Steven Spielberg‘s first motion-capture flick The Adventures of Tintin has topped the U.K box-office, knocking ‘Paranormal Activity 3’ off the top spot. The Herge character is wildly popular in the U.K and Europe and with the combined talents of Spielberg and Peter Jackson bringing the world to life, there’s little doubt the film will do exceptionally well in this market.
The flick opens 2 months later in the U.S where the character is less revered, however the film is said to be reviving interest in mo-cap movies, where the Robert Zemeckis produced efforts have been less than well received.
For Steven Spielberg’s it’s the first time in his career he’s worked with another filmmaker this closely, with Jackson bringing much needed humor to the project, not to mention the talented artists of Weta Digital in New Zealand, who worked on the ground breaking flick, Avatar. As a young director he had heard for years that Spielberg was set to make a film adaptation of the intrepid young journalist, the project however stalled – until the day Steven called him.Jackson tells The Hollywood Reporter:
I started to read about Steven doing the Tintin film and I was waiting and waiting to see it. Then eventually, six or seven years ago, Steven called me.
Spielberg recalls how he learned about motion capture film-making when his friend James Cameron invited him to the Marina Del Rey studio while Avatar was being made.
I watched for a while and Jim let me play with — you can’t even call it a camera: it looks like a game controller, with a littletelevision screen and an X and Y control to move the camera around. When you walk, the camera dollies; when you go forward, the camera moves in. I was able to play around. Then Peter and Weta devised an entirely new system that was the most remarkable I had ever seen.
We kept changing the script all through the shoot. We had an entire subplot we cut out. We shot it to thicken the plot, because the plots in all the Hergé books are very easy to understand and we tried to overly complicate them and realized that Hergé was right and we were wrong.
Sony and Paramount have a lot of faith in this new Tintin and have put plans in motion for a sequel. With Jackson set to take the helm if they get the go-ahead to make a sequel, it will be his next film after he finishes work on the eagerly awaited ‘The Hobbit’ prequels. While Spielberg’s film was based on the Herge’s books ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’, the sequel will draw from ‘Prisoners of the Sun’ and ‘The Seven Crystal Balls’.
via: THR
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