This week the folks at Sony Entertainment have released a new Amazing Spider-Man Second Screen app before its companion Blu-Ray Disc hits the market. With this app you’ll be working on your iPad, Sony Tablet S, or Sony Xperia Tablet S to see content related to the film feature even before the Blu-ray is released. Once the Blu-ray is out on the market and you’ve got it home with you, you’ll have companion content available with bonuses galore!
This app currently has a collection of media that relates to the process included in the creation of the Spider-Man franchise reboot. This app will also have new content each week until the Blu-ray hits store shelves on November 9th – just a month away! This app will then work with two interactive modes – Timeline and Production – both of them immersing you in the Amazing Spider-Man universe in ways you’ve never before experienced with a home-bound video.
In Production Mode you’ll be working with media involving Filmmakers, Story, Cast, Stunts, Location, and Design, each of these ready for “sling” action. Once you’ve got your tablet connected to your Blu-ray player, a quick “sling” will push the content you’ve got in your Production Mode interface to your full HD television – neat stuff!
Timeline Mode is also included, here connecting with your Blu-ray Disc to show scene-specific trivia bits, storyboards, featurettes, interviews, and content galore related to the video you’re watching. This app is available for download from the iTunes app store as well as through the Google Play app store right this minute – totally free – just look for The Amazing Spider-Man Second Screen App. Check it out!
This week we got to speak to the multi-talented Genndy Tartakovsky about his direction of the new-to-theaters animated feature Hotel Transylvania. This film is a big step in an already star-studded path for Tartakovsky whose creative career also crossed paths with or was straight up responsible for Dexter’s Laboratory, Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and soon Popeye – another animated feature coming soon. Have read here as we trade words with the director on his new vision for a monster-filled hotel filled with the likes of Adam Sandler, Steve Buscemi, and Andy Sandberg.
The story we’re seeing here with Hotel Transylvania is one with lots of monsters all having a fabulous time staying in a hotel run by Dracula. Of course Dracula has a daughter who wants to see the world, this all coming to a head when a human named Jonathan arrives at the hotel by chance – and there’s not supposed to be any humans at the hotel. Thus ensues a lovely comedy fest crowned with the top-notch visuals of Sony Pictures Animation and the music of Mark Mothersbaugh.
What we’re interested in is how Tartakovsky handled this movie with his past experience in more traditional animation in mind. How does Tartakovsky work with TV shows vs a star-studded feature for the big screen?
Genndy Tartakovsky: I think that one of the main differences is the pressure. With a TV show you work for multiple shows and when the show comes out, if one episode comes out and doesn’t perform as well as it could, the audience usually forgives you. Then the next episode is going to be better. There’s a pressure to perform, but it’s OK if you have an off episode once in a while.
With a movie, you have opening weekend and then that’s it. Everything is done for that opening weekend, and if you don’t get the characters right, and the humor and the entertainment and everything, then it fails and all that work is gone. It’ll be gone within 6-8 weeks and then that’s it.
So to think of it like you have one shot, it makes you think quite differently.
SG: You’ve had quite an expansive career when it comes to animation – how would you describe the difference between shows you’ve worked on like Dexter’s Lab or all the way back to Batman: The Animated Series back up to Star Wars: The Clone Wars and this new film Hotel Transylvania?
GT: In a way it’s hard to compare because one is CG and one is 2D. The two are very obviously different in the way we use the pencil. The one big difference for me, personally, is – when I worked on Dexter, especially – is I know how to do every different part of animation production. From the lighting to the camera work to the sound editing, mixing; I’ve done it all before.
Some things I can do better than others, obviously, but I know how to do it. So if there was something to troubleshoot, I could have an opinion about it. But then on CG, I don’t know how it works – to fix something, I have to trust my official tech supervisor Dan Kramer. All I could say is “yeah I don’t like the way that’s working,” but never say “let’s use this different lens to make it work.”
GT: I could just say “this isn’t working, let’s try a different way to try and fix it.” It was something that was very difficult for me because I’m so used to problem solving and having this push that’s a big part of being a director, in my experience. Especially on technical things – “why doesn’t this camera look right?” And then I’d figure it out. So in our production I couldn’t do any of it because I just didn’t know.
