Through the Middle-lands their journey took them, to the blasted place in the shadow of Mount Doom known to Elves as the Black Country. The haunt of Men, workers of great engines of smoke and fire and speakers of a tongue so strange as to be known only to the likes of Clare the Short and Frank the Skinner. And there they spoke of the Ring, and of orcs and wizards and hobbits, and of whether Mordor should be pronounced Mordor, as it always had been, or Mawdaw!, in that startled, Scottish way preferred by Sir Ian McKellen. [More]
Month: August 2005
Peter Jackson’s restored version of the only film taken of the Anzacs at Gallipoli in 1915 will have its New Zealand premiere at a documentary film festival in Auckland and Wellington next month. The film Heroes of Gallipoli screens at the DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival in Auckland from September 15 and in Wellington from September 29. Jackson, a World War I buff, approached the Australian War Memorial two years ago to see if technology developed by Weta Digital could be used to restore archival film. [More]
The name is Hungarian. The man is from New Zealand. But lately Marton Csokas is a self-proclaimed gypsy, since he’s been shooting near-constantly since 2001, when his career surged, thanks to a little movie from Down Under called “Rain,” in which he played a drifter who’s dabbling with both a lovely lady and her curious 13-year-old daughter. Csokas’ penetrating stare and abundant talent have landed the former soap star roles in a stream of blockbusters — “The Lord of the Rings,” “Star Wars: Episode II,” “XXX,” “Kingdom of Heaven, ” the upcoming “Aeon Flux”. [More]
Joe Utichi, Editor for FilmFocus.Co.UK writes: We had a chat on the phone with Richard Taylor the other day about just about everything Weta is working on and I thought you and your readers might be interested in it. [More]
Massive Software today announced Massive Jet, a new autonomous agent 3D animation application that enables the creation of large-scale, believable digital crowd shots “out of the box” with high quality and a low learning curve. A full-functioning package priced under $6K USD, Massive Jet leverages the company’s Academy Award-winning artificial life-based technology, pre-built Ready-to-Run Agent library and GPU-accelerated rendering support to allow animators and artists at any facility to quickly and easily produce highly realistic Massive scenes. [More]
From gamespot.com: The Academy Award-winning Lord of the Rings motion pictures made novelist J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novels live again on the big screen. Last year, the team responsible for Command & Conquer: Generals brought the fantasy movies home in the form of an epic real-time strategy game. The team is now back working on a sequel, Battle for Middle-earth II, which will be built out with the full library of lore offered by Tolkien’s novels now that publisher EA has secured the rights to the books to go with its movie license. In plain English, this means bigger fortresses, bigger battles, and more spectacular effects. [More]