Slashdot Mirror
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?
----
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!
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
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