoria Alonso, John Nelson

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial

Bacardi - SUNDANCE
Alex Thiesen, Nikos Kalaitzidis, Jay Barton, Zsolt Kalaitzidis

Coke - IT'S MINE
Angus Kneale, Asher Edwards, Ben Smith, Dan Williams

FedEx - PIGEON
Satoko Iinuma, Murray Butler, David Hulin, Spencer Lueders

Monster - STORK - Stork
William Bartlett, Helen Stanley, Dan Seddon, David Mellor

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project

GRAND CANYON ADVENTURE: RIVER AT RISK - Main Title Sequence
Mark Freund, Alan Markowitz, Lee Nelson, Josh Mossotti

U2 3D - Selected Shots
Peter Anderson, Jon Shapiro, David Franks, Jeremy Nicolaides

Outstanding Real Time Visuals in a Video Game

CRYSIS WARHEAD
Zoltan Pocza, Gabor Mogyorosi, Tamas Schlagl

DEAD SPACE
Ian Milham, Ben Wanat, Christopher Stone

NEED FOR SPEED UNDERCOVER - Xbox 360
Henry LaBounta, Steve Barcia, Dave Taylor, Carl Jarrett

Outstanding Pre-Rendered Visuals in a Video Game

COMMAND AND CONQUER - RED ALERT 3 - Chrono-Lab, Empire and Allied Scenes
Richard Taylor, Benjamin Hopkins, KaTai Tang, Mical Pedriana

NEED FOR SPEED UNDERCOVER - Cinematics
Henry LaBounta, Steve Barcia, Dave Taylor, Mark Raham

WORLD OF WARCRAFT: WRATH OF THE LICH KING - Intro Cinematic
Jeff Chamberlain, Phillip Hillenbrand

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - Benjamin Button
Steve Preeg, Matthias Wittmann, Tom St. Amand, David McLean

HELLBOY II THE GOLDEN ARMY - Elemental Sequence
Colin McEvoy, Christoph Ammann

IRON MAN
Hal Hickel, Bruce Holcomb, James Tooley, John Walker

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES - Hogsqueal
Todd Labonte, Michael Brunet, Nathan Fredenburg, Aharon Bourland

Outstanding Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture

BOLT - Various Sequences - Bolt
Becky Bresee, Bob Davies, Renato Dos Anjos, Wayne Unten Jr.

BOLT - Various Sequences - Rhino
Adam Dykstra, Dave Gottlieb, Clay Kaytis, Hyrum Osmond

KUNG FU PANDA - This Kung Fu Stuff is Hard Work - The Animation of Po
Jack Black, Dan Wagner, Nico Marlet, Peter Farson

WALL-E - WALL-E and Eve Truck Sequence
Ben Burtt, Victor Navone, Austin Lee, Jay Shuster

Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Broadcast Program or Commercial

Bacardi - SUNDANCE
James Atkinson, John Cooper, Phillip Prahl, Charles Felix Chabert

BRAINS DANCE
James Sindle, Jesus Parra, Josh Fourtwells

Coke - STEWIE
Ben Smith, Andrew Proctor, Jong Jim Choi, Keith Kim

WHO'S GONNA SAVE MY SOUL
Thomas Tannenberger, Olcun Tan

Outstanding Effects Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture

BOLT - Various Sequences
John Murrah, Michael Kaschalk, Dale Mayeda, Adolph Lusinsky

KUNG FU PANDA - The Secret Ingredient - Visual Effects of Kung Fu Panda
Markus Manninen, Alex Parkinson, Amaury Aubel, Lawrence Lee

MADAGASCAR ESCAPE 2 AFRICA - Effects in Africa
Scott Peterson, Laurent Kermel, Andrew Wheeler, Greg Gladstone

WALL-E - Effects in WALL-E
Jason Johnston, Keith Daniel Klohn, Enrique Vila, Bill Watral

Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Feature Motion Picture

CHANGELING - 1928 Downtown L.A.
Romain Bayle, Abel Milanes, Allan Lee, Debor Dunphy

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
Richard Bluff, Barry Williams, Yanick Dusseault, Yusei Uesugi

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK - Matte Paintings
Brett Miller, Garrett Eaton, Matthew Conner

SPEED RACER - Overall Matte Painting Presentation
Lubo Hristov, Dennis Martin, Ron Crabb

Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

DOCTOR WHO - Series 4 - "Silence in the Library"
Simon Wickers, Charlie Bennett, Tim Barter, Arianna Lago

