I’m still trying to catch up with everything that accumulated during my recent month in Europe. One thing I ran across was an interesting interview with Peter Jackson in ICG, the magazine of the International Cinematographers Guild. It’s in the December, 2009 print issue or online here.

Interviews by professionals in the film industry tend to be a bit more substantive than those by entertainment journalists–not surprisingly. But don’t be put off by the thought that this one is full of technical terms that you won’t understand. It’s pretty straightforward stuff.

It’s mostly on The Lovely Bones, but there are a number of topics touched on that reveal Peter’s ideas about adaptation and cinematography in general. I recommend it.

It’s been a while since I posted. I’m currently in Berlin, busily doing research on statuary fragments at the Egyptian Museum. The city has experienced it’s biggest snowfall in decades, so I’m trudging through snowy, icy sidewalks on my way to and from the S-Bahn.

There hasn’t been a lot of LOTR/Hobbit news recently, but I spotted an interesting article in the New York Times. It’s about Avatar and whether it’s new motion-capture technology will have an immediate impact on Hollywood filmmaking. The basic answer is, not much, not yet. The next round of big fantasy films have either started without the new technology (e.g., Iron Man II) or won’t be out for a long time (e.g., Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, made with much the same technology).

The most interesting passage for us fans is that The Hobbit is still not planned to be in 3D, and given that the pre-viz is being edited, I suspect it’s a bit late for a change of mind on that. Here’s what the article says on that subject:

So far, Guillermo del Toro, who is expected to direct the first of a two-part fantasy series based on “The Hobbit” for release in 2012, has stuck with a plan to film that movie with more conventional, 2-D techniques, even though Mr. Jackson — a powerful force behind both “Avatar” and “Tintin” — is among his producers.

Executives of Warner’s New Line Cinema unit, one of the studios behind the project, have in the past said that they believed that 2-D would be well suited to the sense of intimacy they anticipated from “The Hobbit” and its fantasy universe — and nothing about “Avatar” appears to have changed that plan.

As far as I know, there’s nothing significant about that mention of 2012 as the release date for The Hobbit.

One subject that keeps coming up in the article is how much Avatar cost. I’m sure New Line, Warner Bros., and MGM have no desire to lay out hundreds of millions of extra dollars for a technique that neither the director nor the fans are clamoring for. Avatar got made the way it did because James Cameron was bound and determined to follow his own vision of the project. As with Titanic, it turns out he was justified, but not everybody is quite that enthusiastic about 3D and especially this very expensive new process for creating it.

After a notable lack of information on Weta Digital’s part in creating the special effects in Avatar, there seems to be a flood of information coming out. Animation World Network has posted two pieces on the effects. One is an interview with James Cameron, “Cameron Geeks out on Avatar.” The other is “Avatar: The Game Changer.” The latter has quotations from Joe Letteri, the American special-effects expert who moved to Wellington after working on the LOTR film and now is a partner in Weta. As I point out all too frequently, this is relevant here because it demonstrates the impact that LOTR continues to have on the world of filmmaking.

[Thanks to Bill Desowitz for sending these links!]

Yesterday Anne Thompson posted a terrific interview with Joe Letteri on Indiewire. It’s done with flip cam in four parts, adding up to about 22 minutes.

Part 1, “Avatar advances,” has an excellent explanation of how Weta has developed motion capture from Gollum to Kong to  the Na’vi in Avatar. Part 2 is “Facial capture.” Part 3 doesn’t have a title, but it includes some interesting material on how Weta competed with other effects companies and managed to win the assignment of doing 95% of Avatar. Basically they specialized in character creation. Clearly they built on the technical success of Gollum and have become the go-to firm for complex facial expressions on digital characters. Part 4 is “The Eyes!”

There’s no mention of The Hobbit, but in Part 4 there’s a little discussion of how the Avatar technology has been used on the first Tintin film and will continue to be used on the second. It seems pretty likely that the technology will be handy for The Hobbit. Letteri says that some of the programs are proprietary, so I expect that, like Massive, these developments will result in some highly influential programs going on the market.

CGI has come a long way since the LOTR film trilogy came out, and its impact on present filmmaking is not as direct as it used to be. Still, LOTR launched the ongoing process that Letteri talks about in this interview. By the time LOTR was finished, industry commentators were saying that Weta Digital was one of the top three effects houses in the world. By now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see people calling it number one. As Anne says, it seems almost certain that, whatever other Oscars Avatar picks up, one for special effects will be heading for Wellington.

