Thanks. I just got in from being out all day. I’ll check it out.
He has said in interviews I’ve seen that he wrote the script in '94 and had drawn the beasts and Na’vi characters before that, going back as far as his high school days. He’s said that most of what became Avatar, the creatures, the Na’vi and the scenery with its glowing ground and so forth came to him in a dream when he was in his teens.
If Burkett’s telling the truth I’m still on the side of Williams’ 87 year old mama. She did after all raise a son who is not only an Oscar winner but was incredibly gracious in a situation with a completely out of control bitch in front of hundreds of millions of viewers. Yelling “SECURITY!” or anything short of hitting her with the Oscar would bothhave been quite reasonable reactions. (I wonder if she’s going to demand a statuette; those things are worth several hundred dollars just for the gold plating and of course they’re priceless for a trophy case.)
I’ve seen both Avatar and The Hurt Locker in the same seat in a state-of-the-art theater (AMC’s Mainstreet in Kansas City, MO) with 11 channel sound and bass shakers in each seat. The Hurt Locker absolutely deserved both of it’s sound wins. Sound was a character in that film. I walked out stunned.
Yeah, looks like the director had seen Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
Losing weight is difficult. (I’ve lost 50 lbs since last July). There is no way short of a life-threatening course of liposuction for her to have lost enough weight for anyone to have noticed since the nominations were announced.
My Google-fu is not strong this evening, but I recall a study that African-American women seem to be a statistical anomaly, suffering fewer health problems than equally over-weight Caucasian women of the same age.
Hell no! I quite enjoyed his book “How I Made 100 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime”.
Penn played a downright joyous character through the majority of Milk.
She looks so bad because she’s trying to maintain the body of an 18 year old. As Kathleen Turner said “Past 40, you can either keep your body or your face”.
Untrue. That’s like saying that the only “real” painting is done with oils on canvas or watercolors on paper, that any artwork done on a computer is not actually “art”. It’s bullshit. A “cinematographer” is a person who creates moving image compositions. It’s the same job with a video camera, an 8mm film camera, a 35mm film camera, a 3D rig or a virtual camera. Same job, different tool.
One of the reasons Pixar’s films are so good is that they hire skilled artists for each department. The people who place virtual lights in the scene are lighting people. The people who place the virtual camera in the scene is are cinematographers. And the people who animate the characters are animators, first and foremost. They take talented artists and teach them to use a computer instead of taking computer users and trying to make them be artists.
For instance, virtually every film is edited on a computer these days (the sole hold-out is Spielberg, forcing his editors to cut film on a KEM machine*). Does the fact that it’s done in a computer invalidate the artistry of an editor like Thelma Schoonmaker?
*I bet they cut on an Avid or Final Cut Pro when he’s not around, having an assistant assemble the work print for Steven to look at.
Knowing her as I do it would not surprise me at all.
Looks like she got one!
The DP is responsible for the look of the entire film, including the Visual Effects/CGI stuff.
Isn’t the Production Designer responsible for the look and the DP responsible for how said look is photographed?
Well, fair enough, but the cinematographer still has to match everything perfectly to the CGI. It’s no small task.
Entertainment Weekly called it correctly.
Hmm. If this were true, the Art Director, Production Designer, and a few other jobs would be completely unnecessary. The DP is responsible for how the light hits the film, not for what the light bounces off of before it does so.
Yes…and No. I work in the industry, and effects crews have their own cinematographers and camera operators that often work fairly independently of the DP, especially given that most VFX artists are immersed in post-production workflows separate from what the DP does in the lab and timing suites. And in situations as CG-heavy as this, the director, as much if not more than the DP, is responsible for calibrating the looks.
No, it’s not the same job. It may be the same responsibility, but it is not the same discipline and not the same skillsets.
Essentially, photography is capturing a moment of time. If you screw that up (wrong lighting, lens, filter, stock, exposure, movement), that moment is lost. There are things you can do to fix it of course, but it’s still a moment that is gone. Digital photography is the same way. But the creation of exclusively CG scenes are not, because you are not “capturing” anything; you are creating things from whole cloth that can be changed, altered, and manipulated at will because none of it is there to begin with. Back in the optical days, you at least had multiple elements to shoot and composite, which required its own meticulous scrutiny.
