Hobbit gets greenlight.. Shooting in February IF...

[Mark Collins]

Wait a minute, Mike. Because I am suggesting that Peter Jackson or any director that tackles the Hobbit should use Avatar-style performance capture and 3D, somehow this is disrespectful to Peter?

It's just my paltry 2 cents about filming techniques and technology.

The only negative thing I've said about Peter is that King Kong was about an hour too long, but that's just my opinion. I'm a nobody. I do love Peter's films.

I hope it doesn't get to the point where I cannot express my opinions about filmmaking around here anymore.

You can express your opinions about filmmaking around here so long as you say that Red is the best and that all other cameras suck and aren't good enough.

 

[Tom Lowe]

You can express your opinions about filmmaking around here so long as you say that Red is the best and that all other cameras suck and aren't good enough.

Well, I always say THAT, so I'm safe. :sifone:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't see why prosthetic make-up is any less valid than CGI, they are all just tools that need to be applied appropriately, and one can argue that if only 5% of a person's physical appearance, for example, needs to be changed to create a desired look, then perhaps it makes more sense to change that 5% with make-up rather than recreate the person 100% with CGI.

In other words, it only makes sense to create an all-CGI hobbit if the hobbit design suggests that this is the best way to accomplish this.

There are a lot of advantages of having physical things in front of the camera for other actors to react to, having something that interacts with the light on location, etc. Some of the best CGI work in movies tends to be blended with physical and mechanical effects so that you don't know where the live elements ends and the digital element begins.

I mean, if Cameron made "Titanic" today, perhaps he would have not built the full-scale Titanic out there next to the ocean in Mexico and instead had his actors run around an all-blue soundstage and painted in the boat in post... but I'm not so sure that it would have turned out as well. Generally we can tell even today when something was built for real versus is entirely created with CGI. "Avatar" certainly created a new world, but I can't say that it has the same realistic textures of the jungle location of "Thin Red Line"; I can't imagine that movie being as good had they faked all of it on a soundstage with bluescreen and CGI.

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Tom, so the LOTR trilogy didnt work for you because Hobbits and Elves and Orcs were played by humans?

When I imagine Hobbits, Elves and Orcs, I pretty much saw what Jackson did in LOTR. Humans with adjustments that were skillfully made by WETA.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Yeah, but David, the Thin Red Line is a story about humans in a real, historical place. Of course, I agree with you 100% in such a case.

But we are talking about dragons and goblins and elves, etc, running around in magical fantasy lands that have never existed. I'm not against using real sets (Empire Strikes Back vs Attack of the Clones), but at some point, once you start to rack up a certain percentage of characters and locations that are 100% CGI with performance and motion capture, then it probably makes sense just to go whole hog. The integration of human, video-captured actors with the CG elements was the weakest link, visually, in AVATAR for me. The humans, shot on HD cameras, appeared too "low res" and "pasted in" compared to the super clean, sharp and pristine CGI denizens of Pandora.

I mean, we can all watch a great animated movie, right? So what's wrong with a "photo-real" fantasy world full of non-human characters? People seemed to LOVE it Avatar, considering it was the biggest film in the history of all the world. Maybe Cameron was on to something?

My only point is that I think -- personally -- that the Hobbit is the ideal project for this new technology. Even Gandalf could be a more "stylized" human -- even more epic! He doesn't have to be a human actor.

 

[Charles Angus]

The story is full of magic and wonder, and the visuals need to carry it to its full potential.

Which is why you shouldn't use VFX when a real-world solution will do. I have yet to see a movie where the CG wasn't laughable one year later.

And yet those guys standing around in rubber masks in the cantina still look as good as they ever did.

Funny how that works.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Which is why you shouldn't use VFX when a real-world solution will do.

Okay, sure, I agree with your general premise. But what happens when 90% of your characters are CGI?

Let's say for example that you are making a film about a strange race of aliens on a far-flung planet. The aliens look nothing like humans at all, so the entire cast is CGI.

At some point, it might actually become more difficult to incorporate any type of live, physical set into the production, when 90% of everything else already 3D digital characters, sets and FX.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

It certainly is a valid approach, creating a fantasy world wholesale with CGI so that you aren't limited by the physical world and locations, weather, i.e. reality. It has a certain logic to it, no different in some ways than the 1933 "King Kong" using sets and stop-motion to create a world rather than go on location, as did the 1977 "King Kong".

