The Hobbit - Making of

The first thing I've got to mention is the fact that I love the movie extras from Peter Jackson's movies. He does these videos for his blog, for his fans really, there are interviews, making of, previews etc etc. To sum up, it's a great source of information, and there is no doubt about how true the information is or anything because it comes straight from them.

So again, I listened to it looking for things that would help my dissertation. On top of that it was very interesting and beautiful to watch. 

I got a lot of pointless facts out of it like, they cooked about a 100 kilos of meat everyday, they ate around a ton of oranges in a week, stuff like that. But at least we know that the crew was well looked after haha.

But to get to the point. 

Richard Armitage

"I could've spent this entire shoot on location, we saw so many incredible places."

Ian McKellen (Gandalf) 

" This is Middle-Earth I'd always have pictured"

Martin Freeman ( Bilbo) 

"The backdrop is so beautiful people will think it's cgi. It looks so perfect"

Peter JAckson

"I'm used to seeing this on film and now we're walking into it it's almost like you've stepped inside a movie it's a really weird experience"

"Films are hard to make, but what makes it fun are the people that you work with"

Stephen Hunter

"Seeing the sets was amazing, coming to bag-end for the first time and walking through on our first day, that was amazing."

They've even done the concept art in 3D! Two concept artists did the same image, one in red and one in blue.
Considering the film was going to be in 3D they even had to consider the patterns on fabrics because it could make people feel sick because they'd look so psychedelic in 3D. I would never think that a lot of these things mattered! D:

The logistics of the whole thing sounded very complicated. I recommend watching it! I won't even begin to explain the things they had to go through.

Inception - Extras

So, one of my aims was to watch a few movies here and there, watch the making of etc.

It was to get the comments of the actors, producers, to get their opinion in this matter in the way.

After watching the making of the Inception, I was a little surprised of the amount of difficult sets they built. They went through a lot of trouble!

I've collected a few quotes I might use in my essay ^^

"Normally for an earthquake shot, youd build a set on rigs, that would shake it etc. But because of the size of this set it wasn't possible to do that."
Chris Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

"We used a lot of different earthquake devices, camera devices for shaking the camera, but they all did it in a very mechanical way so all the shakes were done the old fashioned way just by shaking the camera."
Christopher Nolan, Writer/Director

"All the way through we were aware there was an earthquake going on so we were pulling on statues, pulling on vases... we were able to drop boxes from a height at a push of a button."
Chris Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

There was a lot of choreography involved. Because everything needed to be safe,especially with glass and metal beams falling around the actor. It all came down to the actors focus. He was where he needed to be at the time.

"Flooding was achieved by a 200 kg pressurized containers"
"If you don't get it right the first time you're into a big re-dress because you've got 3000-4000 gallons of water now on the set"
"We had a bike flipping over and a car flipping over to make it seem really real" ( they were on strings and they pulled them at the right time)
vfx supervisor

About the explosions on the street.
"What we can do with vfx is add all the things that wasn't possible to do on the day, the debris, furniture, glass pottery, masonry and rigit pieces. (for obvious health and safety reasons) We can bring an extra level of danger and destruction. What you see is a mixture of reality and vfx.
Paul Franklin, vfx Supervisor

About the infinite staircase:
"It had to be mathematically perfect. And in that it had to be at a particular length and a particular height and distance and the camera had to drop in a particular way to HIDE the trickery."
Wally Pfister, Director of Photography

Interesting how they built the train. Fibreglass, plywood, semi-metal. All on a long tractor axes, so they can drive it. Had to make sure everything looks right, has all the right textures in the right places. Another thing was to make sure it's strong enough so when it drives into obstacles cars etc. it just pushes them out of the way rather than smash to pieces.

"Make it rain, is one of the most difficult things to do in pictures."
Nilo Otero, First Assistant Director

"The tilted bar, there was all this talk about how we could do this and the use of green screen and smoke effects, let's just do this in post, and we all knew, that we wouldn't, it just had to be done properly for it to be a believable thing." (So they built it, tilted between 20 and 45 degrees)
Guy Hendrix Dyas, Production Designer

Rotating Corridor
"Suspended the set in these huge rings"
Guy Hendrix
Tons of steel needed to be built and welded before the set was built. The main thing was the accuracy, to avoid any unneeded vibrations etc.

"With any of the sets that required this kinda movement the equipment had to be locked into the set. It either had to rotate with it or the set rotate around it. It required a lot of planning in order to see what was gonna happen with the lights etc."
Wally Pifster, director of photography

"With so many action movies, everything is computerised where as these scenes that we did, they were so well thought out with the things revolving, it's up to me to keep my balance and we did the performance and I love that. It's the most challenging and most fun."
Joseph Gordon- Levitt


Here we see a good balance between the traditional tricks and the vfx. It's a good mix where one supports the other, none of them overpower anything and in my opinion, that's how it should be. Because nobody wants to see a purely cg movie but at the same time they want to see amazing places and great effects.
Watching the making of showed me a lot of pros and cons about both of the ways. Which I will definitely use in my dissertation.