I’m not saying it’s less “artistic”. But the demands and challenges are significantly different and, in most cases, greater when you’re dealing with a photo-chemical process or even a typical production workflow (as opposed to an exclusively post-production one). Now Mauro Fiore is a perfectly fine DP and I’m not going to deny the myriad technilogical roadbumps he had to deal with in a 3D shoot. But the Academy has usually been lazy about rewarding the Cinematography award to films that had exotic location photography and lush panoramas (as if good photography = pretty pictures). And this year was no different–except that there was no location to go to and no panorama that wasn’t completely at the whim and mercy of a bottomless budget and a fully-engaged VFX staff. And I’ll personally take any 5 minutes of The White Ribbon or non-nominated A Single Man over all the Pandora lights and colors that film has to offer.
All of those had camera shots as well for the live actors and probably for the notion capture actors as well. They invented all sorts of new techniques and equipment for this movie.
That said, the story was simplistic and I never connected with the male lead.
Well, maybe that’s a good thing. So they’d make less money - so? Every time I hand over my hard earned $10 or so at the movie theater I wonder what part of that is going to go up someone’s nose or go toward paying for a big ugly Coach purse. Let 'em polish off a six-pack and shop at Target like the rest of us peons, I say.
When the animated Disney “Beauty and the Beast” was up for best picture, the same shiver of fear (to a lesser extent) swept through the entertainment community. When it was discovered footage of deceased movie stars could somehow be resuscitated, manipulated by computer into a simulation of acting, and wedged into a present day storyline, there was another shiver of fear (dispelled by threats of lawsuits, as nothing seems to have come of it). Avatar is new and different, but I think any imitations or followups won’t be as successful, or change the very nature of motion pictures in a major way! It’s an ‘experience’, but would you really lump it in with the term ‘movie’? Transformers, basically about toys, made a heap of money, and it too was an ‘experience’, but did it fit the term ‘movie’? …I doubt we are going to give up our star worship, our obsession with Jen’s hair, with Angelina’s latest kid, and I doubt people are going to stop going to the movies. And they are going to want to see movies starring, and about, humans, not only blue computer things and giant ray- blasting tinkertoys.
Well, apart from the fact that Starving Artist’s analysis betrays an almost complete lack of understanding about the issue, even IF he were correct, it wouldn’t change the price you pay at the box office anyway.
If they can get you to fork over $10 (or, in the case of Avatar IMAX, $16) for a movie, they will. And even if Cameron’s technology did signal the beginning of the end for Hollywood stardom (it doesn’t), all this would mean is that more of your dollars would be going into the pockets of studio producers, execs, and their parent corporations, instead of the pockets of the actors.
Remember, just about the first thing that crosses Starving Artist’s mind when he comments on any remotely political or economic subject is, “How can i get a gratuitous dig in against the liberal media, liberal Hollywood, or just liberals in general?”
Just a quick comment before I have to leave for the night: I didn’t mean to give the impression that I thought the trend in movies would be that instead of stars, the main characters would non-human creatures. What I’m thinking is that in time movies will look the same as they always have, with human beings fighting and loving and being comedic and all the things they have always done, but doing it instead while wearing performance capture gear and doing their acting in front of a blue screen. You could still have New York City sets or desert sets or whatever, but they would all be created digitally. The actors’ clothing and make up would all be applied digitally, the cars they drive would be created digitally and so on, but to the viewer everything would look no different that it does now.
Another way in which I believe future movie-making will alter the actor’s job is that it will no longer be necessary for them to cool their heels while all the secondary work is being done to get the set ready for their performances. I’ve heard it said that actors may often work only an hour or so out of a ten hour day on the set, and the rest of the time they’re waiting in their trailers or rehearsing or surfing the net waiting for the director to be ready for them. Freed from the need to deal with all of the backgound activity that surrounds the acting process, the director will be able to spend all his or her time working with the actors. This means the director can work the actors all day, thus ratcheting up their workload considerably and also requiring their services for far less time - the result being that they may only be needed for a number of days rather than weeks or months. The director can then take their performances and stitch them into the rest of the movie that will all be created digitally.
So what I’m thinking is that this is going to make the work of acting a lot more concentrated and difficult in terms of an actor’s workday, while at the same time making the surrounding environment much more dull and mudane. I expect this will eventually weed out the “personality” type performers, leaving most of the work to be done by journeymanlike actors dedicated enough to their craft to be able to hack acting all day long, and to deliver a believable performance while performing in a dull gray warehouse in front of a green screen.
