| D-Day for Widdecombe after passionless salsa Ann Widdecombe will discover today if her unsexy take on the salsa will be enough to save her from being kicked off the celebrity dancefloor. feeds.breakingnews.ie |
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Apocalypse Now: No 1 Francis Ford Coppola, 1979It was John Milius who first came up with the idea of transposing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to a Vietnam war setting. Milius wrote the first drafts of the screenplay; former war correspondent Michael Herr later added narration. George Lucas was down to direct, but it was Francis Ford Coppola who finally set out to make what was intended to be the ultimate statement about the madness of war. It turned out to be equally about the madness of movie making. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) hitches a lift on a Navy patrol boat up the Mekong river to Cambodia on a mission to terminate "with extreme prejudice" a certain Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who is reported to have gone native in rather a nasty way. But it's a long journey, and before he confronts the renegade colonel, Willard must first face all manner of trippy imagery, including the American Air Cavalry strafing a Vietnamese village to the sound of amplified Wagner, Robert Duvall declaring that he loves "the smell of napalm in the morning", a riot triggered by frugging bunny-girls, a Californian surfer on LSD and Dennis Hopper as a madly babbling photojournalist.After this build-up, it's hard to separate the film from the circumstances of its production. Brando's arrival on set unprepared and overweight, necessitating his being shot only from certain angles in dim lighting, has now been incorporated into film-making legend, described in George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr's documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Film-maker's Apocalypse. For the opening shot, set to Jim Morrison singing "This is the end", several acres of palm trees in the Philippines were doused with 1,200 gallons of gasoline. "There aren't too many places in the world you could do it," said Coppola. "They'd never let you in the US; the environmentalists would kill you." Leading actor Martin Sheen (who replaced Harvey Keitel two weeks into the shoot) suffered a heart attack, and a typhoon destroyed the sets. The budget soared from $12m to $30m and shooting dragged on from the scheduled six weeks to 16 months. With the director struggling to edit millions of feet of footage (literally) and come up with an ending, industry wags dubbed the unseen film Apocalypse When? and predicted it would be a disaster.In the event, though, the finished film was a qualified, critical success and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Reviews were mixed, but within a year or so it had established itself as a modern classic, with young adult audiences in particular revelling in the hallucinatory visuals and quotable one-liners such as "Saigon... shit!", "Charlie don't surf!" and "Never get out of the boat!" Hollywood had largely steered clear of the war in Vietnam while it was being fought, but Coppola's film spearheaded a small cluster of attempts during the 80s to revisit it, albeit almost exclusively from the navel-gazing perspective of the Americans. In 2001, Coppola released an extended version called Apocalypse Now Redux which restored 49 minutes of footage cut from the original film, most notably a long sequence featuring Christian Marquand and Aurore Clément representing the legacy of French colonialism. "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and, little by little, we went insane," said the director. The experience certainly seemed to knock the stuffing out of Coppola, who has since failed to make anything even half as passionate or spectacular.Action and adventureFrancis Ford CoppolaDennis HopperMarlon BrandoAnne Billsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, a match made in Hobbit heaven So Martin Freeman is taking the title role in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit. Might this aid the UK in their bid to play host to the production?The Hobbit is often considered to be a lesser book when compared to JRR Tolkien's later opus, The Lord of the Rings. This is patent nonsense: the two novels are simply entirely different beasts, one a vivid but fuzzily drawn tale, the reading of which feels like a warm hearth and a mug of mulled wine, the other a thrilling yet terrifying vision of a world in which nightmarish creatures of genuine evil vie to destroy that kind of comfortable existence.The disparity between the two books is also the reason why the casting of Martin Freeman in the central role of Bilbo Baggins – announced today – comes as such a relief. For Freeman is a quite different type of actor to Elijah Wood, who played Frodo as an overwrought, angsty, almost emo-ish little hobbit in Peter Jackson's film adaptations of the later tome.If Frodo occasionally resembled a My Chemical Romance fan, Bilbo needs to be more like a minor official in a local branch of the Campaign for Real Ale. Getting the casting right is also absolutely vital because