GENERATION KILL - "Episode 2"
Christian Irles, Yannick Bourgie

MERLIN THE MARK OF NIMUEH SERIES 1 - "The Mark of Nimueh"
Dave Early, Simon Wickers, Bryan Bartlett, Sara Bennet

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Feature Motion Picture

THE DARK KNIGHT - Garbage Truck Crash Models and Miniatures
Ian Hunter, Forest Fischer, Branden Seifert, Adam Gelbart

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
David Fogler, Craig Hammack, Brian Gernand, Geoff Heron

IRON MAN - Suit Up Machine
Aaron McBride, Russell Paul, Gerald Gutschmidt, Keiji Yamaguchi

MY DARLING OF THE MOUNTAINS - Hot Springs
Taro Kiba, Kenji Nagatani, Yuki Minagawa, Hideo Udo

Outstanding Models and Miniatures in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

NEW BALANCE - Anthem
Ian Hunter, Jon Warren, Matt Burlingame, Raymond Moore

GHOST WHISPERER - Episode 404 - "Claridon Ship Shots"
Eric Hance

Outstanding Created Environment in a Feature Motion Picture

CLOVERFIELD - Brooklyn Bridge Sequence
David Vickery, Phil Johnson, Victor Wade, Sean Stranks

THE DARK KNIGHT - IMAX Gotham City Scapes
Peter Bebb, David Vickery, Philippe Leprince, Andrew Lockley

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL - Temple Heart
Michael Halsted, David Fogler, Steve Walton, David Weitzberg

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR - Avalanche Sequence
Mike Meaker, Rich Mahon, Jason Iverson, Sho Hasegawa

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK - Created Environment
Brett Miller, Garrett Eaton, Matthew Conner

Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

Audi - LIVING ROOM - Living Room
Jack Zaloga, Jake Montgomery, Andy Boyd, Sean Durnan

HEROES - Tokyo
Meliza Fermin, Michael Cook, Daniel Kumiega, Anthony Ocampo

JOHN ADAMS - "Join or Die" - Episode 1 - The Boston Harbor
Paul Graff, Robert Stromberg, Adam Watkins

Wrigley's 5 - FRUIT SHREDDER
Ludo Fealy, Dean Robinson, Adam Leary, Michael Gregory

Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN
Stuart Lashley, Arundi Asregadoo, Mark Curtis, Richard Baker

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - Benjamin Comes Together
Janelle Croshaw, Paul Lambert, Sonja Burchard, Sarahjane Javelo

IRON MAN - Head Under Display - HUD Compositing
Jonathan Rothbart, Dav Rauch, Kyle McCulloch, Kent Seki

QUANTUM OF SOLACE - Sienna Chase and Fight Sequence
Anthony Smith, Christian Kaestner, Adrian Metzelaar, Jon Thum

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

Coke - IT'S MINE - Balloons
Angus Kneale, Dan Williams, Andrew Proctor

FedEx PIGEON - Pigeon
Andy Walker, Spencer Lueders, Maryanne Butler, Murray Butler

JOHN ADAMS - "Join or Die" - Episode 1 - The Boston Harbor
Paul Graff, Joshua LaCross, Matt Collorafice

TIME SCULPTURE
Richard de Carteret, Paul Downes, Oliver Dadswell, John Price

Outstanding Special Effects in a Motion Picture

THE DARK KNIGHT
Chris Corbould, Peter Notley, Ian Lowe

THE DARK KNIGHT - Garbage Truck Crash Mechanical Effects
Scott Beverly, Robert Spurlock, Jon Warren, Brian Kelly Hahn

DEFIANCE - Special Effects
Neil Corbould, Steve Warner, Anne Maria Walters, Alan Young

Outstanding Effects in a Student Project

HANGAR NUMBER FIVE - Robot Attack
Nathan Matsuda

LA MAIN DES MAITRES - Revolution
Adrien CaYuS Toupet, Clement Delatre, Vivien Looky Chauvet

OUR WONDERFUL NATURE
Tomer Eshed, Dennis Rettkowski, Tomer Eshed, Dennis Rettkowski

PLASTIC - Transformation Sequence
Sandy Widyanata, Courtney Wise

The 7th Annual VES Awards will take place on Feb. 21, 2009, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

This year the VES will present producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Phil Tippett (Congrats!) with the Georges Melies Award.

For more information on the VES Awards, sponsorship and tickets, visit www.visualeffectssociety.com.

Posted by dschnee at 10:54 PM

Drag Me To Hell

Black Friday has given way to one Hell of a Monday, as I've been dragged onto the next project, and this one's pretty awesome to be on Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell, The Evil Dead's Sam Raimi!!! Raimi's back to the basics in his low budget horror digs. Here's the Plot: A loan officer (Lohman) ordered to evict an old woman from her home finds herself the recipient of a supernatural curse, who turns her life into a living hell. Desperate, she turns to a seer to try and save her soul, while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.

