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Yoda, Gollum Take MTV Awards
zoobaby writes "MTV has given the LoTR franchise credit for spectactular work with Gollum. After being snubbed by the Academy Awards, it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films."
It's myy precioussss, it is... Nasty Yoda can't haves it, Noooo....
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is obviously keeping up with the 'shiny things' network.
Giving Gollum some recognition is great and all, but when he wins it jointly with the little guy who jumped around like sonic the hedge hog wielding a light saber, it is lacking credibility. It is obviously the 'digital characters are cool' award.
-Eyston
Some of us might have actually enjoyed watching the goddamn awards without knowing who wins beforehand. The show isnt even aired til June 5th. Once again Slashdot Editors, thank you for spoiling another (Circle one: TV Show, Movie, Game Ending).
...it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films.
Its probably a lot easier to be yourself when you know its never going to hit film (your face).
Perhaps acting could become even better in the future, still done by humans, but mapped over with different faces?
With acting you have to let yourself go. I think actors still hold something back though and aren't 100% of what they could be.
(It's a joke. Laugh.)
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Eminem got awarded for best male role and said: "I can't believe I beat Mariah for 'Glitter'".
While I can't believe it either it still puzzles me.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
First the Aimee Deep Story and now this MTV story...if this turns into a Teeny Bopper website, I am so out of here...
they should just have cast Christopher Walken as gollum.
. . .then the emereror has already won.
You are not the customer.
I don't see how recognition by a network known for not knowing the difference between art and a hole in the wall is in any way complimentary...
The LOTR makers' work on Gollum was not snubbed by the academy. They did not make Serkis eligible for an Oscar, but they gave the Oscar for visual effects to the WETA team, and (IIRC) showed a Gollum clip as they were walking to the stage.
I don't know about you guys, but I still don't think CGI is ready for the big time. In every movie it looks so obvious that there was CGI used that it almost ruins the movie for me.
Even movies from the 80's that used blue screens for everything looked more realistic than today's CGI aided movies, CGI just isn't advanced enough yet to be convincing. You also can't reproduce the human touch of make-up and hand produced costumes you get with using real actors.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
with the work that those people did on yoda and gollum they definatly deserve EVERY award they get. they'd both better win, or i'm boycotting mtv. (well actually i am anyway)
I write code.
My presssssshious ssssslashdot thwarted my tv watching ssssssschedule, they did.
(ok, was that a good merging of the two?)
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
i wonder how protective gollum would be of his new precious.
bananas like monkeys.
The guy who played gollum, yes there actually was a guy in a suit and his name was Andy Serkis, deserves all kinds of credit. He did a marvelous job bringing the character to life. If you look Neo for example, he was basically cg the whole movie anyways. They had other fighters/actors in suits with the little balls at every joint and they pasted his face on the body.
SCI-FI movies esp need more cg characters to bring the world to life. Why is every species in star trek is just like a human. Wouldn't it be neater to see a different variety?
Any one seen simone lately?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
He didn't expect it? Boy, that rendering farm and the voice actors sure must work in a hurry to produce a rendered imagine complete with voice acting in such a hurry! You'd almost think this is a huge show, a spectacle aimed at enriching those with the largest marketing/SFX budget! Almost like the gollum thing further on in the article:
Come on people, we're talking about the MTV awards here, brought to us by MTV; the epitomy of modern pop and hype culture. We're talking about something hosted by a TV station aimed at 14 year old girls who faint at the sight of $current_hip_boyband and wish to be like $cheap_spicegirls_knock_off while flooding the rest of the market with artists like $random_teen_chick and $overhyped_guy_who_looks_gay ...
Hate me!
Gollum was a great character. Yeah, the camera work back and forth may have been a little too much, but I think that's a great way for Gollum to be depicted. His split personality was shown greatly and that is the one thing I am actually looking forward to in the third movie since they already messed with the storyline so much!
Look at all the pointless first posts, this submission must have attracted the MTV crowd. I played right into it. Shit.
Ah but he does very much exist... Andy Serkis is a graduate of my very own Lancaster University and did a very marvelous job of portraying gollum.
The animators used actual footage of Serkis acting out the role in a silly skintight body stocking, and the voice is all him. I am particularly impressed by gollum's dialogue with himself
He didn't have a split personality in the book. Maybe he was at ends with himself and conflicted, but leave it to Hollywood to encapsulate the original writing in a way most modern idiots could understand or appreciate.
