The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

[modage]

[Ghostboy]

Is Peter Jackson dying?

[©brad]

Is Peter Jackson dying?

Hahah right? I miss pudgy Peter Jackson.

[polkablues]

I'm not sure I've ever even heard of Empire Magazine before, but I'm damn sure buying a copy.

[pete]

they're the one with that top 500 greatest movie list that made internet puke.

[polkablues]

Apparently none of the stores near me care for it either, because I can't find a copy of the damn thing anywhere. 

Anyway, here's a few bullet points pulled out of the article by tintinmovie.org:

    * The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn will cover parts of the Crab withe Golden Claw and Secret of the Unicorn.
    * Red Rackham's Treasure will be the second film ...
    * ... and is currently in pre-production and has financing.
    * A third film is not planned at the moment
    * An additional week's shooting will happen in New Zealand in June
    * In the original 20 minute test reel, Jackson played all the parts
    * The film will "have this film noir kind of look. Something very atmospheric" - Spielberg

My take on this:

I'm intrigued by the idea that the movie will be a combination of different books, but I don't like the idea of splitting up Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.  They're fundamentally a single story, and if the two films are being spread out between them, that means they're passing up the possibility to do one of the many other stories that are begging to be adapted (the Moon books, specifically).

I'm saddened but not surprised that the third movie is officially not part of the plan at the moment.  I'm sure it will all depend on whether these two can somehow find an audience.  Edgar Wright has already shot down an IMDb-started rumor that he was on tap to direct the third film.

Finally, I'm a little perplexed by the phrase "film noir kind of look".  That's kind of the exact opposite of the visual style of the Tintin books.  It's all moot until we see some footage (20 minute test reel!!!!), but something about that just doesn't sound right.

[polkablues]

Scans:

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[MacGuffin]

Spielberg's 'Tintin' sets a date
'Adventures' to hit theaters in December 2011
Source: Variety

Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn" will hit U.S. theaters in December 2011 -- long after bowing internationally.

Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled plans to release the motion capture pic Stateside on Dec. 23, 2011. But in an unusual move, film will launch internationally in late October and early November 2011, with Sony Pictures Releasing Intl. handling Continental Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America and India, and Paramount distributing the film in Asia, Australia, the U.K. and all other English-speaking territories.

The two studios also revealed that they will release "Tintin" in 3-D, a move that had been mulled for several months. Insiders said the dailies convinced them that 3-D would offer the best rendition.

Film, which began production in late January, is the first of a planned series based on the iconic character created by Georges Remi, better known to the world by his pen name "Herge." The second feature in the series is scheduled to be directed by Peter Jackson.

The decision signals the two studios' belief that the property, which has been translated into 70 languages, shows stronger potential overseas than domestically. Not surprisingly, the film's cast skews international with Brit Jamie Bell starring as the intrepid young reporter. Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook round out the cast.

Spielberg, Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy are producing the pic, which will compete for North American audiences against Warner Bros.' "Happy Feet 2" and Disney/Pixar's "The Bear and the Bow." Nick Rodwell, Stephane Sperry and Ken Kamins are exec producing.

[Fernando]

hey polka, don't know if you read the int. of PJ at aicn, there's a very brief mention of tintin.

While we're cleaning the closet of all project Jackson has a hand in, he did mention that Steven Spielberg had just finished his first cut of TINTIN.

Full interview: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/41848

[MacGuffin]

Tintin is Peter Jackson and Spielberg's dream movie
Source: SciFi Wire

We love Steven Spielberg, so when we heard that he wants to adapt Tintin, the beloved Belgian comic strip by Herge, we were intrigued.

Tintin isn't a household name in the U.S., but it's been hugely popular in the rest of the world for 80 years. Basically it's about the adventures of a young Belgian reporter (Jamie Bell) and his faithful fox terrier Milou (that's Snowy in English), and it spans genres from adventure to fantasy to mystery to science fiction, liberally dosed with humor.

The franchise has been Spielberg's dream project for decades, and the first of his planned Tintin films, Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, is now in production, with Spielberg directing. The movie is being made in 3-D motion-capture animation.

Spielberg may be credited as director, but he's not alone. Peter Jackson is producing the film with him. The film's co-star, Shaun of the Dead's Nick Frost, said that Jackson was always around to put his imprint on the film. That's potential for the best of Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings in the same movie! Add to that the creative minds behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and we're in.