Hellbent on this one for 2 short weeks...

Posted by dschnee at 10:00 AM

January 16, 2009

FOXED!?!

It's over, just like that... all gone. Good Luck with it.

See Also:

Hey Mate- Would you mind posting this? Thank you for your support! HJ

Hey everyone -

It's Hugh Jackman, sending this note from freezing Vancouver. I have read a lot of your online comments regarding the footage that we are currently shooting and I share your passion for the Wolverine character and the movie - I owe it all to you guys!

I wanted to reach out and let you know that due to scheduling conflicts with certain cast members and location/weather considerations, we had to wait until now to shoot a couple of scenes. Please rest assured that WOLVERINE will be badass and hopefully meet all of your expectations. I am stoked by the positive response to the teaser, which clearly reflects the tone and scope of the film. If you like that, we've got much more in store!

In the meantime, here's an exclusive shot of some characters you may recognize...

Cheers,

Hugh (Jackman)

-aintItCoolNews.com

Posted by dschnee at 4:00 PM

Wolverine Going Back for Extensive Reshoots

In an interview with the New York Post's Popwrap Blog, "Lost" actor Dominic Monaghan confirmed that he's scheduled to do another ten days of filming in Vancouver at the end of January.

Asked if it's a reshoot or an additional scene, Monaghan says "We're doing a bit of both, more than anything else, it's an additional scene... my character features in a huge set piece with Hugh and Liev [Schreiber]. I think the best thing I can tell you is that it's a flashback scene."

Such extensive reshooting so close to the film's May release date is surprising but not unheard of. The film has been plagued throughout its production by talk of difficulties, mostly distributor 20th Century Fox apparently interfering with director Gavin Hood's dark 1970's-like feature to make it more action-heavy and kid-friendly.

Director Richard Donner's appearance on-set has stemmed talk that his 'advisory capacity' on the production was a little more than that, and more than a few sources who've read the script or been involved in the production have referred to the film's last act as being "a mess". (uhhh yeah, to say the least...)

With the studio under immense pressure to perform this year, the reshoots could actually be a good thing. Collider got in touch with Fox about the talk and the studio replied that the reshoots were "always planned and are intended to capture specific weather conditions".

The site also speculated that a proposed set visit of journos during the reshoots shows that Fox is trying to boost confidence in the property, though the reality there is much more practical - flying a group of American journos to Vancouver is a lot cheaper than flying them all out to Sydney.
-darkhorizons.com

With the Watchmen legal battle finally coming to its end, and Fox not getting more than just a large helping of undeserved money, I would expect the anti-20th Century Fox backlash to slowly dissipate. But with this news today, it might swing back into high gear. Last August we reported that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was experiencing some issues, primarily with power struggles between its director, Gavin Hood, and Fox's CEO Tom Rothman. And this was all before the trailer hit. However, an update has arrived from Collider tonight that says they're going back to Vancouver to do some extensive reshoots. Although I'm normally optimistic, I'm pretty sure this is a very bad sign, despite the other opinions I've heard from my peers.

We've heard a lot of negative behind-the-scenes buzz about X-Men Origins: Wolverine for a long time but have tried to play it off because we were hoping it would turn out great in the end. Obviously the trailer was impressive, but for some odd reason I felt like it wasn't as polished as it could be. Normally I love trailers like that, but I could tell that Gavin Hood had some problems keeping his vision of Wolverine intact. In regards to the production, word is that Richard Donner (yes, of Superman: The Movie), was often on set "ghost directing" and providing more than just minimal feedback. While this shouldn't be a bad thing, apparently it is, but Gavin Hood still might get his chance to go back and reshoot a lot of the movie.

Collider is reporting that Fox is conducting very extensive reshoots over the next few weeks. They're also saying that studios usually try and keep news like this under the radar, but Fox even wanted to bring in some journalists to cover these reshoots. Why? Well because apparently Gavin Hood is going to be directing them. My guess is that he's getting his chance to fix the movie, but they're also trying to "cover up" any previous bad buzz by bringing journalists in and "showing" them that it's Hood directing, not Rothman and not Donner. So why didn't Gavin get to do this to begin with? And I don't understand how rushing reshoots this late in the game can be called a good thing. I'm sorry, but I'm not drinking this Kool-Aid.

