The
adventures of a young reporter and his meeting with his future best friend, a
drunken sea captain.
For those
interested in the evolution of the cinematographic medium this is an extremely
interesting affair. Steven Spielberg uses motion capture technology to adapt a
classic Belgian comic.
A couple of
weeks ago I realized that the concept of motion capture, while yesterday news
to us movie fans, is not really that clear to everybody so maybe a little bit of
explanation is in order. Basically motion capture, as perfected by James
Cameron for Avatar, means that the actors practice their stuff while wearing
strange full body suits. Those suits are covered in sensors and so every single
movement of the actor is digitalized. James Cameron added an odd apparatus on
the actors head to register all the tiny details of the expressions and so he
was able to solve the famous “dead eyes” problem that plagued this type of technology.
The idea behind all this stuff is the creation of a virtual “costume” that will
follow every movement of the actor without being limited by anything physical.
The place
where all this stuff takes place, the box, with the aid of more processing
power than practically everything else on the planet, is able to do the basic rendering
of this process in real time which in practice means that the director will
have a good idea of how a scene is unfolding while filming it and not two weeks
later while watching the animators working. Another strange detail that
probably not everybody knows is that the digitization normally happens to the
entire scene at once and that the director chooses the angles at a much later
date while sitting alone in the cutting room. Spielberg pushed this technology a
little bit toward traditional movie making with the creation of a virtual
camera that he used to film the virtual movie in real time.
All
interesting stuff indeed and I only skimmed the surface on what’s going on
behind the scenes but let’s get to the movie.
Spielberg
adapted a very classic movie and decided to be extremely faithful to the look
and feeling of the original material. This makes it extremely peculiar because
while the design of Tintin works perfectly as a drawn character translating him
so literally to a flesh and blood one creates something extremely peculiar.
The whole
movie has been created following closely the original so we have a world in
primary colors, clear lines, and cartoon looking even with all the motion
capture shenanigans of the world.
I believe
that this has been a mistake. Movies and comics are two different medium and
what works perfectly well on one doesn’t necessarily work on the other. Bryan
Singer with the X-men opted out of their primary colors costumes and with good
reason.
While I really
wanted to enjoy it, we are talking about Spielberg here, there was another big obstacle.
Tintin while virtually unknown outside to today’s audiences is such an
important part of the evolution of the fantastical narratives that in reality
we all know him by earth even without having read it, not even once. Spielberg
himself with Indiana Jones already created Tintin the movie and he didn’t know
that he existed, all the morning serials, countless movies, a very part of our
culture is ingrained in those exotic adventures. This means that Tintin
adventures are rife with clichés, that Tintin as a character has grown old.
Luckily
Spielberg didn’t shoehorn the terrible three act structure on Tintin, we join
him in the middle of his adventures with his desks full of memorabilia from his
past, and he simply stumble into his latest adventure while walking into a flea
market. Also his camerawork, virtual camera work this time, is still perfect.
In the end
a very interesting experiment but a failed one, maybe if he didn’t try to push
the envelope in so many different directions it would have been easier to
relate to the movie and enjoy it. Still a Spielberg failure is head and
shoulders above the rest of the pack so definitely worth checking out.
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