But the other equally valid approach is to take the David Lean approach, shoot as much as you can in real locations, and then augment it with efx, sort of like how the original "Star Wars" movies went to Tunisia, Norway, etc. (or LOTR in New Zealand) and set the fantasy against an exotic but real backdrop as much as possible. And with modern CGI, you can do so much to augment those real locations, expand them, add cloud formations, etc.

I mean, when I saw "Planet Earth" on Blu-Ray, I thought some of the locations they filmed at could have been some alien planet, they were so exotic.

It's just a different way of tackling a fantasy movie, one is to treat it like some sort of work of designed art, like the cover to a science fiction novel, and the other is to treat it a bit like a faux documentary, as if you found this location and filmed it, and to pull it off, you use as much real elements as you can in the frame. After all, Middle Earth is still the Earth, it's not an alien planet. So a lot of natural elements should still seem believable, recognizable. Of course LOTR is a mix of both approaches, sometimes it is heavily created -- on stages, with miniatures, and with CGI -- and other times, it's fairly straightforward location photography, people tromping over real mountains and in forests, through streams, etc. I think that was Peter Jackson's intention, to ground the movie with enough real-world elements that Middle Earth seemed like a real place, not a total act of imagination. Now maybe with newer CGI technology and the problems of CGI + 3D, he'll opt for more creation of environments and characters in post for "The Hobbit", I don't know, but he doesn't strike me as the sort of filmmaker who wants to just animate the whole movie ala "Beowulf" or 60% of "Avatar", I think he likes building sets, holding props, and going out on location.

 

[Tom Lowe]

It certainly is a valid approach, creating a fantasy world wholesale with CGI so that you aren't limited by the physical world and locations, weather, i.e. reality. It has a certain logic to it, no different in some ways than the 1933 "King Kong" using sets and stop-motion to create a world rather than go on location, as did the 1977 "King Kong".

....

It's just a different way of tackling a fantasy movie, one is to treat it like some sort of work of designed art, like the cover to a science fiction novel

And this is what I am talking about. Essentially, the Navi sections of Avatar were 100% CGI. Cameron literally took inspiration from old album covers and sci fi/fantasy art, as well scouring the strangest landscapes on Earth, and then "heightening" their magical look. All the jungles in the Navi scenes, all the characters, every blade of grass, every sunset, every drop of water -- everything was CGI.

And audiences were dazzled.

I remember my dad (who hated Phantom Menace and called it a "cartoon") absolutely loved the dragon scenes and the avatars. People are thirsting for this type of fantasy, magic and adventure. It has been sorely missing from cinemas for decades.

All I am saying here is that my approach to making The Hobbit would be different from how LOTR was made. Technology has changed a lot.

 

[Joe D'Arcy]

My preference is to use CGI to enhance what is real not replace it. But at the end of the day, 'each to their own.'

Peter Jackson gets to decide his preferences based on the fact that his track record dictates that his decisions are good ones artistically and translate to profit at the box office.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I thought a huge part of the magic in LOTR was that it was a real place. That if I just went over the next hill I might find a magical land full of dwarves, elves and hobbits.

The more stylized that world becomes and the more detached it is from my world the less exciting I think I would find it. There was something intoxicating about Peter Jackson's LOTR treatment because it felt so real. It felt like history. It felt like it might (just might) actually be true.

I disagree though about CG always looking fake a year later. I think a lot of CG still looks amazing and there is a world of stop motion and rubber suits which looks silly. I think gollum still looks good. I think Gollum as a rubber suit would been rediculous. But I don't think the treatment of "human like" non-humans was mishandled in LOTR. Even the handful of Goblins in the films looked good.

http://www.movie-erudition.com/vide...ns-Tomb-Extended-Edition-Amazing-Quality.html

And remember that's 2001

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I'm glad David said he thought a lot of Avatar looked like a big videogame, because that was the same feeling I had.

That's one of the reasons why I also personally loved The Fellowship of The Ring more, then The Return of The King.
It has a more emotional climax, but it was also much more exciting to see the small hobbits fight against 7 black riders, then it was to see a complete CGI army fight hundreds of CGI elephants. I liked all the LOTR movies , but it became a bit too much CGI at the end. (which was also one of the things I hated in King Kong... I loved the real BUILD UP, BEFORE they got on the island...)
And, for instance, I really DID NOT like Avatar.

