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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."
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
...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.
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 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?
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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!
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?
It's not that you can't tell that it's CG, it's that it's done in a way that you don't care that it's CG. It's obvious from the looks of him that Gollum doesn't really exist, but then again, hobbits don't exist but we're willing to accept them as characters. It was the natural nature of Gollum's movement that allowed someone to accept him as a character, to the point that (some) people cared about him. You can put people in costumes in front of a bluescreen, but if they can't convey a sense of their characters (through acting) then they're no better than Jar-Jar.
Yeah, right. Reloaded was sure stingy on the effect. Like, geez. Only $100 mill. wtf.
Choice snippets:
o A 17-minute battle sequence alone cost over $40 million.
o The 1.4-mile, three-lane loop highway was built specifically for the chase scene on the decommissioned Alameda Point Navy Base at a cost of around $30 million. It was destroyed when filming was complete.
o It was reported that Keanu Reeves volunteered to give up a claim to a share of ticket sales amounting to around $38 million when producers feared that the film would never recoup the cost of the special effects.
o The special effects cost $100 million U.S.
-Rob Ewaschuk
To clarify, he speaks in "periodic syntax", which is the same as the context of classical latin. Several other languages (including the earliest post-latin forms of Spanish/Italian/French).
Modern english, interestingly, maintains this in a form: a "periodic sentence" is one with its main clause at the end, following all subordinate clauses and other elements. This is an echo of the older periodic sentence, revised to technically fit into the syntax rules of modern english (which inverts the verb order).
"Stumble before you crawl"
Sorry, but a bunch of guys in rubber suits in front of a blue screen is even less realistic than CGI work. Take Matrix Reloaded. You could definitely tell it was not Keanu in some of those scenes. But he still blended into the environment very well, and even a few shots he looked photo realistic. More importantly, there are millions of things added to scenes in recent movies that you would never have known were CG. You've just been trained over the years to accept the rubber suited monster in front of the screen, where as the new generation is being trained to accept the CGI. And as a CG artist myself, I can tell you that great strides have been made to this date.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
I say the definitive Gollum (and, for that matter, the definitive Treebeard) is that done by J.R.R. Tolkien in his recorded interviews, wherein he voiced many stretches of dialogue by many characters.
"Stumble before you crawl"
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.
I don't know about you guys, but I still don't think CGI is ready for the big time.
Fair enough, but just about everyone else does.
In every movie it looks so obvious that there was CGI used that it almost ruins the movie for me
Could you pick out all the CG in every one of the over 1000 VFX shots in Matrix Reloaded or Lord of the Rings? The answer is no, because most instances are seamless, and others are hidden very well if they aren't. You are probably talking about some instances of 3D that looks fake. Many times when visual effects do not look real it is due to budget and time contstraints like everything else.
Even movies from the 80's that used blue screens for everything looked more realistic than today's CGI aided movies,
It is definitly a different look, and I can understand why someone would like one over the other, but saying that 80's blue screen and optical printing is more convincing than film quality compositing and visual effects is pretty rediculous.
CGI just isn't advanced enough yet to be convincing.
It depends on what is being done. Trying to reproduce humans is incredibly difficult. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean that it can't. Just it because it can be done doesn't mean it is practical and not just a novelty. To say that CGI in general is not convincing is, quite frankly, bullshit. In just about every movie you go to, you may know where the visual effects lie in one shot, but there are 20 more that you didn't notice, I guarantee it. The movies you watch today are made possible by CGI. Deal with it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Did you ever consider that maybe Andy Serkis/Gollum wasn't nominated because he really didn't deserve the nomination? Here are 5 far superior supporting performances from eligible 2002 movies.
Chris Cooper from Adaptation
Nicky Katt from Full Frontal
Brian Cox from 25th Hour
Ian McKellan from TTT
Dennis Quad from Far From Heaven
The problem with CGI isn't how it looks - the WarCraft III Human box art is as close to photorealistic as anything I've seen. No, the problem with CGI is when it starts moving. CGI in motion has issues with lights and shadows, reflection, and lifelike movement, among other things.
Another issue is the use of "texture" images - a flat image looks photorealistic until you get close up. That's because it's a flat image, not a texture. The most obvious indicatior of CGI is clothing, because real clothes are exquisitely textured, while most moving CGI attempts to represent it as a flat image. Flat images would work if they could convey shadows, which is how you notice real-life texture anyway.
There's also the issue of collisions. In the Matrix: Reloaded discussions, someone brought up the fact that there are instances where they used bullet-time when it seemed completely unnecessary, for instance when the Agent jumps on the car in the freeway scene. This is because high-speed collisions rendered in CGI apparently look bad, so they slowed it down.
The world can be wrong today for once.
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
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.
Inanity is not to be confused with satire, and calling the MTV movie awards such is giving the network way too much credit. If you've ever watched one of these things, they're taken about as seriously as anything can be in their teeny-bopper mentality. Obviously it's not on the same level of seriousness (and pretentiousness) as the Academy Awards, but that in no way implies some sort of smart social commentary.
MTV has always tried to present these awards as an alternative to the Academy Awards. That's not the way you do satire - nobody reads The Onion as an alternative to the Washington Post, for example; you don't go there trying to get actual news. These awards aren't satire at all. They may be irreverent, but they're totally straight underneath it all.
And as such, they carry even less weight than if they were satire. The Academy Awards may be overblown but they're at least decided upon by people who know a little something about the subject - those both inside the industry itself as well as those who make a living commenting on it. What the hell does MTV know about movies? About enough to make and market Jackass, I guess. Next you'll tell me that's satire too.
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.
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.