And of course most of the secondary jobs involved, like set construction, lighting and makeup and so on will also become obsolete. I’ve been picking up rumblings since even before Avatar was released that it has a significant number of the Hollywod community to be running scared, and thus caused quite a bit of resentment to be aimed Cameron’s way.
I could be wrong about all of this of course. It’s still early in the game and a lot has to be worked out in terms of bringing down the cost and so forth. But it just seems to me that if you create a situation where virtually everything about a movie is being created by CGI, you’re obviously going to put a lot of people out of work and change drastically the nature of the work for those who stay, and it’s only understandable that the people who stand to be affected that way are going to resent it.
ETA: And on preview, kindly ignore mhendo. There is longstanding animus between us and he likes to get in his little digs whenever he can. It just so happens that for all its liberal, tree-hugging environmental hippieness, I have nothing but admiration for Avatar and for Jim Cameron, his genious and extraordinary hard work, and the subtle yet effective way he chose to get his messages across . It has been very much to my surprise to find that the political messages contained in that movie have bothered me not in the slightest.
And I don’t know what he’s on about when it come to ticket prices and where the money goes. I would think it obvious that the money will flow to the producers, drectors, CGI companies and whoever is providing the financing. I never said anything to indicate that fewer actors or lower actor pay will result in lower box office prices. So as you can see, his comments as usual are not worth the paper they haven’t been written on. 
I see this thread has largely come to revolve around Avatar. I can see that. But I have to ask: anybody as excited about Christoph Waltz getting an oscar as I am? It was pretty predictable I suppose, but it was so deserving and there was a really tender moment when he recieved the prize. Tarantino was notably emotional.
This is a pretty naive look at the economics of acting. It may be a craft, but those “personality” type performers are, more often than not, the ones that put butts in the seats, which is why they will continue to be indispensable to the industry, and there’s no reason to think (as you hypothesized earlier) that somehow the increased workload and reduced time commitment will translate to lower payouts to these actors. If anything, the money, in pure percentages, will shift in the actors favors because digital environments will save a ton of money in materials and overhead, while a charismatic actor or actress will still always be in high demand.
And that would be fine if it happens. I’m not wedded to the notion that there won’t be stars anymore. But still, I think acting as a profession for anyone without star power will become a pretty mundane affair and that will reduce the number of people trying to get into it. And since stardom is such a capricious affair to begin with and no one knows going in that they’re going to be the next big thing, the pool of people from whom stars emerge stand to be reduced considerably, and therefore the chances of someone breaking out and becoming a megastar are reduced considerably as well. Or so it seems to me.
And then like I said, there are tons of people in Hollywood who work in film but aren’t actors and they clearly stand to see their jobs evaporate and they can’t be happy about that.
You said in one of these threads that you’re in the business. Have you not been hearing rumblings of any of this? I’ve been reading and hearing allusions to it for the past several months and I’m not even in the businsess.
And on preview, sorry cactus waltz, I don’t mean to be turning this into an Avatar thread. I can’t comment on Inglorious Basterds because I haven’t seen it yet. It has been a great year for movies though. I can’t remember a year when so many movies have come out that I have really, really wanted to see.
Personally, I think it’s got an ounce of truth for every pound of hype. The media likes nothing more than to find a new technological or industry trend and blow it completely out or proportion. The Avatar phenomenon has made that even easier to do, but like any alleged “game-changer”, change actually comes very slowly, and while there are unquestionably shifts in the industry due to technological advancements, the characterization that people are “running scared” is hyperbole. This isn’t the introduction of sound, where things changed virtually overnight. This is platforms and formats and other work processes that people have been living and working with for years (or decades) gradually making inroads into more and more corners of the craft. But people see it coming and adapt accordingly, and while the technology certainly makes it easier, more efficient, cost-effective and practical, a time where a film like The Blind Side or The Hurt Locker is shot exactly like Avatar was is a long, long time from now, IMHO. FTR, I primarily work in post-poduction, so largely work with professionals who are embracing this change, though I’m still personally rooted in an analog tradition and enjoy it even if it’s becoming, among the younger generation of talent, more the exception than the rule.