I was delighted to see that an old friend of mine, David Poland from Movie City News, was lucky enough to go on a press junket to Wellington recently. He was there at the invitation of Paramount to check out the technology used in making The Adventures of Tintin. David’s first entry is brief, but he promises more on the subject. Perhaps something relevant to The Hobbit will be mentioned.

Website Den of Geek! has just posted a lengthy interview with John Gilbert, who edited The Fellowship of the Ring. (Jamie Selkirk was the supervising editor for the entire trilogy, but each film had its own editor.) Gilbert has edited many other films, most recently Blitz, a British action film, the upcoming release of which was the occasion for the interview.

But Gilbert talks a lot about FOTR and working with Peter Jackson. He got the FOTR job because he had previously edited The Frighteners. Up to that point PJ had edited on film, and Gilbert was brought in to use the digital editing system Avid on the film. Needless to say, by LOTR, Peter’s team was doing most technical jobs, including editing, using digital technology. Gilbert was slotted to edit King Kong back in the mid-1990s, but when that project fell through (temporarily), he was put on FOTR.

One highlight of the interview:

There was a lot of pressure. There was pressure on him from New Line and the people with the money, just because it was so much bigger than what he’d done before. But he’s very adept at keeping everyone in check and keeping in control of things. And I think we cut a sequence together in the Moria Mines early on and finished it as a piece of film, and it went off to Cannes about halfway through the process. The press and everyone fell in love with it, and everyone backed off after that and let him go for it, because it spoke for itself.

I discuss the preview footage shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 in Chapter 1 of my book. I hadn’t been aware, however, of how very important that moment was in convincing New Line to give Peter more creative leeway after that point.

Gilbert stayed on in New Zealand to edit Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Indian (a charming film that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved), and he has some interesting things to say about the impact of LOTR on the Kiwi film industry.

All in all, a very interesting interview, well worth reading.

The coverage of the SXSW Film Festival on Cnet includes an interview with Frank Rose. He’s the editor of Wired and author of the new book, The Art of Immersion, which he describes as “essentially about how the Internet is changing storytelling.” For it he interviewed, among others, James Cameron back when he was working on Avatar.

Rose points out that Cameron’s team and its new technology built on the breakthrough work for The Lord of the Rings:

He took what Peter Jackson and his crew had done with Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” and scaled it up dramatically. That was one character, with sort of like hand animation. And Cameron scaled it up in dramatic fashion to do dozens of characters that way, and, by the way, used the same people to do it.

The “same people,” of course, being the CGI experts at Weta Digital.

Eventually, I suppose, CGI and performance capture will evolve far enough away from LOTR that the connection to Gollum won’t be mentioned as much. But he was the first really convincing digital character, and his place in the history books is assured.

Tvnz.co.nz reports that:

Wellingtons film industry is getting a further boost of government funding, with special effects workshop Weta Digital one of six fast-growing, high-tech companies awarded $7.2 million each under the new Technology Development Grant Programme. […]

Weta is only one of six firms chosen to receive the full extent of support available under the TDG scheme, which will see $92 million invested over the next three years in what Mapp says is “the largest business investment the government has ever made in helping business innovate.”

The Lord of the Rings was responsible for New Zealand’s image changing from one of a country full of sheep farms to one on the cutting edge of design and technology. The continuing success of the Wellington-based film industry, notably in the creation of Avatar, has reinforced that image, and The Hobbit can only enhance it. Congratulations to Weta!

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.