Tuesday, 13 December 2011

Adventures of Tin Tin


Adventures of Tin Tin








One of the most irritating things about the current advances in 3D and motion-capture technology is the way film-makers keep promising "photo-real" images. James Cameron was at it with Avatar, and now it seems that Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are going to be bandying the word around to describe their forthcoming Tintin movie, which has borrowed a great deal of the technology utilised to bring Pandora and its weird and wonderful denizens to life.
"With live action you're going to have actors pretending to be Captain Haddock and Tintin," Jackson tells Empire magazine, which has published the first images from The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, in its new issue. "With CGI we can bring Hergé's world to life, keep the stylised caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Hergé's artwork, but make it photo-real."
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the term, but looking at the images of Tintin himself, Snowy the Dog, and Captain Haddock, it's immediately obvious that the still versions do not look like photographs. They do, however, look pretty spectacular. This technology has come a long way since Robert Zemeckis was accused of creating dead-eyed children on his 2004 animated tale The Polar Express.
Yet, despite picking up plenty of critical plaudits when it was first released, there are now plenty of naysayers who question whether Avatar's technical miracle is enough on its own to ensure the film's lasting place in the pantheon of great event movies. Could Tintin be the first film to unite 3D motion-capture spectacle with storytelling that's free of corny cliche? Spielberg is certainly talking the talk, telling Empire: "The first part of the film, which is the most mysterious part, certainly owes much to not only film noir but the whole German Brechtian theatre – some of our night scenes and our action scenes are very contrasty. But at the same time the movie is a hell of an adventure."
With Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Haddock, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Thomson and Thompson (or possibly the other way around), Tintin is due to find his way on to cinema screens next October. Fortunately for fans of Hergé's tales, the film is not being shot in New Zealand, and doesn't have anything to do with MGM, so that's one promise Jackson and Spielberg might just be able to keep.

Comments in chronological order (Total 9 comments)

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  • JohnBarnesOnToast
    3 November 2010 3:23PM
    I'd be more interested in a film if its creators were championing the quality of its script, rather than its effects.
    I seem to recall that LOTR was heralded for its use of landmark CGI, and it already looks shit after less than a decade.
  • phaine
    3 November 2010 5:24PM
    Tintin's for squares. All the cool kids were into Asterix.
  • mrphantomb
    3 November 2010 5:35PM
    ....the film is not being shot in New Zealand...
    Erm....actually it was.
  • Monkeybug
    3 November 2010 5:38PM
    @JohnBarnesOnToast
    I seem to recall that LOTR was heralded for its use of landmark CGI, and it already looks shit after less than a decade.
    No it doesn't. I'm sure you can cherry-pick the odd effect which isn't very convincing, but you could at the time. Most of it still looks amazing.
    Plus the only 'landmark' CGI is the motion-capture performance of Andy Serkis as Gollum (which is still great). The LOTR films only used CGI when necessary (unlike Avatar and the Star Wars prequels) - plenty of sets and props were created for the production and the New Zealand scenery doubled as Middle Earth whenever possible.
  • struppi
    3 November 2010 5:58PM
    motion/performance was actually "captured" in Los Angeles, additional "capture" happened in New Zealand.
  • drbob1975
    3 November 2010 7:32PM
    Fortunately for fans of Hergé's tales, the film is not being shot in New Zealand
    True, most of the filming was done in Los Angeles in early 2009. But all the post-production work is taking place at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand (which also did Avatar).
    Post-production is much more time-consuming in these motion-captured movies, as everything has to be created digitally, from scratch.
    Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately for those who work in the industry), there is no union for digital artists in NZ.
  • lomier
    5 November 2010 3:15PM
    “I'd be more interested in a film if its creators were championing the quality of its script, rather than its effects.”
    Is this statement merely based on what you’ve read above? You should read the actual Empire article itself, which is pretty lengthy, before dismissing the project as nothing more than technological one! Rest assured, they talk an awful lot in it about the scripting and challenges of forging the story. Spielberg has rejected numerous Tintin scripts over the years as they were not up to scratch. But he feels the Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish have cracked it with their take on the character.

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