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.