Baggins is one of the only a few fully rounded characters (Gandalf, Gollum and perhaps Thorin Oakenshield would be the others) in a story which, in line with its fairytale quality, is populated by creatures who are mainly sketched rather than drawn. Moreover, while Frodo is often a subject for other players to impose their hopes and fears onto, Bilbo is constantly at the heart of the action, carrying us with him. The other denizens of Middle Earth may be used to sly dragons, hideous goblins, giant spiders and mysterious elves, but Bilbo isn't, and neither are we. Just like us, he goes on a journey, and we see it unfold through his eyes. The actor who plays him needs to be able to embody this everyman quality perfectly, and I think in Freeman that Jackson has got his man.At 39, the actor is the right age (Bilbo was older than Jackson's version of Frodo when he set out on his journey) and he certainly has that world-weary quality about him. One can just imagine him bumbling around his hobbit hole happily, perhaps planning a light mid-morning snack of a cake or two to follow a delicious breakfast, and being most disgruntled by the arrival of a company of dwarves and a wizard intent on enrolling him in a rather uncomfortable adventure. Bilbo is well-to-do and respectable, but crucially very ordinary (at least on the surface). And Freeman does quintessentially English ordinariness like no-one else in the business.It's hard to read too much into the other casting decisions announced. If Jackson follows the tone of the book, characters such as Bombur, Fili, Kili, Oin and Gloin will barely register as individual personalities. Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarves, is a different matter. On screen he will need to be a more dynamic and charismatic character than he is in the book, a vital figure for whom one would gladly give one's life in battle. Jackson must have some confidence in Richard Armitage, best known from the BBC series Spooks, to have handed him the role.Fortunately, the film-maker can rely on his Gandalf. The wizard will once again be played by the great Sir Ian McKellen, who so perfectly embodied the character's gruff warmth and kindly menace in the Lord of the Rings films. The news reports today do not mention Hugo Weaving, who made a passable Elrond in the earlier trilogy, even though the character appears in The Hobbit. A re-casting should not prove too much of a burden, since the half-human, half-elven figure is not a major player in the first book.It remains to be seen where the new films – yes, there are two of them, despite the Hobbit being a relatively short book – will be shot. Following a row with a local union, there have been suggestions that the entire project could move from New Zealand, where Lord of the Rings was filmed and where sets remain, to Europe – even possibly the UK.Speculation to that effect may have been given a slight boost when you look at some of the newly announced cast, which features a swathe of actors well known from UK television: Armitage, and dwarves Aidan Turner (of BBC 3 drama Being Human), Robert Kazinsky (Sean Slater on Eastenders) and Graham McTavish (Lost) are all Brits. However, John Callen, Mark Hadlow and Peter Hambleton, who will play further members of the company, are Kiwis, and Stephen Hunter, who has been cast as rotund dwarf Bombur, is Australian. Currently, I'd say it looks like all bets are off.Lord of the RingsMartin FreemanPeter JacksonJRR TolkienBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Inside the Star Wars machine: part two The second instalment of our behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of Star Wars...At the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco, legendary special effects house Industrial Light and Magic shares its office space with LucasArts, the game development arm of LucasFilm. Here, concepts of game and filmmaking are closely entwined – the two work together, drawing ideas and technologies from each other as the twin entertainment media converge. It's a gaming event, for example, that helped kickstart a new R&D project at ILM – real-time movie-making using motion capture systems. As Mike Sanders, the digital supervisor at ILM, explains: "On the first Force Unleashed game, LucasArts called us and said they were doing a press junket and wanted to do the Clone Cam thing with everyone on the tour. So I said, that's going to take a while, why don't we do something different? Let's write some code to port the virtual reality in this room into the game engine live and then we'll put the press people right into gameplay and they can lightsaber battle against the apprentice in real-time."Sure enough, a week later ILM had modified a system that could port motion capture footage directly into a game engine. In other words, you could have two actors in mo-cap suits performing moves, and everything they did was fed live and direct into a PC running an environment from the game. "This was the basis for us thinking, 'hey why don't we use the game engine as a real-time renderer for… anything'". As he's speaking Sanders picks up a camera plugged into his computer set-up and points it at different parts of the