Remember how a system for selective digital grading was developed by Peter Doyle for the LOTR trilogy? (I talk about it in Chapter 9 of The Frodo Franchise and blogged about it here.) And remember how Peter Jackson was having live video conferencing between him in London and his special-effects team back in Wellington, all over the innovative secure internet connection they dubbed the Fatpipe? If you’ve forgotten, you’ll find short segments on those techniques in the extended-edition DVD supplements.

Those were incredibly cutting-edge technologies at that time. Now Variety reports that Technicolor has put the two together to allow filmmakers to sit in on and participate in color-grading sessions going on at a distant facility. It’s called “Technicolor Remote Grading.” The same footage is shown on 2K digital projectors in Technicolor offices that might be in Hollywood and London. According to Marco Barrio, VP of theatrical post-production for Technicolor Creative Services, “We have clients working with that colorist as if they’re sitting in the same room. The color matches, it’s in real time, and the quality is the same as if they were sitting in the same room with the colorist.”

Back in 2003 when I first interviewed Barrie Osborne, he said that the trilogy’s greatest impact on the film industry would be its use of digital intermediates (the version of the film used for color grading). I think it’s safe to say that this new technology’s origins could be trace back, directly or indirectly, to the innovations of the LOTR film. Quite possibly something of the sort will be used on The Hobbit.

Nothing much to do with LOTR or The Hobbit, but Newsweek has just posted a double interview with Peter Jackson and James Cameron. The interviewer’s questions have been eliminated, so it reads as a conversation between the two of them. They have some interesting things to say about the current dominance of the blockbuster in Hollywood filmmaking and about CGI–how much it costs, how it will never replace actors, and how the story still rules. Cameron has some nice things to say about Gollum.

The interview will also be in the January 4 print issue.

Mike Goodridge, editor of Screen Daily, has seen Avatar. Not only that, but he spoke briefly with Peter Jackson about the film, since Weta Digital has been deeply involved in the motion-capture computer animation for the film. In a brief piece on Screen Daily.com, he reports on both film and interview.

Goodridge was curious as to why actors like Zoe Saldana, Wes Studi, Sam Worthington, and Signourney Weaver would be content to perform for the motion-capture cameras and, in some cases, not appear onscreen at all. He was impressed by what he saw:

The effect is startling. Working with Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital facility in New Zealand, the Avatar team has created lifelike digital characters which carry the story arc of the film. While watching, I was so engaged by the characters I constantly had to remind myself they were not human. It isn’t like watching Roddy McDowall in an ape suit or Gollum. It’s a whole new cinematic experience.

Lumping actors in ape suits into the same category as Gollum is a dubious move. James Cameron delayed making Avatar for years because the technology didn’t exist to create the blue Na’vi characters. Peter Jackson set out to make LOTR knowing that the technology didn’t exist, but his technicians developed it and made Gollum the first appealing, believable digital character in a live-action film. (Jar-Jar Binks was created using the same basic technology, but he didn’t exactly convince audiences that digital characters were a good thing.) Cameron decided to get back into directing because of Gollum.

Peter explained motion capture performances as “a way of moving. It has nothing to do with how the characters look, which is a design of the character. It’s terrific because instead of an animator and a computer animating a character frame by frame, motion capture allows a real actor to perform.” Anyone who has watched the supplements for LOTR or King Kong knows what he’s talking about.

He also mentioned the first Tintin film, which he is more deeply involved in, being one of its producers and, if all goes according to plan, the director of the second.

Jackson went on to elucidate that on the first of the Tintin movies, which he is producing and Steven Spielberg is directing, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig are “bringing it to life” but the faces that will be seen on screen when the film is released at the end of 2011 will look like the characters from the pages of Hergé. “They are performing it as if they are doing the movie for real,” said Jackson. “And yet, what’s coming to life are characters that Hergé designed. They look as if he actually designed them himself.”

Avatar will be released on December 18, although if you live in certain countries you’ll be able to see it a day or two earlier. Then we’ll all be able to judge how far motion capture has come since the breakthrough performances of Andy Serkis as Gollum.

[Added the same day: Variety's senior film reviewer Todd McCarthy has just posted an enthusiastic report on Avatar, with kudos to Weta Digital as the lead special-effects house.]

Today’s New Zealand Herald has a fascinating story about Weta Digital’s expanding research department and some innovative work being done with facial expression and movement. Some of this new technology is being used on James Cameron’s Avatar, but I suspect it will be used for The Hobbit as well.