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."
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.
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
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!
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
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!
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
True; I meant that Serkis was not eligible because he was not nominated, but used the wrong language.
One thing to keep in mind is that nominations are made only by the respective Academy members. In other words, only actors cast votes for Best Actor (speaking gender-neutrally), only directors cast votes for Best Director, etc. Later, everyone votes on which nominee gets each award. (It doesn't make sense to look too deeply into nomination counts, since there are parallel intenions, but everyone does it anyway.)
So it's really not shock or mystery why Serkis wasn't nominated. The very segment of the Academy population that was the most resistant to recognizing the work of digital characters -- the actors whose jobs may someday be threatened by them -- was the only one that had any say in the matter!
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Dude. Jesus.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C