room. On a PC screen he's running an environment from Force Unleashed 2, and as he pans the camera, the in-game camera changes accordingly. Of course, ILM has been converging real and CG elements like this for years (including the ground-breaking creation of Bill Nighy's Davy Jones character in Pirates of the Caribbean) – it's just that in the past, all this data would have been fed into a computer to be later lit, tweaked and placed within the environment. The thing is, not only does such a staged process take more time, it also robs the director of creative autonomy. What Sanders and his team are doing now is evolving and condensing the practise. With the ILM system, directors will be able to 'film' CGI sequences in a real room with real actors, while looking into their cameras and seeing the virtual world. "It's kind of how Avatar was shot," says Sanders. "That's the idea: real-time animatics, real time game cinematics, whatever you want. So for VFX shots, rather than doing render passes overnight, you can do base layouts, base lighting tests and animation tests and watch in real-time – this will be a game changer in the future."This R&D concept is now part of ILM's Director's Toolkit, an array of digital tools designed to facilitate moviemakers working on CG-heavy projects. As ILM spokesman Greg Grusby explains, "This new technology means we can give a director a view of their characters performing in the actual environment they will be seen in for a given shot or sequence with interactive lighting, shadows and a choice or render looks. It's much more robust, and the system is flexible enough to be placed in a director's home or office. Via a game controller, the filmmaker can scout virtual locations, create storyboards based on actual camera placement, test camera moves or begin choosing lenses, camera platforms or map out other technical details of a shot."It's also a very hands-on intuitive system. "I wanted to show management how easy it was to use the tech," Sanders continues. "So by myself, I shot three pieces of motion capture, processed it, looped it back over the game engine, and with the virtual cameras, I did maybe 30 different shots and 120 camera moves. Then I cut it all together in Final Cut Pro with audio in less than two days. The motion system is just broadcasting what's going on in the room and the animation system's picking it up, retargeting it on to the character and recording it to the game engine. I was just trying to show that you don't need $10m and a team of 30 people to pump out animatics, or even game cinematics, anymore..."And in this way, the director has complete control over his CGI shots, using cranes, dollies, whatever he wants to achieve a shot, which is then converted straight into CG footage. It's the sort of virtual filmmaking that can be difficult to grasp for conventional helmsmen. As Sanders explains, "We work with a lot of directors, some of them get it, some of them don't in terms of the spatial understanding. Spielberg's awesome – he'd just grab the camera and go look for a shot that you would never have imagined, but he knew where it was in his head and when he went to it, everyone would think, 'ah that's why he's doing it.'"Sanders is certain that this virtual filmmaking technology will filter across into games, and we'll start seeing movie sequences that have been constructed in real-time. "I think you're going to get way more dramatic and cinematic quality in game scenes," he says. "It's already happening in the film sector, and in animatics in general – there's a lot more decision making going on at the front end of the art process."The creative process is no longer linear," he continues. "It's more cyclical in terms of iteration. Traditionally, you'd have a script, then a storyboard, then you go into asset build, and you do your pre-production art then you go into production and post-production… Well all of that stuff is being considered at the front end now. And nowadays we're still using production tools in post-production – with Star Trek and Transformers 2 we used virtual cameras in post-production, live in the shot, actually adding CG camera moves on the animation, adding camera shake – JJ loves his camera shake. We replicate all of that realistically, in real-time, on Maya… it's happening throughout the process. It's changed the way we think."It is somewhat comforting to note, however, that while digital technology guides everything that's done here, there is still room for techniques and influences garnered from the original movie trilogy. In another part of the building Matt Omernick, talks about how the design of Force Unleashed 2 has been heavily inspired by the grungy, melancholic look of Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. "We go back to the original inspirations: that's true for story – back to the Joseph Campbell stuff – and that's true for art," he explains. "We look at the Ralph McQuarrie drawings a lot. Even though it's a very different art style, there's a spirit to what was done there that you don't see anywhere else.""We drew a lot of inspiration from the very Earth-based, gritty, lived-in type of design that was new to sci-fi when the first