Films to watch

So to get the ball rolling I thought i'll start off with watching  few old movies, to see how they used to do things. 

If i'd see something interesting I'd explore the movie a little further, more along the lines of finding the making of etc. 

Which is another thing on my to do list. Watch the extras on things like Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit. 

Apart from that here's the list of movies I'm going to watch:

Star Wars

Cleopatra

Spartacus

King Kong original then the remake.

Escape From New York 1981

The Host 2006 could then watch remake from 2010

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 1958

Clash of the titans 1981

Sin City

Labirynth 1986

Pan's Labirynth 2006

Planet of the apes

2001 a space oddysey 1968

Godzilla

So there it is, just a few bits and pieces, might watch more, might watch less. But I think there's a good variety of movies ^^ 

Getting in touch with local theater

When thinking about how I can gather information that would help me with my dissertation I decided itd be best to get them directly from the actors.

My first step was to get in touch with the local theater, West Yorkshire Playhouse to be more specific.

I couldn't find any contact information online so I decided that I might as well ring them, and see what happens. 

The man I spoke to was very nice and helpful he gave me the e-mail address of the person I should contact.

In my e-mail I explained who I am, where I study, what my dissertation is about, and what I expect to achieve if I was to visit the theater and got to interview the actors and maybe get backstage and see how it works. 

Now I play the waiting game, hoping for the best! ^^

Cop3 - Presentation

Here's what I talked about during my presentation C:

Before the end of the year we were to write up a kind of proposal, explaining what we want to write our dissertation on etc etc.
Before summer I thought I was going to write about something else. I have presented my idea to the rest of my group and tutors and received good feedback but also a few concerns about it.
The thing is, it was an argument that was talked a lot about in the past and an argument that cannot be settled, there were just too many doubts surrounding the subject for me to carry on with it. Taking those comments on board I have decided to drop this subject and think of something else.
For a long time I could not think of anything that would be good and interesting enough for me to write about. I knew I need to write about something that's in one way or another appealing to me because otherwise I'd get bored and sick of it, nevermind the fact it'd be difficult to research and then work on it.
I've decided to go with vfx because it's something I've been enjoying doing lately and thought it was an interesting thing to write about.
But that isn't the only reason why I've chosen to write about VFX.
It pretty much came to me when my partner, who is really passionate about Star Wars, was reading an article out loud about one of the actor's experience while filming the new Star Wars movie.
There was one quote which stuck in my mind, as well as his reaction to what he just read.

"He's shooting on film and actually building the sets, so you've got hundreds of Stormtroopers or whatever, and hundreds of extras and all the ships. You actually see it. It's all REAL. Everyone can interact with the world." - Oscar Isaac

To which Jakub (my partner) responded with, "This is how it should be done! I can't even imagine how amazing it must feel to be there, I wish I could experience this."

This is what caught my attention.
He isn't the only person that thinks that way and here I started wondering why. Why is it so important for people to see real sets, is VFX that bad?
And here I started recalling another article he read to me a while back.
It was about Ian McKellen about the new Hobbit movie.

"In order to shoot the dwarves and a large Gandalf, we couldn't be in the same set. All I had for company was 13 photographs of the dwarves on top of stands with little lights - whoever's talking flashes up"
"Pretending you're with 13 other people when you're on your own it stretched your technical ability to the absolute limits."
"I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, 'This is not why I became an actor.'"

This is a completely different experience to the one Oscar Isaac is having and I think it's worth exploring why that is. If the impact of our green screen and vfx is in fact, ruining the film.
I really wanted to explore this subject and hopefully I'll understand what's going on.

Since presenting this I've received some good feedback about this, some good comments and advice to where to start,
Someone said that a man in a costume can be a hundred times better than any cg,
I've looked at quite a few books about film, and vfx and they all seem to talk about the limitations that traditional film making comes with, and the time consuming processes they have to go through,
And here is another thing that someone mentioned, that the turnaround of old movies could be as little as 6 months and they were still great, and the turnaround of modern movies can be years and years, that they don't see this as an improvement and less time consuming processes, infact it seems to come with more difficulties and is a lot more time consuming.

So the things I'll start looking into is the traditional film making, the vfx industry, I'll definitely have to talk about things with actors and professionals to ask their opinion, I'll watch a few old movies and most of them have a re-make which will be great for comparison. I got told that doing a few experiments with actors would be a good idea and I think that's another thing I'll have to do sooner rather than later. The experiment was something along the lines of taking an actor and filming first in a set I'll prepare and again on a green screen, then interviewing them asking about their experience. I will do that with a few people to get a variety of feedback, I hope.
Another thing is to just look into books of all kinds, look into magazines old as well as new editions.
Definitely go to theater because I haven't been in a long time and see how well the performance can be done without the vfx without the explosions, with just good acting and music. I'll again, ask around about people's experience there.
So to sum up, I'm quite excited about this and I can't wait to get started.