That's why I love Christopher Nolan's approach to shooting (shoot as many things for real as you can). Yes, people really do see the difference between CGI and real things. I also agree that I'm more in excitement seeing hand on hand combat of a guy against another guy in very good prosthetics, then it is to see a complete CGI army fight each other. To give a comparison: the battles in Braveheart were much more hard and believable then the ones in LOTR. One used CGI just to make the excisting extras larger in numbers, but modestly, and just choreographed a lot of real action with real stuntmen. The other is just a bunch of videogame-like characters fighting each other.

Good comparison with Titanic also... That movie really enthrilled a lot more then Avatar, and one of the things is that there is soooo much obvious realism in what was shot. (there was CGI, but modestly, and there was miniature work, but you couldn't see it - I often think a good miniature looks better then a CGI landscape).

I'm not against CGI. But I just have to agree with the fact that too much CGI looks like a video game, and I really feel that I get emotionally much more drawn into movies where you can FEEL that real things have been shot (Titanic, Braveheart, The Dark Knight, Once Upon A Time in America where you can feel these huge sets, Jurassic Park 1, Minority Report which used CGI very wisely, the old Indiana Jones-movies, ...)

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Audiences were enthralled with "Avatar" but they were also enthralled with LOTR -- I don't think that makes an argument either way for an all-CGI approach. After all, we have had heavily CGI'd movies that haven't done well with audiences ("Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" for example.)

 

[Subhadip Sen]

And remember that's 2001

I was wondering when this monumental film would be mentioned in a CGI vs Non-CGI debate. Personally, I am not as interested in watching pretty grass and pretty mountains. Good visual, to me, is innovative and meaningful composition, montage and mise-en-scene. So, this is why 2001 remains a transcendent experience, despite using primitive technology, and Avatar remains utterly bland visually. Though I can understand why the audiences loved the perfect and paradise-like CGI environments.

Basically, the age old saying, it's not the technology, but what you use it for, and how well you use it. This has been said time and again for cameras, and it applies to visual effects as well.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Keep in mind, though, that The Hobbit is very much a known commodity in terms of the story. So it does come down to deciding which technology and visual techniques will be used. The story is already known.

 

[MiguelOrtega]

Gollum was easily the weakest element of the LOTR and the biggest thing that will age it and make it look like a POS in due time. So much so that I really hoped they saved their layers and data and can eventually re-render LOTR with a new Gollum.

Considering its such a POS, it must break your heart knowing that not once in your life will you accomplish anything that remotely comes close to that technical and artistic achievement that you easily discredited as a POS.

Im not even trying to be offensive, but i just find it laughable how easy you guys discredit the work of
Hundreds of artists many whom are the modern day master painters, sculptors.etc.

I mean do you see golumn, or any other character and for once really really think about what level of understanding of anatomy, skins reaction to light, hair, cloth, animation , muscle systems etc etc etc it took to be up on that screen Just so u can call it a POS in passing?

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I'm glad David said he thought a lot of Avatar looked like a big videogame, because that was the same feeling I had.

That's one of the reasons why I also personally loved The Fellowship of The Ring more, then The Return of The King.
It has a more emotional climax, but it was also much more exciting to see the small hobbits fight against 7 black riders, then it was to see a complete CGI army fight hundreds of CGI elephants.

As a counter balance. While I agree that I got less and less interested in the films after FOTR (Then again I REALLLLLLLLLLLLLY liked FOTR so there was a high starting point haha.) I think the Prologue battle in Fellowship is the best battle on film ever made and it's almost all CGI. When I saw Fellowship of the ring and that battle right off the bat I was giddy imagining an hour and a half of that.

The problems I had with ROTK were soley directorial. And unlike Fellowship and the Two Towers I actually thought ROTK's extended edition was not only an improvement but necessary. The battle is confusing and boring in ROTK and then it's fixed by Deus Ex Machina.

The "Darkness" which was supposed to be this opressive depressing gloom was like partly cloudy with a little fog. They had to cut it down so much in editing for the standard edition that they cross cut from day to night to day to night to day to night several times with several people in a matter of minutes.

And none of the battle feels like a battle. There was no strategy. No archers. No give and take. Most of the shots were like Google Maps vantage point in order to encompass the entire armies.