After a while I realized that I’m in good hands, and it became easier that way. In some ways it was a lot easier, in some ways it was a lot harder.
SG: You recently did a Reddit AMA post answering questions from the public – could you describe the changes in the way you’re able to communicate with viewers of your shows and now movies over this rather quickly evolving time period you’ve been working in?
GT: I remember when we started on Dexter, the internet was just sort of taking off – and we never went online to see the reactions. And now you can get thousands and thousands of reactions to a movie or TV show. I remember when we were doing [Samurai] Jack and it was taking off and after each episode we’d go and see what people thought, and on Sym-Bionic Titan it was even more intense and especially on Clone Wars. You could go to Star Wars [online] and totally see that all the fans were talking about if we messed it up or not.
What’s great for television is you get instant feedback. It’s a more specific audience that’s talking back, it’s not everybody, but you definitely get a clue, and see what people like, if your stuff is landing. It was really hard on Dexter – we would do an episode, we’d air it, I’d watch it at home, and I’d go “yeah I guess people liked it, I have no idea.”
GT: Then on Monday you’d get a rating, “oh I did a 2.2″, and that’s it. It wasn’t until I started doing comic book conventions and film conventions that I actually met some of the people who love the show and they would say how much they loved it. Then our numbers would slowly start going up, and you’d start to realize – “oh, it’s getting popular”.
It’s a really hard thing to capture, the popularity, especially when, in the beginning when Cartoon Network only had 12 million viewers. You know when Nickelodeon has a 120 or 160 or something, it’s different in such a mass. But what’s so much fun about a movie is that I can go to a theater to see if I’ve failed or succeeded instantly.
SG: What’s the difference between the built-in fanbase you had with Star Wars: Clone Wars and the audience you’ll have with Hotel Transylvania? Is there a big difference?
GT: For sure when you’re doing something that’s built-in like Star Wars, it’s all about getting it right – for yourself being a fan, and for the people who know the material and the last thing you want to do is be insincere about the material and change it so much that people hate it. Like saying “that was a huge disaster!” But here you’re presenting a new idea.
And you’re selling it for the first time, so you want to try to do something – you’re trying to sell your point of view. You want to do something that’s new and fresh and people have an experience watching. It’s a really big pet peeve of mine to – you know, I’m selling my point of view, it’s what I get hired for. And if my point of view is the same as 5 other directors, then I’m screwed. Replaceable.
But if my point of view is very unique, and strong, and people can sense it, then I’m much more successful that way. To me, that’s what the difference is.
Stay tuned for more entertainment coverage straight from the source here on SlashGear and be sure to check out Hotel Transylvania in theaters right this minute across the USA! This film has already set a new record for highest-grossing September opening weekend with a budget of $85 million and total earnings of $51.1 million – keep it growing!
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could go to the movie theater and watch as many movies as you wanted, and only pay a flat monthly fee? That’s actually becoming reality with a new service called MoviePass. It’s been in beta for some time now, but the company officially launched the new service today with an iPhone app and charge card combo.
For between $24.99 and $39.99 per month (fees vary depending on where you live), you get one movie ticket per day (3D and IMAX showings sadly aren’t supported). Then, simply just go to the theater, pick out a movie you want to see, and then hop on your iPhone to select the movie from the MoviePass app. The app will then unlock the debit card, and you can use it to buy your movie ticket like you would with any regular charge card.
Obviously, there are huge savings to be had, and it almost sounds too good to be true. You could easily pay your monthly fee with just a few movies, and if you actually went and watched one movie per day, that can easily add up to over $250. However, there are a few caveats that come with the savings.
First, you can’t order tickets in advance, so you won’t be able to guarantee yourself a ticket to a midnight showing of a hyped-up movie. Also, the service is invite-only, which is a huge bummer, since people that are getting access to the service first won’t be able to invite their friends until Thanksgiving.
However, I think it’s a genius idea, especially for people who are always going to the theater. Even if you don’t go to the theater that often, seeing just 3-5 movies per month on the weekends and such will pay for the monthly subscription fee, so the service might be relevant to more people than you think.
