This week the folks at Universal Pictures are offering up a closer look behind the scenes at The Bourne Legacy, the next chapter in the super-agent film series. A larger conspiracy has been uncovered in the newest installment of the Bourne timeline, a genetically enhanced agent by the name of Aaron Cross – played by Jeremy Renner – explains his excitement in joining the series as the cameras roll on this action-packed extravaganza. With a storyline that plays out alongside the third film and the Treadstone program, this movie keeps with the fast-paced explosion-loving idiom of the first three films while expanding upon the universe with a whole new chapter in the world of secret agent warfare.
The science of this film – inside the storyline, anyway – is in the modification of the body of the lead character, Aaron Cross. He is subject to both changes in muscle efficiency and pain suppression in the government’s quest to create a perfect force of one-man armies to take out their enemies under heavy cover. Edward Norton plays a vital role in making sure these human experiments do not get out of control, his character Eric Byer subscribing to a “higher morality” as any classic “license to kill” official very well should.
You’ll find de-railed train cars, grinding motorcycles, and lots and lots of gunshots in this film that’ll certainly rely on your believing in the unbelievable in and out of quick-action shots for the entirety of the feature. Pay close attention to the clip near the end of the first video in the embedded player above to see Cross jump straight down quite a few stories off a building to snap the neck of a police officer to see what’s meant by “you must simply believe.”
This film will be in theaters on 8/10/2012 – pick up some early release tickets now or get in line, this is gonna be a big one!
Those of you jumping for joy at having just seen the Batman movie you’ve been anticipating for four years can continue to to do a flip as both Anne Hathaway and Christopher Nolan have suggested a Catwoman movie may be in the works. Firs you’ll want to speak with Hathaway whose noted that it’d basically only be possible if Nolan is attached to the movie as well. With the Dark Knight trilogy director connected to the new Superman movie as producer, hypothesizing the same credit for Catwoman may not be that far off.
Christopher Nolan has stated that he is “done” with the Batman franchise, but there’s always room for involvement in other roles than the director’s seat. Nolan noted with Access Hollywood that Hathaway was not only more than great as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, she’s certainly worthy of a follow-up as well.
“She’s an incredible character and we’re very excited to see her and hopefully we’ll leave people wanting more. … I certainly think she deserves [another chance], she’s incredible.” – Nolan
Speaking with Digital Spy this week, Hathaway confirmed that “it would be lovely” to continue to continue the Catwoman story from the point its at in The Dark Knight Rises. She also confirmed that she definitely did not base her Catwoman on past portrayals of the character, noting that “I thought it was probably best to focus on being a part of Chris Nolan’s Gotham City.”
“I think it would be lovely to see more of [Catwoman], but only if it’s with the right people. She lives in this Gotham City and so it would have to be established by the people who have made this Gotham City. For me, at least.” – Hathaway
You can see The Dark Knight Rises in theaters across the USA this week – get out there and experience the last of the trilogy!
Movie fans visiting Comic-Con got a chance to see the first trailer for the film The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp as Tonto. About 6000 people packed the San Diego Convention Center yesterday and were treated to a brief trailer for the film. Sadly, there seems to be no YouTube footage of the trailer to be found.
The short trailer showed Depp decked out in long hair and makeup to make him look like a Native American. In the scene, Tonto rides beneath a speeding train. The Lone Ranger in the film is being played by Armie Hammer with Helena Bonham Carter strangely paying the main female character. I’m not a huge fan of Carter’s work this side of Fight Club.
Jerry Bruckheimer is producing the movie, and the director is Gore Verbinski. Depp and Verbinski worked together on the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films and the animated film Rango. The Lone Ranger is set to release next summer.
The RoboCop 2013 reboot is gaining momentum, and the hype machine is getting into gear with the first of several teasers themed around arms manufacturer OmniCorp. The video – which you can see after the cut – introduces some of OmniCorp’s product line, including the ED-209 battlefield robot and the RC-2000, the man-machine cyborg that will eventually be known as RoboCop.
“Imagine your city with no crime, where a policeman’s life is never in risk” the trailer opens, building to a few brief glimpses of RoboCop himself. ”In the coming months we will unveil our newest and most exciting innovation yet, where human resources meets robotic engineering. The RC-2000, the next-generation of defensive products.”