The battle in Two Towers was much better even though it was smaller. It was oppressive. It was menacing. You felt like both parties had strategy and organization. There were attacks and counter attacks. Ground lost. Ground gained. Return of the king in the normal edition had none of that.

But I don't blame CGI for that. CGI was also used in the prologue which was mind blowingly good. And CGI was used in the Siege of Helm's Deep and that was amazing. It just got rushed and sloppy in the third film.

Gotta say Gollum looked pretty good too especially for being almost a decade old:

And for something a little more recent to demonstrate what's now possible. Good luck doing that with prosthetics and having it look anywhere near that lifelike. It's pretty much perfect. If there actually were tentacle faces I wouldn't have even questioned its authenticity:

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Considering its such a POS, it must break your heart knowing that not once in your life will you accomplish anything that remotely comes close to that technical and artistic achievement that you easily discredited as a POS.

Im not even trying to be offensive, but i just find it laughable how easy you guys discredit the work of
Hundreds of artists many whom are the modern day master painters, sculptors.etc.

I mean do you see golumn, or any other character and for once really really think about what level of understanding of anatomy, skins reaction to light, hair, cloth, animation , muscle systems etc etc etc it took to be up on that screen Just so u can call it a POS in passing?

Are you suggesting that people don't have the right to have a negative opinion if they themselves can't do it? Sorry, but that just makes no sense. Most film viewers are not filmmakers, are they not entitled to an opinion? People are entitled to their opinion. I do think that most of criticism hurled at artists come from a simple difference in opinion between the person with the opinion and the artist behind the work. I think most people respect that, and even when they criticize, it's more "I would have liked to seen it differently" rather than "The director is useless, I could do a better job", or so I hope anyway.

Art is subjective, but it's also taken for granted. I try my best to understand and see the director's perspective. After all, what is right for the director is right for the film. What is right for me is not necessarily right for the film. And really, I would never appreciate a work as much if it were designed to please me. It has to be sincere. If I ever find something I don't myself like, I ask myself "Why would the director make this choice?". And so on and so forth... In this way, it is possible to appreciate a diverse range of works. Indeed, some of my favourite films seemed impenetrable at first. But I don't expect everyone to do the same - it is perfectly normal to see a film, respond to it based on your expectations, praise what meets your idea of good and criticize what meets your idea of bad, to put it bluntly.

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

And for something a little more recent to demonstrate what's now possible. Good luck doing that with prosthetics and having it look anywhere near that lifelike. It's pretty much perfect. If there actually were tentacle faces I wouldn't have even questioned its authenticity:

Good points, Gavin, and I actually also liked the first battle in the prologue of FOTR, but maybe you missed my point: I don't have a problem with CGI in general (like I said, I did like LOTR, I like Minority Report where it is used wisely, it's also used in Titanic), but I don't like if people go overblown with it without any senseless direction or emotional feeling anymore (like Avatar). And I think that having that emotional disconnection is something you can also have if the stuff looks too much like a video game. I think people still have a more instinctive emotional reaction to 'real' shot things. I'm of course trying to compare the same situations. Like the real locations from New Zealand in LOTR versus the complete CGI landscapes in Avatar.
It's most definately not a black and white situation where CGI is bad and real is always good, but I just want to support the notion that I prefer having real actors and film as much on real locations as possible and not do everything in CGI just because it's possible. Like Spielberg said: actors respond differently on a real set (and directors too!) in comparison with a whole blue-screen environment. (Something George Lucas doesn't seem to have grasped).

And the picture of Pirates of the Caribbean, Davey Jones: I agree. I saw that movie in the theater, and my god, that face looks VERY real, I just cannot make the CGI out. It helps that of course there was a great actor beneath it.

 

[MiguelOrtega]

Are you suggesting that people don't have the right to have a negative opinion if they themselves can't do it? Sorry, but that just makes no sense. Most film viewers are not filmmakers, are they not entitled to an opinion?

i would hope most people on this forum are filmmakers AND artists/craftsmen of some sort. and I personally respect all forms of art ESPECIALLY if i cannot do it. to think someone has taken any craft so serious as to reach a level of perfection is amazing to me. So to answer your question, no i dont think people should not have an opinion but I would expect an educated opinion from a community of filmmakers.

If find ballet to be boring, to call a ballet a POS because of that or any other reason is ridiculous. especially from so called "artists".