The MoviePass app is only available on the iPhone, but the company said that an Android version of the app will arrive in the coming weeks.
While MoviePass was in early beta, it got more than a small amount of pushback from theaters that didn’t like someone changing the price formula without their explicit say-so. The company just found an end-run around that conspicuous obstacle. It’s releasing both an iPhone app and a reloadable card that, when combined, let MoviePass’ effectively unlimited subscription model work at just about any US theater. The app unlocks the card for a specific showing; after that, it’s only a matter of swiping the plastic at a payment kiosk like any old credit card. It’s not as sophisticated as NFC or Pay With Square, to be sure, but it should keep the rude surprises to a minimum. Both the iOS app and the card require an invitation to the $30 monthly service if you’re eager to get watching movies today. If either is too limiting, there’s promises of both an Android app and wider availability in the future.
Any review of the movie LOOPER that tells you essentially any elements of the plot is going to be written by a jerk who doesn’t want you to get the full movie experience – take that to the bank. What we’re going to talk about here and now is how you need to see the movie and what sort of mood you need to be in. LOOPER is a time travel movie when you go into it, and a bit of a baffling mystery wrapped inside an enigma when you walk out of it – but you wont be walking right out of it, you’ll be sitting in the chair thinking about what you just watched, just like you’re supposed to while the credits are rolling.
Do you remember what it felt like to see The Dark Knight in the theater? If you didn’t see The Dark Knight (the one with the Joker in it, not “Rises” which just came out), you’ll have an idea of what this film did to me. I’ve seen some movies recently that were entertaining, to be sure – Total Recall was a fun adventure, Men in Black III was a great mix of comedy and relatively fun action – but none were movies I told even my co-workers that they had to see. LOOPER is a movie I’m telling my co-workers, friends, and family members that they have to see – in the theater, no less.
LOOPER is a movie that’s made for the movie theater. There are movies that are made to be watched a bunch of times. The Avengers was certainly made to be a hard-hitting big-screen entertainment force like no other, but made absolutely sure to be re-watchable in just about as big a way as any movie has been in the history of action films. The Amazing Spider-Man is another example – rather similar to The Avengers in that it’s comic book-based and made to keep the brand alive, to sell toys, and perhaps third most important, to present an engaging film experience for the sake of making a great movie in and of itself. LOOPER is a movie that’s made to be a great movie.
If you plan on seeing LOOPER, please do yourself a favor and see it in a movie theater. Don’t bother with the popcorn and the pop (or soda, if you’re not living up here in Minnesota), because you won’t need to pass the time by eating and drinking like you do with so many movies these days. It wont be an issue for you.
The plot of this film plays second fiddle to the execution, to the way the story is revealed – you can guess a lot of the answers to the questions the characters in the movie have before they do – and you won’t be disappointed when you do. What I mean is that this movie does not assume that you’re an idiot – this isn’t the kind of science fiction / action / horror movie where people scream because someone’s jumped out at them or because they’ve realized that their family has been ripped apart – no way. Instead, loud bangs, revelations, and visual jams on your eyes are used to astound your senses – and not always to make you say “oh wow.”
There’s also a bit of comedy in this production. LOOPER takes itself seriously until just before you’d normally say “oh come on, that’s stupid” in any other movie in which time travel is a plot element. For those of you wondering about the time travel bit in this movie, I recommend you see two things before you enter the theater.
The movie 12 Monkeys has Bruce Willis and a time machine – and it’s generally regarded as rather absurd in how serious it takes itself, especially in the universe of time travel movies. It’s almost certainly because of that movie – along with the other surprisingly large amount of time travel movies that have made it into the main stream – that Joe (Willis) and Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have a brief screaming match in a diner about how unimportant the details are. The details being how time travel works and what paradoxes are – in so many words.
This film takes beautiful futurescapes and conceptual industrial design that every Blade Runner lover can’t resist and cuts a giant hole from our present time directly into a future possibility of an environment. The ideas you see here outside the time travel concept are quite engaging, and interesting to see as each future vision film is, with those responsible for constructing this environment presenting the future they believe could very well be part of a timeline we’re on right this minute.
I believe it – for the most part.