Sony Pictures is taking no chances with the RoboCop reboot, and so has lined up some high-profile names to feature. Hugh Laurie, better known for most as the grumpy eponymous doctor in TV show House, will play OmniCorp’s CEO, while Samuel L. Jackson and Gary Oldman are also apparently onboard, playing a media mogul and RoboCop’s creator respectively.
The film isn’t expected to open until early August 2013, so there’s still more than a year to go before we can see if one of the most loved 80s features has been butchered or not.
This week as the fuzzy teddy bear toting R-rated Seth MacFarlane movie Ted comes out, we got the chance to interview Jenny Fulle of The Creative-Cartel, the group responsible for overseeing the visual effects for the film. As it is with many of the films The Creative-Cartel works with, Ted presented them with the challenge of creating a set of effects that were top-notch with a budget that was less than your everyday average blockbuster effects film would present. The result was no less than a perfectly legitimate looking transformation of MacFarlane to the body of a toy bear stuffed into a comedy with essentially no other visual effects to speak of. It had to look real, and it certainly does.
[Question] Ted is a movie that take a real-world set of characters and tosses in a character that isn’t technically real. Could you speak on what techniques you used to make that happen?
[Jenny Fulle] In our early meetings with Seth MacFarlane, who obviously also is the director of Ted, he actually wanted to be Ted. And he was afraid to do this, he didn’t want it to be cartoony, he wanted it to be real. He wanted it to be a real teddy bear that he could infuse his character into to bring it alive. So he knew when he was going in that he wanted to do motion capture in some fashion, some form or another in addition to doing Ted’s voice.
So what our challenge was, was with our budget and our timeframe for getting it done was – how could we get Seth and his mannerisms and his voice and all that, get that into Ted. And not break the bank and not run the schedule over. So what we ended up working with was the Xsens suit, the motion capture suit – it’s basically a situation where you can go with a suit or you can go with straps, and we opted for the straps so Seth wouldn’t have to be in a unitard all day long. And what we would do is we would set that up on set. So that while he was doing the voice, the lines back and forth with the actors, he could also be in the suit. We could be capturing his motion and we could then capture that and we could then feed that to the animators who could edit it in post.
Above: Seth MacFarlane sans the motion capture gear.
[Jenny Fulle] We really focused on motion capture from his waist up – because he has a lot of mannerisms with his hands and he rocks back and forth and moves backwards and forwards and stuff like that. What we would also do is keep a high-definition camera on his face. That way we could also capture a visual representation of what he does with his eyebrows and when his eyes go wide and that sort of thing. We would then give that to the animators so they could just manually take that look and apply it to the bear.
“He didn’t want it to be cartoony, he wanted it to be real.”
[Q] That’s interesting – is there then a separate camera on his face at the same time as the main camera on the set?
[JF] Yeah so, he’s the director, so he’s also on the set on the set as the director and he sits behind the camera. So we put him in a suit behind the camera and sometimes we would have an over-sized bench for him to sit on that would match [the scene being filmed.] He would have a monitor where he could see the bear in the scene, he could kinda see what was going on, he could see placement, we would have eye-line set up for Mark Wahlberg and Seth so that they could both be doing their own things. And we would have the reference camera that was a high-definition camera on Seth that was behind the motion picture camera. So we were capturing all this stuff behind the scenes as we were filming with the cinematic camera that was capturing Mark.
[Q] What literally was on-set with Mark? Was it just a stuffed bear the whole time, or what did that end up being?
[JF] We had a stuffed bear that we used for reference – we used it for reference for the actors and for our lighting. And then when we shot the actual plate for it, most times we would have this little rod thing that we made for Ted’s height that had two little eyes on it. So then as they were shooting a scene, Mark could look at the eyes and knew roughly were Ted was – then we would go in and remove that and put in the CG bear.
[Q] Which camera models are used throughout the film?
[JF] We used the Genesis for the film and on our stuff we had a Sony EX3.
[Q] The visual effects in this film appear to be centered around (or entirely contained within) the bear – did you work on anything outside of the bear in the film?
[JF] It’s not a “visual effects” sort of movie so it’s really that, really just the bear – anything the bear interacts with has to be CG, there are some fight scenes where we add a little bit here or there but for the most part it is the bear.
