Peter Jackson has confirmed that The Hobbit, to be shot in Wellington next year, will be one continuous movie in two parts and not two self-contained films. When the project was announced in late 2007, the plan was for two films to be shot back-to-back. The first film would be based on The Hobbit in its entirety, or, some of the story would spill over into the second film which would also be based on author JRR Tolkien’s other writings to create a direct link to The Lord of the Rings. But Jackson, who is also an executive producer on the project, said The Hobbit would now take up all of both films. “We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” he hold British film magazine Empire. Hobbit: One tale in two parts

Wellington’s Weta Digital computer graphics workshop is launching a working group aimed at bringing advanced research together with movie production. The new group, Transfx, is headed by Sebastian Sylwan, who has joined Weta as head of research and development, Variety Magazine reported today. Sylwan was most recently senior industry manager for film and television at United States software developer Autodesk, where he led work on stereoscopic 3-D. Weta is already working on an innovative 3-D movie, James Cameron’s Avatar, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Tintin. Weta seeks advanced research for movie graphics

Kristin writes: The Independent has posted a story about a problem of racial sensitivity that the makers of The Dam Busters are trying to solve. It involves the name of squadron’s canine mascot. The Name Dilemma

From screenrant.com: District 9 is the upcoming and highly-secretive Neill Blomkamp-directed sci-fi film, produced by Peter Jackson. While we haven’t seen much news on the upcoming film, Screen Rant reported at the beginning of April what the movie is all about and it sounded very interesting to say the least. Now, we finally have the official trailer for District 9 and it’s really damn cool. Official ‘District 9′ Trailer Looks Amazing