There are some points at which you can tell that the creators of the film gave in to the now nearly cliche ideas of transparent smartphones with no border and the promise of flying motorbikes, but for the most part they serve their purposes in the story perfectly well.
The acting in the movie is up there in the great films each of the top actors and actresses in the movie have done, more or less. Bruce Willis is fresh, certainly making this film an effort that’s set to be a point in his career he can be proud of.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt took this movie to the bank, too, making an extraordinary character out of Young Joe, very much a young version of Willis – and executive producing the film as well.
I’m having difficulty finding anything negative to say about the movie, even when I make an effort to nitpick. You’ll find reviewers across the board saying this is a “must see” movie, must see for action lovers, for science fiction lovers, and of course for the lovers of both Gordon Levitt and Willis. They can be proud of this production, that’s for certain.
It’s almost time for the big drop of the new science fiction action time travel blockbuster LOOPER to hit theaters, so SlashGear took the opportunity to speak with none other than Dr. Edward Farhi of real-life time travel study fame. What we learn from Farhi, aka Director at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, is that time travel into the future is indeed very possible – theoretically – but that backwards movement – like LOOPER suggests – just isn’t in the cards.
Farhi and colleagues Sean M. Carroll and Alan H. Guth worked on a report by the name of “An obstacle to building a time machine” which lets it be known that the amount of mass that would have to be destroyed to make a time machine work would essentially break apart half the universe. That’s a time machine that travels along closed timelike curves – what we’re interested in is a machine that jams a single human back in a metal tube from 30 years in the future to our own present – or in the case of the LOOPER plotline, just a few decades into the future (and 30 years from then.)
Dr. Edward Farhi : There are two forms of relativity – one’s the Special Theory of Relativity [STR] and the other is the General Theory of Relativity. Relativity tells us that the rate at which clocks run depends on the speed of the system. And when we talk about clocks, we’re talking about the actual flow of time. It’s not something that just feels like it’s going at a different rate, it’s actually going at a different rate.
One thing we know is that if you could get into a rocket in space and go close to the speed of light and return to Earth, you could arrange it so that a short period of time elapsed according to you would be a much longer period of time elapsed on the Earth. For example I could put you, Chris, on a rocket, and you would say that 6 months have passed and you’d come back to Earth and 100 years have passed on the Earth – if you had kids, you would meet your great great grandchildren.
We call that “skipping into the future.”
Farhi : It’s actually allowed by the laws of physics. That rate at which you’re clock runs depends on the speed – another example is the GPS satellite. When you’re in your car you communicate with these satellites that triangulate your location. It’s very important that you understand that the rate at which the clocks run on those satellites is important – if you didn’t take into account the fact that the clocks are running at a little different rate because they were moving, you’d be driving in the ditch.
Moving clocks run at different rates, and that allows you to skip into the future.
The other thing is that if you’ve got a strong gravitational field it’ll also affect the way clocks run. So if I took you and I lowered you into a strong gravitational field, your clock would run slower. And if you were watching out, if you were watching me on the Earth, you would see me moving quickly and I would see you moving slowly and when we came back together again, you would have aged less than I. Those are real effects, there’s no doubt about these things.
Farhi : If you took that little trip and you went into the future and you wanted to come back, that would be a little more problematic. One of the reasons we can see it would be a little more problematic is that if you could go into the future and come back, then maybe you could today just go back – and if you could go back in time, you could prevent your parents from coming together and making you. That’s paradoxical. Most physicists, I would say, because of those paradoxes, going back in time doesn’t seem too possible.
Check out our LOOPER review tonight and see the full film out in theaters this weekend across the USA! This is a film that’s made for those who love loud blasts, massive kills, and massive amounts of mystery. It’s an investigative adventure from start to finish, one you’ll not want to miss on the big screen – and specifically there too, it’s a real experience.
There’s tons of extra cameras and colorful chairs hanging around Google‘s Headquarters in California. That’s because it’s the set of what is surely going to be an awesome new movie — or a giant commercial for Google. The epic duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson from Wedding Crashers are back, this time for a new movie called “The Internship.”