[Q] I understand you also worked on Ghost Rider [Spirit of Vengeance] – could you describe the difference between working on a movie like that where it has quite a few effects shots compared to this where there really isn’t a lot of effects shots.
[JF] At The Creative-Cartel what we’re really good at is getting films that are very ambitious in what they want to achieve, but their budgets are a little bit more modest. So we’re constantly forced to think outside of the box and think of new and creative ways to get things done – which is really fun. Ted was an example of that, we used the motion capture and sapped as much as we could to kind of lighten our load for what we had to do in post production.
“We’re constantly forced to think outside of the box.”
In Ghost Rider we had to also deliver stereo. You can’t really deliver a conversion on fire when it’s close and medium shots and close and medium shots because it ends up looking flat. You can’t really convert and keep that kind of volumetric 3D look with particle stuff like fire. So on Ghost Rider that was the biggest challenge for us – how do we deal with that – and we ended up delivering a hybrid pipeline so that we shared work between our conversion vendor and our main visual effects vendor so shots weren’t constantly going back and forth so that we didn’t have any duplicative work which often happens in conversion. And we were able to do our conversion early so we could deliver the left-eye/right-eye to visual effects so they could do the stereo renders for Ghost Rider. A lot of – 50% of Ghost Rider is rendered in stereo even though it was shot in 2D.
We stay creatively and artistically agnostic in who we use so we’re able to work with different people on each show who are best suited for the type of work and for the filmmaker. Because you can have an Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor and if he doesn’t share the director’s vision or if they don’t get along in some way, it’s like oil and water and it just doesn’t work. So we steer clear of that so we can tailor and cast every show with the right people.
[Q] Comparing this project to blockbuster hits like Lord of the Rings with the CG character Gollum, were you expected to reach that level and outdo it, or are we at a point in the film world where something as impressive as that is just expected?
[JF] I think it depends on who your audience is. We still have these movies (that I’m not going to name because my friends work on them) that are geared towards kids, and you can get away with a lot more in terms of how photo-real they need to be because kids are more able to easily suspend their belief in reality. For Ted though, our audience is obviously a lot older audience, it’s an R-rated comedy, so we were always really clear in Seth’s directive that it had to be photo-real. You had to forget that you were looking at a visual effect. So you needed to – within the first five minutes of the film – buy that this teddy bear is real. And he just happens to talk and do all these things.
“For our film we needed to hit the top bar.”
So I feel like – to answer your question specifically – I think it’s dependent on what the film is for what level of realism you need to achieve. I think for our film we needed to hit the top bar. If it didn’t look real all the time, the audience that’s being targeted for Ted would be distracted by the fact that the bear didn’t look real.
Catch TED in theaters across the country this weekend, and make sure you’re ready to giggle!
Creating machinima with a video game engine usually requires accepting one of two truths: either that it will require a lot of fudging or that it will have all the sophistication of playing with action figures. Valve Software isn’t very happy with that dichotomy, which is why it’s posting its very own movie-making tool, Source Filmmaker, as a public beta. Any game that runs on the Source engine, whether it’s Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2 or another in the family, can have gameplay run-throughs edited and dissected right down to custom facial expressions. As Valve expounds in the video after the break, throwing a gaming-grade PC at the task gives directors the advantage of seeing exactly how any changes will look in the final scene; there’s no rough wireframes or pre-rendering here. Budding Francis Ford Coppolas can sign up for an invitation to the Filmmaker beta at the project page. If you’d just like to see how far someone can go with the end results, we’ve also included the latest Team Fortress 2 character profile video, Meet the Pyro, after the jump.
Many Apple fans on the opposite side of the Pacific from Cupertino haven’t had much of a choice to shop from iTunes, even though they’ve had the App Store for some time. There’s now a much better sense of balance: Apple just flicked the switch on the iTunes Store for music and movies in a dozen countries and territories across the Asia-Pacific region. The company singles out our own Richard Lai’s Hong Kong as well as Singapore and Taiwan, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam are also getting the media catalogs, which include local content along with the international hits. It’s a full catch-up as well, with iTunes in the Cloud re-downloads and iTunes Match subscriptions available in every new country. If you’re a huge Andy Lau fan but wanted his albums from the most iPhone-friendly store possible, the wait is over.
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.