Is anyone sick of hearing of Lord of the Rings... Does anyone care that CGI is taking over film, and that nobody is putting effort into special effects anymore? Why I remember back in the day, when it used to be really cool to see stuff, even if it looked a little fake, that was done. Now it's like, "That's too much effort, lets toss some CGI in there for this scene." Same with the Matrix Reloaded, the fight scene with Neo and the Agent Smiths. Obviously they thought that the first movie was cool with the spinny effects (which it was) so they'd better put more spinny effects in there. Only we want to do it really cool without spending a lot of money, so lets just replace the entire scene, actors, backgrounds, etc with computer animation and solve the ingeneuity problem. Yes ingeneuity, figuring out how to make a scene come to life with real people. Something that movies these days are starting to seriously lack.
*runs*
Some people have said that having Serkis as the actor on scene, the face actor, the expression actor and the voice actor is just a gimmic.
This is complete rubbish. The reason that Gollum seems as real as he does is because of the connection between voice and motion that you get with every human. It is for this reason that it is always easy to tell when a voice for animation was cast before or after the animation itself was complete.
If I walked around with somebody else's voice all day, I would seem strange. Hats off to Serkis and the LotR crew for knowing this. Now we can begin to cast by acting talent, not physical attractiveness.
-twb
While there will always be acting jobs in theatre, TV and non-Hollywood productions, is it any suprise that no acting Oscars went to a film that demonstrates actors worst nightmare - i.e. that the demand for them is about to drop?
Well take this!
Vader is Lukes father
Soilent Green is people
XXX Sucks
And the third LOTR and the third Matrix are actually the same movie!
The Academy announced that Serkis was eligible to be nominated for an Oscar (scroll down in link, third paragraph from the bottom). He just did not receive enough votes from Academy members to receive a nomination.
Perhaps, but the definitive Gollum is that voiced by Peter Woodthorpe in the still definitive BBC radio version. Anyone who is interested in The Lord of the Rings, but hasn't heard this version, should really do themselves a favour and check it out.
Semi-interestingly, Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo in the films, is cast as Frodo here. Co-incidence? I doubt it. I rather suspect that t'old Mr Jackson has heard this version too.
Cheers,
Ian
Why yes, yes you are! It's easy to be a comedian when a bunch of nerds are reading!
iCe
Um...I want the name of the person who modded this "Insightful" so that they can be dragged out into the street and shot. That is all.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I cannot _stand_ people who think Yoda speaks in a fashion that just randomly rearranges words. The times I've watched Star Wars (tm) movies, it's always seemed to me that he speaks in a classical Latin word order
eg.
"Strong you are" (Yoda) or whatever, as compared to
"mangus es" (Romans)
If only it was... Any award from that channel is more of an insult. Those pigs are out for money and nothing else, and they realize that digital characters are going mainstream. Any attempt at fairness by them is completely chimerical.
Move Zig!
Basically, it was bugs-bunny animation physics.
In other words: Gollum didn't get a "best supporting actor" nomination because he didn't deserve one: he sucked.
o The butler did it.
:(
:P
oo Everybody dies at the end.
oo He leaves her/she leaves him (but they get back together)
o He's/she's NOT REALLY DEAD and will come back to life.
oo There will be a chase scene. Perhaps more than one.
oo There WILL BE a fight of some kind.
oo There's a built-in sequel - they even do it just for the money sometimes, and to Hell with the plot.
o TLG are DEAD. Get over it.
o SW Episode III will probably suck too. So will Hulk.
o Gollum dies.
o Your popcorn has been pissed in, and you probably deserve your money back.
--Now please excuse me, I have to go watch Finding Nemo again.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
No, you will never be funny, because you have a tendency to explain jokes like a social anthropologist with a stick up his ass.
It's not on the level of the lone gunmen spoiler or anything, but still - nobody has actually seen the awards show, so maybe you should assume that SOME of us want to be surprised? Yeah I know it's been taped already, but it doesn't air until Thursday. Being as not a single Slashdot reader has actually seen the show, this should be posted with a spoiler warning.
stfu, stalker
Quoteth the article:
The event at the Shrine Auditorium is more satire than ceremony, honoring show-business types for such categories as best kiss and villain.
The only redeeming part about the MTV movie awards: the fact that, underneath it all, they're just poking fun at self-important movie stars.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Don't you have anything better to do, troll?
Come on guys, MTV.COM could use a good slashdotting.
Not to mention eMpTyV, 32 feet of static cultural head.