films came out. Tatooine embodies it the most, that's for sure, especially when you get into Mos Eisley and everything is sand-beaten and torn up and chopped away. The cantina, the interiors, we used as visual reference quite a lot – we'd say, look, you can tell this door has had eight different types of droid bump into it seven times a day for 50 years. And then in contrast the empire is so clean and perfect and reflective and shiny… We used those as our spectrum – it should be one step above Tatooine, somewhere around the bad part of Naboo!"He also talks about how the art team has learned key techniques from Lucas and Irvin Kershner. "The Star Wars films were really smart about using colour carefully and thoughtfully," he explains. "Most backgrounds in the films are quite de-saturated – they reserve colour and saturation for the most important elements on screen. This gives the viewer absolute clarity on what's important in your image." He shows a still from the opening moments of Star Wars, with R2 and C3P0 walking down a corridor in the doomed rebel ship. The stark featureless white background means our attention is locked on C3PO, while R2, with some blue colouring, is the secondary priority. There's similar background uniformity on Hoth and on Endor, forcing our attention onto the warring Rebel and Imperial forces. In Force Unleashed 2, then, the team regularly uses flags and doorways painted in saturated blues and reds to indicate new areas for the player to explore. As Matt Omernick explains, "It works really well because during gameplay you have experience points popping up at you, you have holocrons, there's all this critical information, but what we don't want to end up with – that a lot of games do – is this sort of confusing visual confetti. Sometimes, you just see colour everywhere. So we use colour cautiously to guide the player's eye and give them information about their priorities."The team has even produced a chart showing the over-arching game plot and the points in which emotion and action build to crescendos. Each different stage of that process is given a relevant colour, matching the intensity of the narrative, and that colour is used throughout the environment. In this way the scenery becomes a subconscious guide to the story. Omernick also talks about how the Force Unleashed design team has been given access to props from the films. "Up at Skywalker Ranch, there's this giant warehouse of archives, which has everything from Jabba the Hutt to a box that was in the corner of the cantina. Thankfully, a lot of those props still exist, but Lucas has also done a good job of documenting the movie props via photography and making that available to us. And there's all this really cool prop re-use that you only pick up on it when you go through the archives. An example is, in the cantina in Star wars, behind the bar, there are these weird cylinders with holes punched in them – presumably that's what they pour drinks out of. But when you fast-forward through the movie and you see the droid, IG-88 – his head is the same object! (a Rolls-Royce Derwent jet engine burner, according to Wookipedia) According to Omernick, even in the area of character design, where human modelling is now uncannily detailed and intricate, the team is continually drawing back to the basics. "Many games suffer from a similar visual problem – when you see an enemy way off on the horizon, you're like, 'well, what is that? Is it a stormtrooper, is this person going to hurt me?' So we spent a lot of time working on each character's silhouette – we weren't thinking about volume, or colour or do they have lights or VFX on them, we just thought let's get the silhouette right, so when you see a guy on the horizon you can immediately say, 'holy shit, that guy's huge and he's got a frickin flamethrower!'"To pack in more emotion and atmosphere, the art team (which reached 60 members during the peak development time on TFU2) has built a new deferred lighting engine, which allows multiple real-time light sources, adding an extra sense of Empire Strikes Back-style shadowy menace to everything. And for the vast menagerie of characters, there are new facial models with more polys, better use of shaders and a dramatically improved facial animation system. There are nice little graphical flourishes too – like when lead character Starkiller ventures outside on the storm-swept planet of Kamino, his clothes get visibly soaked from the top down. When he goes in again, they gradually dry and lighten up. For any new planets, species or spacecraft that LucasArts adds to its games, they need to consult LucasFilm licensing, the Orwellian-sounding department that checks everything is canon. "They understand what is, and what isn't Star Wars," says Omernick. "If there's something we're excited about, but unsure about, that's where licensing will come in. They'll be like, 'this is fine, but change this, alter that, the skin colour should be different…' That's the whole reason that division is there, to maintain continuity... They are the Star Wars brain!"Continues tomorrowSee part one hereGamesStar WarsKeith Stuartguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |