Okay, I wander off for a few hours, and everyone digs up the Billy Boyd article from The Scotsman for me! Apparently, the story is that Billy is the hottest bloke in Scotland right now. Nice work, if you can get it … [More] Updated!
Category: Original TORn
Okay, I wander off for a few hours, and everyone digs up the Billy Boyd article from The Scotsman for me! Apparently, the story is that Billy Boyd is the hottest bloke in Scotland right now. Nice work, if you can get it …
Thanks heaps to the dozens of people who found the article, and e-mailed me.
Update: Carnadacil wrote to remind me know there’s also this tiny breakout article that gooes with the larget story. [More]
Who’s hot and who’s not in Scottish singles charts
CLAIRE SMITH
ONCE upon a time being the heir to the throne guaranteed the No1 spot among Britain’s most eligible bachelors.
But a newspaper poll has demoted Prince William to the No3 spot, after an actor who played a hobbit and a famously scruffy publisher.
Ahead of the heir to the throne in Scotland on Sunday’s Most Wanted list are elfin-faced Lord of the Rings actor Billy Boyd and high-flying Edinburgh publisher Jamie Byng.
The No1 eligible female spot has been given to Monarch of the Glen actress Dawn Steele, 27, who is a close friend of male No1 Boyd.
Yesterday, Boyd said they were good friends, but denied there was any chance of a romance which could take them both off the singles list.
“We’ve known each other far too long for any of that nonsense, but we might go out for a drink together to celebrate,” he said. He was “over the moon” to be considered the sexiest man in Scotland and was “amazed to be knocking royalty off the top of the list”.
Scotland on Sunday’s annual Most Wanted list aims to be the definitive guide to the 100 most eligible single men and women in Scotland.
The list provides potted biographies and relationship histories, and suggests where you might seek out Scotland’s top singletons if you fancy a date.
Staff at Canongate Books were stunned to hear that publisher Byng, who lives in jeans and unironed shirts, now ranks higher than Prince William as one of the sexiest men in the land.
But Byng’s stock is high at the moment, after Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi, landed the prestigious Booker prize.
Actors dominate the lists of both men and women, with rising star Steele holding the No1 female slot. Potential suitors are advised to polish up their green wellies, but will have a hard time tracking down Steele, who is heading off to Australia for a break after filming The Key in and around Glasgow.
Happily, age is no barrier in today’s fluid singles market. Perennial songstress Lulu may be 54 but she is still rated the second sexiest woman in Scotland. Lulu is believed to have split from Night and Day star Stuart Manning, 32 years her junior.
But anyone planning to make a play for the flame-haired pop star are advised she has the energy to keep them on their toes. Any would-be suitors will have to keep it stylish and be prepared for paparazzi interest in what they have for breakfast.
The researchers say they have spent months compiling the definitive guide to Scotland’s most eligible. The celebrities, sports and business people in their Most Wanted list have often been hard to pin down.
A spokesman for Scotland on Sunday said: “Our researchers have been led a merry dance as they’ve tried to confirm whether certain alleged eligibles are single at all.
“One male entrepreneur was outraged at the suggestion that seeing the same woman for over a year counted as ‘a relationship’. A couple of chancers even asked us to give them 24 hours to get rid of their partners.
“Some women proved just as slippery. Several admitted to having a regular boyfriend but thought it didn’t really matter. But their greatest worry seemed to be the ranking they’d receive – with some demanding to be removed if they were not in the top 20.”
As well as glamorous members of the acting and pop world, the 100 Most Wanted list also features sports men and women, business high-fliers and even the odd politician.
SNP stalwart Roseanna Cunningham makes the list – despite being 51 and married to her job. Potential suitors are advised to swot up on their Star Trek, buy some Australian red wine – and not to expect to win any arguments.
Sweet Sixteen star Martin Compston is one of the youngest to make the list. The 18-year-old, who is about to launch himself in Hollywood, is ranked No4.
Another newcomer – proving the list carries something for everyone – is comedian Rhona Cameron, who shot to prominence in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
The nation’s most eligible
MEN
1 Billy Boyd, actor
2 Jamie Byng, publisher
3 Prince William, student
4 Martin Compston, actor
5 Tony Kearney, actor
6 Des Hamilton, casting director and actor
7 Darius Danesh, singer
8 Sam Heughan, actor
9 Alan Pert, architect
10 John Amabile, designer and TV presenter
WOMEN
1 Dawn Steele, actress
2 Lulu, popstar
3 Shabana Akhtar Bakhsh, actress
4 Emma Redfern, businesswoman
5 Diane Main, artist
6 Emma Richards, yachtswoman
7 Emma Carrick Anderson, skier
8 Rhona Cameron, comedian
9 Mary Forster, architect
10 Kelly Cooper, pub owner
—
By Steven Kent
Special to the Tribune
Published November 30, 2002
In “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first movie in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, audiences had a brief glimpse of a shadowy figure climbing a distant wall. In “The Two Towers,” the trilogy’s second installment, that distant shadow becomes a vital presence.