Its an MTV award.
That means its recognition that LOTR has been assimilated into popular culture.. nothing more.
I often wonder how "serious" artists and filmmakers manage to hide their indifference about MTV awards.
The 2-mile loop cost $2.4 million, not 30. (reference)
And the $100 million special effects are for both movies together.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I was lucky enough to see the taping of the MTV Movie Awards yesterday, and for the most part you're right. It was very much an advertisement for current pop culture trends. Almost every pair of presenters was in upcoming movies together (Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett, Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson), and they all took advantage of their time on stage to plug their movies and release dates.
The assorted movie spoofs, starring people like Will Ferrell, Andy Dick, Vince Vaughn, and the hosts (Justin Timberlake and Seann William Scott) were basically a quick recap of Matrix Reloaded and an unashamedly sexual sneak preview of the Charlie's Angels sequel.
Both George Lucas (who was there) and the LOTR team (who showed up in the audience and via tape from New Zealand) put quite a bit of effort into animating Yoda and Gollum for the awards. It's a great marketing opportunity for them...a chance to show fantasy-based characters in a more realistic setting.
That being said, some of it was F***ing hilarious. The phrase 'expletive-filled tirade' really doesn't do Gollum's speech justice. He went on a rant like you wouldn't believe, swearing at just about everybody and using some amazingly harsh language. He even got in some of the split-personality Gollum we loved in the movie. It's definitely a sight to behold.
I didn't find Yoda's speech quite as entertaining. A little too much backward-talking for my taste, and his gangsta routine (you'll know it when you see it) seemed a little weak.
Of course, I'd get my guy card revoked if I didn't mention the best moment of the night...Tatu's performance. I don't know how the song was...I was too distracted by the hundreds of beautiful women jumping around in white shirts and Catholic schoolgirl skirts. Bouncing around in the aisles, dancing on stage, and getting incredibly sexual at points, they capped it off by ripping off their shirts and skirts to show off tiny tank tops and boys underwear. I don't know how it will come across on TV, but being there in person certainly made my weekend. Also, I'm really hoping they show Vince Vaughn and P. Diddy's reaction to the dancing....classic.
Nothing like a little anti-Semitic blood libel to get the laughter juices flowing.
Go read a history book, and I don't mean The Protocol of the Elders of Zion..
This is an example of computer generated credability (CGC) -- (TM). This is characterized by:
1.) Generate a news story including LotR so it will be picked up on slashdot
2.) ??
3.) Profit!
When the first line of the article reads:
one should wonder if the motive is just to drive up viewership.I've always wondered if anything that was aired on MTV really existed.
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
It's nice to finally see Weeta's acomplishments awarded. They've certainly deserved whatever price MTV have given them.
It's very symptomatic that this award comes from the underground rather than from the academy. The academy might have been in the award business a tad longer, but lately their judgements have been out of synch with the US population.
Many people are complaining about the horrors of pop culture and MTV in particular, but were not Mozart, Beathoven and Bach pop artists of their time? In due time, the real talents of people like REM and Eminem will be aknowledged.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
...chimerical...
im going to wait for an Mtv fan to stumble onto this post somehow and reply to an AC with personal insults because he thought chimerical was some French curse word to describe their favorite channel...
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Does anyone actually watch it anymore? Didn't it stop playing music 7-8 years ago? As a bonus, why would anyone take MTV seriously when it comes to film? I mean, they supposedly specialise in -music-, right?
I'm curious.
Gollum really did a good job presenting a character with some sort of character depth, and compared to 'acting' of other cg chararcters, *cough*(jar-jar)*cough* his was well above normal. Hopefully a trend will continue and our most popular actors won't have to be among the overpaid hollywood elite.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
"...it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films."
Fucking nerds.
This point is very important. Disregarding static issues like skin and hair modeling and rendering. Human perception has evolved and is tuned for communication, primarily with other humans. Therefore we are very sensitive to minute incongruencies with our expectation of how a face shoud move, both by itself, and in the context of the surrounding environment. This is why completely hand animated human faces are almost always very poor...they strive to be real, but cannot account for the complexity. In contrast, cartooned faces are far enough from reality, that "unrealistic" facial action is accepted...as we are not expecting reality.
It is (I'll be bold and say impossible) for an animator to get the motions perfect for anything more than relatively simple facial actuation. There are just too many, often subconscious factors that go into facial action...but all of these are important to achieve a realistic result.
Motion capture has been used to solve this problem, taking the burden away from the animator, but the mapping problem is still difficult, we have a sparse sampling of skin motion from a human that has different facial characteristics from the model being animated. How do you handle the skin in between the motion capture points? Some sort of interpolation scheme is usually used, but this is a gross oversimplification of skin physics...not to mention, that it doesn't account for secondary motion of the skin such as wrinkling.
Anyway, in short, its a hard problem. BUT, I have no doubt that the problem will be solved...
rant over
CGI will never look human, because typically the CGI isn't human, not supposed to be human, would be wrong if it were human.
In the clips of the Incredible Hulk, does it look wrong? Yes? Good! The Incredible Hulk is not human. He bounces better, moves differently, is just plain built differently.
Did Spiderman look unusual? Good! A man swinging through a city shouldn't be normal for you.
In fact, your claims that the old effects "looked better" are a backhanded slam against the realism of those effects. Everything moved like a human or a puppet, because everything was a human or a puppet. Both of those motions looked "natural" to you, because you're used to them, but unless they were supposed to be a human or a puppet, that actually means the effect was a poor imitation of what "the real thing" should be.
Do you really think ET's race could have survived long enough to build those spaceships they have if they moved like an eighty-year-old arthritic grandmother? The equivalent of wolves on their planet would have torn them to pieces long before they developed civilization.
This is not to say all CGI is perfect. But you're going to have to either cut them some slack, or watch "Finding Nemo"*-style cartoons for the rest of cinematic history.
In conclusion, I disagree completely. Compared to modern effects the 80s effects are, well, 20 years out of date. They only look better because you're used to them. I've tried to adjust to the modern style, and while it could still use some improvement, compared to the 80s its stellar. If the (non-humanoid) aliens of the 80s are any indication, what the universe needs most from our planet is enormous quantities of Ben-Gay, Aspercreme, and Gold Bond medicated powder, 'cause there sure is an awful lot of joint pain out there.
*: Not meant as a slam against Finding Nemo; I haven't seen it yet but I expect to enjoy it. The point is that it quite deliberately moves like a cartoon, which is another style of movement we're "used to", even though it's totally 100% fake.
Acting crazy, or angry, or any single emotion very strongly is easy. Watch any high school production: the less experienced actors stand out by the intensity with which they feel each emotion. Talent in acting is revealed in the conflict of two emotions felt at once.
You may say that Gollum's conversation with himself is just that, but it isn't. He gets to switch between two single emotions like a madman which any semi-experienced actor can tell you is pretty damn easy, even fun. Keep in mind that Gollum's conversation with himself was also shot in pieces, once from each angle. In that respect the actor didn't even have to switch emotions as quickly as it appears he did on screen.
Gollum didn't win an Oscar because he didn't deserve it.
The effects in X2 were much more realistic and entertaining. And they didn't even spend as much.
Matrix Reloaded should have done better for $100M.
o Nobody important dies.
o It was all a delusion in John Nash's mind.
o Bruce Willis is already dead
o Colonel Fitts kills Lester
o Lara Croft saves the world.
o Catherine Tramell is the killer.
o The apes take over the city.
o Charlton Heston's character blows up the world.
o 'Rosebud' is a sled.
o Dil is a man
o Bomb #20 kills everyone.
o The butler, a surviving Nazi, did it.
o Eddie is still alive.
o Ash is the only survivor.
o Ash is the only survivor, again.
o Everyone dies, except for Mr Pink.
o The Director committed the murder.
o Walter and Anna reconcile, finish the house, and get married.
o Milton burns the building down.
o Rocky loses the fight.
o V'ger is 'Voyager'
o Spock dies.
o The enterprise blows up.
o Kirk gets demoted.
o Kirk blows up God.
o Kirk blows up Christopher Plummer.
o Kirk dies.
o Gabriel and Ginger escape.
o THX escapes.
o Sean Connery makes a cameo apperance.
o Zurg is Buzz's father.
o Jake & Grace are also father and daughter.
o Yelena is a good guy.
o The book is The Wizard of Oz.
What the hell are you saying? Please dont tell me Yoda has more history then Gollum! Gollum has his entire tragic past. He used to be a hobbit. Then the ring turned his childish pranks into murder. Then he spent hundreds of years being tortured by the ring in a cave hunting down goblins in the dark. He is a tortured soul. Now half hobbit, half something else, he is following one of the most important beings in middle earth during the climax of the age! I mean, yoda is cool too, but to say Gollum has no character is absolute bullshit. And you can see the torture in his facial expressions while he's on the screen. Goddam astounding if you ask me. A bunch of '1's and '0's turned into a character I can believe spent 700 years in a cave being tortured by a magical ring. I saw the pain in his expressions.
