For the last several years, I’ve been keeping a wary and mistrusting eye on Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackon’s secretive attempts to turn the work responsible for some of my fondest (and, I would have thought, least cinematic) childhood memories into a motion picture.
I speak, of course, of the long-gestating, mysterious, almost-impossibly challenging The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
The film features a stellar cast, a legend behind the camera, and a host of top-flight post-production folks. But it also faces a number of very large obstacles, including a devoted (OK, rabid) fan base, occasionally awkward source material, and an incredibly distinctive, incredibly unLive-Action visual style.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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I must admit that this story from the LA Times’ Hero Complex blog has alleviated some of my fears. Of particular note:
Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe. 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. …Jamie Bell will be digitally made to look exactly like Hergé’s classic renderings of Tintin.
That doesn’t sound like a Robert Zemeckis-style attempt to make motion capture look “real.” That sounds like someone wedded to Hergé’s wonderful visuals. Excellent.
Principle “photography” wrapped some time last year, but the film is far, far from complete. The technology being used by Spielberg and PJ is similar to that Cameron has made famous (and incredibly profitable) in Avatar. But it’s the “post shooting camera movement” stuff that really caught my attention:
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.
I’m still afraid. But now I’m intrigued, as well.