Gollum, a degenerate creature corrupted by the ring, is a tangle of deviousness and emotion. He is shorter than a man, yet has disproportionately long limbs and an elongated neck.
“It was important that Gollum be as real as the other characters,” said Remington Scott, motion capture supervisor for Weta Ltd., the New Zealand studio where much of the special effects work for the trilogy is created. “He had to be real emotionally, psychologically and physically because Frodo [the ring bearer] is supposed to see himself reflected in Gollum. Motion capture is the only way to do that.”
Motion capture is a technology used by video game designers and filmmakers that assigns real movements to computer animated characters. Electronic Arts, for instance, uses motion capture of real professional football players to create movements for the virtual players in its “John Madden NFL” series.
To bring quarterback Kurt Warner to life, game technicians capture his steps, his timing and the way he whips his arms. But bringing Gollum to the screen required something more subtle and exacting: Scott had to capture conversations.
To do this, he worked with actor Andy Serkis, who played both the voice and body of Gollum. “[Director Peter Jackson] hired Andy to come down and do two or three weeks of audio recording for Gollum because they were originally going to animate him,” said Scott. But “Pete liked his physicality enough that they kept him on set during production.”
The technique captures actors, dressed in black lycra suits studded with reflective white balls, performing scenes in the capture zone. The cameras do not record the actors; rather, they record the movements of the light-reflecting balls. This information is translated into computer data, which are then used to create skeletal models.
Graphic artists then design skins, placed over the skeletons, to create animated characters with realistic movements. Gollum, however, with his unique physique, posed an additional challenge.
“Andy’s proportions are very different than Gollum’s,” said Scott. “Over the years–I think he has been alive for 500 years–Gollum has changed. He has gotten long limbs, a long neck, and grown very thin.
“If we took Gollum and mapped him over Andy, he would move very strangely. We had to retarget Andy’s bones into the bone structure of Gollum.”
Scott’s team did this retargeting on the computer, stretching Serkis’ limbs and making him proportionally smaller overall.
For the first film, a 16-camera motion-capture studio was used. But that proved inadequate to create Gollum, so Scott increased it to 24 cameras to create a larger zone.
“When I first came out, we had 16 optical cameras,” said Scott, who joined the filming for the second installment, which opens in theaters Dec. 18. “This gave us 5 meters width by 5 meters length with 4 meters height. It was not a large zone. It was very limiting.”
Even with the extra cameras, creating motion capture stage versions of the real settings used in the movie was demanding. “There was a scene in which some Hobbits walk down a mountain. Gollum crawls down.
“They actually shot the Hobbits on some hill somewhere in New Zealand, I have no idea where. We had to track their positions in space and the plane of the ground. That way we could put Andy onto a plane that we had to create physically [in the studio].”
Still, Scott’s zone was far smaller than a mountain. “We had to build a mountain in four or five pieces,” said Scott. “We would have Andy crawl down one portion of the mountain, roll the next one in, and have him crawl on that one.
“Gollum runs around a lot, so we had to create a stage on wheels so that we could reposition the stage within the zone area. That way we could capture Andy, then blend it together later in edit.”
Real-time direction
And there was one other requirement. Because Gollum’s part was so integral to the success of the movie, Jackson insisted on directing Serkis’ motion-capture sessions himself. He could not, however, properly direct scenes in which Gollum speaks with Frodo and others simply by watching Serkis alone in a capture zone.
“It was essential for Peter to see Andy’s performance retargeted as Gollum in real time,” Scott said. To do this, Jackson watched a monitor instead of Serkis and the zone.
Movements synced with actors
“Peter would look at a visualization monitor the entire time,” said Scott. “He would be sitting right next to me, and the stage is right in front of him; but
he’s not looking at Andy, he’s looking at a monitor.
“What he saw was a fully rendered and retargeted Gollum in real time, but that wasn’t enough. He had to see Gollum grounded in the shots, so he could see him in relation to all the other actors and what they were doing.”
To do this, the computer superimposed Serkis’ data over still plates of scenes from the movie. The image of Gollum was placed in the actual scenes, and Jackson was able to see where he would appear and how his movements synced with the placement of the other actors.
Steven Kent is a freelance writer based in Issaquah, Wash.
From the Scotsman: Liv Tyler arrives in the piazza of a New York hotel wearing blue jeans and a white Marc Jacobs blouse, with a Hermes bag slung over one shoulder. I received a tip there’s a Billy Boyd article somewhere on the site as well, but I can’t seem to locate it. [More]
Dave_Smoketoomuch writes: BBC’s Film 2002 is running a Film of the Year poll (it runs from December 2001 to December 14th 2002, so FOTR is elligible). UK residents only, however. [More]
The UK paper, The Guardian, says more classic titles such as Lawrence of Arabia will be hitting IMAX screens as well as two major titles next year, the third Harry Potter and LoTR films. These films will not be cut down in time like Star Wars was, but instead will have an intermission as the reels will have to be changed. They will appear on IMAX screens on the same release date as they will hit regular theatres! [More]