Ok, so its slimy, scrawny, has no social skills and can't stand the light. Sounds more like any old computer geek living in their parents basement than an achievement in CGI. :)
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
let's not forget that the entire gollum character was rendered on a cluster of debian boxes.
Dude. Jesus.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
I also direct movies for HBO...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Circuitous goatse link in the above post....
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
PWN
Fuck MTV motherfuckers, goddam commercial piece of crap teeny bopper t.v. channel, playing the same motherfucking songs over and over again till I puke. What the fuck!! This is slashdot, please don't post motherfucking pieces on MTV... you guys are more intelligent than this.
Anon
ok fellas, to start off a soon to be much debated subject, who WOULD win? Neo or a Jedi Master, any rules apply, take in all accounts and facts such as Jedi lives in another galaxy, while neo lives in a computer simuation(or does he achitect?...) debate starts now.............
While the CGI in this movie was outstanding, it still lacked some items that made it not quite photorealistic. One of the things is translucency. The people in FFTSW still looked somewhat plastic, because they lacked translucency.
Now the CGI in Matrix Reloaded, on the other hand, lacked MANY qualities, and looks like they used plastic figures for things...
Only compared to Keanu Reeves' Neo.
A-Bomb
You know, I swear I heard in interviews, and perhaps saw on their website somewhere, that, with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, they were attempting to make it look as photorealistic as possible.
If I could remember where I encountered this, I would provide links.
MTV has been giving awards to computer-enhanced pseudo-muppets for years!
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
O.T., i know, but might ET not've been so technically advanced, that he evolved less 'wild nature capable to survive?' Like hell, we would be torn to pieces by a big cat, nowadays, our B.C. ancestors were a bit more rugged, albeit not so smart. We evolve toward less physical fitnes for the wilderness, because we don't need to cope with that wilderness anymore, we just grow bigger heads, and a beerbelly, gues eventually human race would evolve towards an ET creature in the long run, ET couldn't cope on eart because there was still wilderness, well we're working on that issue anyway.. (irony)
MTV is the one of the lowest forms of entertainmen ton on the planet or in history. The people who own in and run it are scum. Who cares what they think.
... because if he would be considered as an actor he was clearly overacting, if the character would be consdiered animation (in my book he was just a high tech puppeteer) then he would not be elegible.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How does MTV dare to dishonour Serkis' work by nominating him for their crappy awards?
While I agree with your point, I think Lord of the Rings is not a good example, since PJ actually made an effort to use all kinds of special and visual effects besides CGI. For example, most of the hobbit-human size difference was achieved with forced perspective (even shots where the camera moves relative to the actors), which is about as old-fashioned as you could want. Also, huge models and real locations were used extensively where most other movies these days would have just gone for computer animation. This fact (of not being lazy about using CGI) is one of the things why I like the LOTR movies so much and why PJ is now my favorite director.
Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the MTV awards again this year. Sincerely, Relevance
[OT] Add me to that list. Me friends and I said the same thing coming out of AotC. While I was greatly amused, I thought the 'stoic mind-control fight' would me more appropriate (dignified?)...
Much more like, say, Magneto breaking out of the prison in X2. Yoda should have just stood there serenly concentrating while all hell broke loose around him.
Oh yeah, while we're on it, he should have just force-pulled Anakin + Obi-Wan away from the falling debris, would've been faster. :)
I give MTV more credit these days than the Academy.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
...no matter how many times you see it, the damn ocean liner hits the iceberg and sinks every time!
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Although it is good that the average American provides support for the greatest story of all time (okay...I am a fanboy)...LOTR, I get this sick feeling in my stomach that it isn't for real. Why is MTV supporting this movie? Is it because it really is good, or is it because it is popular (I don't have the answer because I have never known the definition of popular...I'm a fanboy :-) ). I hope that it is it's greatness that prompted this award, though I fear it isn't. Just like the screaming, blabbering schoolgirls annoying scream whenever Legolas comes onscreen (yeah, he's great and all, but shut the HELL up!!), It makes me sick.
"Look at it this way. Considering the type of people you are and the environment you're in, this may be the only chance you ever have in your entire lives to have sex!" - Chris Knight "Real Genius"
To Alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.