What everyone is saying is that the trailer, which received an extreme amount of positive buzz, gave Fox the confidence they needed to go back and do these reshoots. That may be true, but I again question why this isn't something they thought about earlier. Fox really thought a Wolverine movie wouldn't be a big hit? They've got to be kidding me! As much as I'm hoping that X-Men Origins: Wolverine does turn out to be the gritty, badass Wolverine movie we've all wanted to see ever since Hugh Jackman unleashed his claws in X-Men in 2001, I've got a feeling this isn't going to be it. And it's not Gavin Hood's fault. We know exactly who to blame - the very same studio that tried to scoop up Watchmen. Good luck Fox!
-firstshowing.net

Posted by dschnee at 7:48 AM

January 15, 2009

Bafta VFX Award Noms + Making the VFX Bake-Off?

Here are the nominations in Special Visual Effects for this year's Bafta Film Awards 2009, to be held on 8 February at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London

Special visual effects
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan McGuinness, Edson Williams
The Dark Knight - Chris Corbould, Nick Davis, Paul Franklin, Tim Webber
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - Pablo Helman
Iron Man - Shane Patrick Mahan, John Nelson, Ben Snow
Quantum Of Solace - Chris Corbould, Kevin Tod Haug

Sadly again, no Cloverfield... So why is that? Variety chimes in with:

Making the Visual Effects Bake-Off

Now we know the seven films that will compete for the visual effects Oscar: Australia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Iron Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Why these seven and not, say, Hancock, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Cloverfield or The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian -- all of which made the Academy's long list of contenders?

Here's why:

The Academy's vfx branch is fascinated with the intersection of visual effects and acting. They like visual effects that have the emotional punch only an actor can bring. This is a major selling point for Benjamin Button, but also part of the pitch for Iron Man, where much of Iron Man in his armor was digitally animated and had to be a convincing add-on to Robert Downey Jr.'s breezy performance, and The Mummy, which had Jet Li as a digitally animated terra cotta warrior, who had to be convincing as, well, Jet Li. This is an ongoing trend, and I expect it to continue next year with Avatar (assuming Jim Cameron's 3-D/motion-capture epic opens in 2009).

Movies that push vfx into new formats get credit for being pioneers. Journey is the notable entry here. Making digital effects in 3-D is vastly more complicated than making them in 2-D, because many of the 2-D "cheats" that look passable in "mono" are obvious in "stereo." However The Dark Knight also gets credit for pushing digital visual effects into Imax. That meant working at 8K -- and for those of you who aren't digital wonks, that's a lot more resolution, and therefore a lot more detail, than normal 4K or 2K effects.

Beauty counts. Visual effects are becoming more like other categories in the sense that it's more and more about how beautiful the work is and how it contributes to the story, and less and less about the latest tech breakthrough. Benjamin Button has both beauty and breakthrough tech, but Hellboy II may have the most gorgeous and imaginative vfx images of the year.

Okay, so what about "Australia"? If you're shocked by the inclusion of this picture in the bakeoff, you're not alone. Not even Fox really thought it was a big vfx Oscar contender when the season started, and most of the effects seem to belong in what the Visual Effects Society would call "supporting effects." But vfx supervisor Jamie Price told me today that Baz Lurmann challenged them with his "Lean and Lucas" approach: Shoot dramatic locations like David Lean, then intercut them with scenes shot on a stage with bluescreen, like George Lucas. The visual effects had to make it all hang together so you couldn't tell the difference. What, you couldn't tell the difference? That's why it's in the bakeoff.
-Variety.com

Posted by dschnee at 8:06 AM

January 6, 2009

7 in Running for 2008 Visual Effects Oscar

The Bake-Off... It was a long shot, but deep down all of us over here were hoping Cloverfield would make it to the bake-off, unfortunately it didn't, it's still cool to be recognized for the long list. The Spiderwick Chronicles also did not make the list... see also: The Day The Earth Stood Still, Prince Caspian, Hancock, The Incredible Hulk, Indiana Jones, and 007 Quantum Of Solace.

My prediction still stands as:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Iron Man
The Dark Knight

Beverly Hills, CA -- The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that seven films remain in the running in the Visual Effects category for the 81st Academy Awards.

The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

"Australia"
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
"The Dark Knight"
"Hellboy II: The Golden Army"
"Iron Man"
"Journey to the Center of the Earth"
"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor"

On Thursday, January 15, all members of the Academy's Visual Effects Branch will be invited to view 15-minute excerpts from each of the seven shortlisted films. Following the screenings, the members will vote to nominate three films for final Oscar consideration.

The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 22, 2009, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2008 will be presented on Sunday, February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center, and televised live by the ABC Television Network. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 200 countries worldwide.

Posted by dschnee at 10:42 AM