"They co-directed, so Peter was in the studio on iChat every day," Frost said in an exclusive interview over the weekend in London, where he was promoting Pirate Radio. "So we had a laptop with Peter's face on, and he had kind of two, three cameras pointed at the action and pointed at us, too, so we could actually talk to him via some link or hookup. So it was odd. It was quite weird."

Frost plays the film's Inspector Thomson, with his Shaun co-star and frequent collaborator Simon Pegg (Star Trek's Scotty) as Inspector Thompson with a P. Their characters even look alike.

The casting of Frost and Pegg gives us hope that the Tintin movie will have room for grown-up humor. Their frequent partner, Shaun director Edgar Wright, even co-wrote the script. Frost confirmed that Tintin will work on two levels.

"I think it's that Simpsons thing that children will get one thing and adults will get the other," he said

Don't expect Hot Fuzz genre riffs, though. Pegg and Frost said that they deferred to Spielberg and Jackson on Tintin. As uber-fanboys themselves, it's just a dream to be in a movie from not one, but two of the genre's heavyweights.

"Steven Spielberg, I think I'd probably come and clean the kitchen in his house just to hang around him," Frost said. "Peter as well. He was a really big advocate of Hot Fuzz. He really helped us out and hosted screenings and stuff down in New Zealand and was kind enough to let us hang out with him in the house. Just to actually be working with those people is such an eye-opener."

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn combines both of Herge's stories, "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure." The 3-D animated feature is due Dec. 23, 2011.

[MacGuffin]

Steven Spielberg on 'Tintin': 'It made me more like a painter than ever before'
Rachel Abramowitz had a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times this week on the angst among Hollywood actors as they watch more major filmmakers embrace performance-capture techniques and animation approaches.  Here's a great follow-up as she talks to Steven Spielberg about the making of "Tintin."
Source: Los Angeles Times
   
Steven Spielberg says there was only one reason to make his new "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn" with the cutting-edge performance-capture technology that James Cameron used on "Avatar."

"It was based on my respect for the art of Hergé and wanting to get as close to that art as I could," says the director, referring to Tintin's author-illustrator, who created the international blockbuster graphic novel series (200 million copies in print) starring intrepid cub reporter Tintin, and his irrepressible canine companion, Snowy, as they venture through the pre-WWII world.

"Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe," Spielberg said. "It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You'd have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one."

"Tintin" stars Jamie Bell ("King Kong") as the title character, Andy Serkis (Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy) as his buddy Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig (Bond, James Bond)  as the evil Red Rackham. Produced by Peter Jackson, with the animation done by Jackson's Weta Workshop, the film is due in theaters in 2011.

Like Cameron, Spielberg shot the actors on a special performance-capture stage. The performers donned lycra suits, covered in reflective markers, and their every movement was tracked by more than 100 cameras. They also wore a head-rigging with a camera near their jawline that recorded intensely detailed data of their faces -- enough detail to avoid the "dead eye" faces that had an unsettling lack of movement or emotion in many previous motion-capture films. Ultimately, all the camera data was fed into a computer to create a 3-D replica of the actor. The digital document of the actor and the performance is so all-enveloping that the director, in this case Spielberg, can go back and change the "camera" movement and orientation long after the actor has left the set.   

For the director of such films as "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," "Jurassic Park" and "Schindler's List," the new experience was transporting.

"I just adored it," he says. "It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don't often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller."

With that small monitor, Spielberg could look down and watch what the actors were doing -- in real time -- on a screen that showed them in the film universe. Working on the motion-capture stage -- which is called the volume -- Spielberg was routinely dazzled by the liberating artistic value of the new science.

"When Captain Haddock runs across the volume, the cameras capture all the information of his physical and emotional moves," the director said. "So as Andy Serkis runs across the stage, there's Captain Haddock on the monitor, in full anime, running along the streets of Belgium. Not only are the actors represented in real time, they enter into a three-dimensional world."

So though Jamie Bell will be digitally made to look exactly like Hergé's classic renderings of Tintin, "it will be Jamie Bell's complete physical and emotional performance," Spielberg said. He added: "If Tintin makes you feel something, it's Jamie Bell's soul you're sensing."

[matt35mm]

"If Tintin makes you feel something, it's Jamie Bell's soul you're sensing."

Creepy!

[Pubrick]

they've been calling it emotion capture for a long time.

something doesn't feel right about it..

[Gamblour.]

I feel like Spielberg always utilizes new technology in the most affecting ways, thinking back to ET, Jurassic Park, AI, even Minority Report. His enthusiasm makes me very excited.

[polkablues]

I'm in a zen place with this movie right now.  I refuse to resume getting excited about it until I see some actual footage.