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]
Category: Old Main News
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]
This is not the place to expect a sighting of Viggo Mortensen, the star of “The Lord of the Rings.” Or at least it wasn’t when President Bush began his annual vacation here earlier this month. But something has happened to Crawford over the last week. The sleepy summer air has been punctured by a blast of anti-war energy, with carloads of activists appearing every afternoon to join a steady vigil begun by the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. [More]
Elvish singing ripples across the reception at Aston University, where 700 delegates from around the world have gathered for Tolkien 2005, a four-day conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the full publication of The Lord of the Rings. The singing comes from the substantial figure of Mole – Paul Smith in the normal world – who crams into his days a full-time job, semi-professional church singing, a “personal attachment” to Tolkien’s leading dwarf Gimli and regular attendance at Discworld conventions. [More]