If you didn’t like Wedding Crashers then I don’t know what to tell you, because it was awesome. The duo are at it again shooting a new movie that while mostly was shot off of Google’s lawn, recently they’ve been right at the HQ having some fun. Since they couldn’t give up their entire office for months and months, the movies been shot at Georgia Tech, and bits and pieces at Google’s HQ. Awesome right?
That isn’t all either. We’re expecting tons of Googlers themselves to star as extras in the film. Those include Co-founder Sergery Brin, and top dogs like Hugo Barra, and more. This might not be quite like “The Social Network” but I’m betting it’ll be pretty awesome. Isn’t everything that Google does awesome? For more details you’ll surely want to check out this short video clip starring my man from Swingers, Vince Vaughn himself:
While Bloomberg reported that Google doesn’t have any financials involved with the movie, you have to wonder a bit with so many big hitters on the ground. Apparently Eric Schmidt interviewed Vince Vaughn for an employee talk (which should be online soon) and even Sergey Brin hosted a dinner and what surely was a fun party at his property in California for much of the movie crew. Here’s what Google had to say about the film:
We’re excited that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson chose the Google campus as a backdrop for their first film together since ‘Wedding Crashers.’ We’re sure they’ll have a humorous take on life in Silicon Valley and look forward to seeing the result.”
So more on Google. Sergey Brin’s special Google Project X toys will apparently be making a few cameos during the film too. We are expecting to see Google Glass (which we’re excited about here) as well as Google’s Driver-less cars and more. Vaughn states he wrote the script without a major company in mind but after meeting a few from Google, decided to take that approach. Good stuff. I can’t wait to see it!
Fox embraced a radical thought when it outlined its Digital HD initiative earlier this month: customers are more likely to buy digital movies if the content isn’t artificially delayed and priced to match the releases on conventional discs. The studio is about to see if that gamble on common sense pays off. As of today, you’ll find 600-plus Fox movies ready to buy or rent in HD across every major digital video store in the US, with many downloads cleared to arrive ahead of their physical counterparts at lower prices that reflect a disc-free reality. The media giant has also decided to play nicely with Google after a longstanding absence, putting its movies and TV shows on Google Play Movies and YouTube. Its tentpole movie release Prometheus is unsurprisingly being used as the prime incentive to try Digital HD; the title is available online three weeks before the Blu-ray launch at a more reasonable $15 price. The sci-fi thriller is even Fox’s first movie destined for UltraViolet cloud lockers. Only Americans will have expanded access to movies and TV at first, but it shouldn’t be too long before many countries can be creeped out by Michael Fassbender’s android — including on their Android devices.
If Panasonic didn’t have attention from movie producers before, it just might as of this week. Joining the quickly developing tradition of camera makers producing elaborate short movies as technology demos, the company has let cinematographer Philip Bloom wield (and tease) a “brand new G camera” to record Genesis, a fast-paced mini-drama showing a man’s race to meet his love before it’s too late. While Bloom can’t talk much about the hardware in question until the 17th, he’s allowed to confirm that the upcoming Micro Four Thirds body relies on a “superb” 72Mbps All-I codec for video — letting it capture a sprint through the streets without the compression artifacts of the AVCHD format used by most mirrorless cameras. Panasonic’s upcoming shooter also touts “much improved” results in the dark, Bloom says. It all sounds very tempting, especially if it turns out that Panasonic’s inadvertent leaks are for the same camera we see in action here. The full movie is available after the break, and Bloom has the behind-the-scenes details at the source link.
Ever been tempted to rent a movie again, but thought the price was just a little too dear? Google may soon be willing to haggle a deal. One of its newly-granted patents could automatically lower the price of repurchase-friendly content, such as a Google Play Movies rental, depending on how likely you are to pull the trigger. Its algorithm weighs your personal tastes and repurchasing habits against those of your peers: if the code senses you’ll be relatively stingy, you’ll get a better discount. The analysis could even factor in the nature of the content itself. A thoughtful movie, ownership of the soundtrack or just a lot of related searches could lead to a repurchase at the usual price, while a simple action flick with no previous interest may bring the discount into effect. We don’t know if Google will offer these extra-personal discounts to the public at any point in the future, but if you suddenly notice a lot of follow-up bargains in Google Play, you’ll know how they came to be.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
