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Rottenwatch: AVATAR (82%)

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GhaleonEB said:
Please tell me I'm not the only one who read that as if Quaritch were saying "your real legs" and spontaneously laughed out loud are a result.
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:lol :lol :lol
 
GhaleonEB said:
Please tell me I'm not the only one who read that as if Quaritch were saying "your real legs" and spontaneously laughed out loud are a result.
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33urfhu.jpg
 
DarkMehm said:
Domestic: $512,852,205 30.4%
+ Foreign: $1,172,833,529 69.6%

= Worldwide: $1,685,685,734
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The usual:

Wednesday, Domestic: 3,792,807
Wednesday, International: 19,463,329
Wednesday, Total: 23,256,136

Distance to Titanic, Domestic: 87,935,983
Distance to Titanic, International: 69,258,238
Distance to Titanic, Total: 157,194,221


From Monday-Wednesday last week, Avatar made 78,256,729.

From Monday-Wednesday this week, Avatar made 77,008,468.

The opening in France on Friday and MLK holiday on Monday are offsetting what are otherwise 20% weekly declines. Looks like Avatar will break Titanic's WW record on Monday.
 
The definition of an animated movie according to Academy standards is:

An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of at least 70 minutes, in which
movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, a
significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than
75 percent of the picture’s running time.
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But even if Avatar could qualify, it wouldn't matter because they're not going to submit it as an animated feature, they're going to push for Best Picture.
 
It sounds like it'd qualify as an "animated film" as much as any other CG feature. Everything is still drawn in a "frame by frame" fasion.

I'm not sure if CG comprises 75% of the film's running time.....though it probably does.
 
ryutaro's mama said:
I think I may know a little more than you are giving me credit for. Your pompous, arrogant attitude is clown shoes.

Anyway, of course the mocap isn't just unwrapped and applied to the models as is. Yeah, there is a LOT that the animators do to tweak the anims and get them right.

What I was arguing was the fact that, UNLIKE OTHER FILMS, the actual actors were involved in the process and it was for example, Zoe's data being recorded as opposed to Zoe standing in a VO booth while some other mocap actor performed the needed capture.
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I've never argued with that. It's performance capture, it's motion capture, that much we agree with.

I'm just not sure people quite understand how much work animators and mocap artists have to do before they get it just right. Trust me, even though it's Zoe on screen, it wasn't as straightforward as it seems to be. And there's quite a bit of keyframe in the movie, anyway.

But, if the debate is "this is Zoe's performance, not an animator's", then, we can all agree this is right. Does this fall into the Animation category? I don't know, it's a whole other can of worms.

Edit : By the way, I didn't want to insult anybody.
 
Lord Error said:
I see - I wasn't sure how that works. I know they introduced the "Best Animated Movie" category, for what seemed no better reason than to prevent animated movies competing against live acted movies.

I'm all for the equality in how the movies are treated btw, and I didn't like how they had that category added.
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A movie can be in both the animated category as well as the best picture category, just like how a movie can be in both foreign and best picture. The animated/foreign/documentary categories are actually there to help films in these categories get recognition, not to take away any chances they have. Best picture is simply the best feature length production of that year, regardless of what sort of movie it is. Any sort of film can qualify if it is nominated.
 
duckroll said:
A movie can be in both the animated category as well as the best picture category, just like how a movie can be in both foreign and best picture. The animated/foreign/documentary categories are actually there to help films in these categories get recognition, not to take away any chances they have. Best picture is simply the best feature length production of that year, regardless of what sort of movie it is. Any sort of film can qualify if it is nominated.
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Hmm...Can you name the last animated movie to win best picture? Whilst your at it, name a foreign language film to do the same. You could argue that The Academy has acknowledged the glass ceiling for these films, though not outright barred from nomination and winning they might as well be...

Best Picture should be ...BEST DRAMA IN ENGLISH (poor comedies we love you)
 
Littleberu said:
I've never argued with that. It's performance capture, it's motion capture, that much we agree with.

I'm just not sure people quite understand how much work animators and mocap artists have to do before they get it just right. Trust me, even though it's Zoe on screen, it wasn't as straightforward as it seems to be. And there's quite a bit of keyframe in the movie, anyway.

But, if the debate is "this is Zoe's performance, not an animator's", then, we can all agree this is right. Does this fall into the Animation category? I don't know, it's a whole other can of worms.

Edit : By the way, I didn't want to insult anybody.
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No, I think we agree on everything you posted.

I know for a fact that mocap capture is only a small part of the process and that the animators play a huge role.

No insult taken, you just sounded a little arrogant in the post I was responding to.

:P
 
GhaleonEB said:
The opening in France on Friday and MLK holiday on Monday are offsetting what are otherwise 20% weekly declines. Looks like Avatar will break Titanic's WW record on Monday.
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This brings something to mind:

How genius the release windows for both Titanic and ABUHDAR were.

You line yourself up for 3 holiday weekends in just one month's time....

Of course this only works well if your movie has legs...
 
Lord Error said:
I see - I wasn't sure how that works. I know they introduced the "Best Animated Movie" category, for what seemed no better reason than to prevent animated movies competing against live acted movies.
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Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture.
 
Smidget said:
This will probably be either the best or worst place for this, not sure: I'm not interested in seeing this at all except for the fact that everyone else has seen it and I need to weigh in myself.

My issue is I can't stand blockbusters anymore and would rather watch a movie with a great script with great actors with a single camera in one room rather than the $300 million budget effects laden movie.

Should I even bother? Is the writing/acting/story something different or is it just the 3-D and visuals that carry it?
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Honestly, you probably shouldn't bother. The movie is fun and it's impressive, but by far the most impressive thing about it are the visuals and action sequences. I can't say I enjoyed the dialogue, other than a quip here and there, the movie is ultra-predictable and kinda naive, in the way many Hollywood movies are, and more so than Cameron's movies normally are for sure. It's also his most family friendly movie (most of the brutal action happens off screen), and as much as he took chances with spending crazy budget, doing so much in pure CG, and betting so much on 3D, he also went very, very safe with plot, dialogue, etc.

BertramCooper said:
This movie confuses me like few others have.

On the one hand, it's an exhilarating experience. An absolutely mindblowing moviegoing event. I've seen the movie three times (once in Liemax 3D, once in a regular screen, and once in RealD), and it's a consistently thrilling piece of cinema.

With that said, it's extremely hard for me to overlook the generic narrative. While it might have been a fairly original story when Cameron first conceived it, it sure as hell isn't now. I could see every single plot twist from a mile away, including
Grace's death
. That definitely bothers me. There's a very been there, done that feel to the script, and I think that really holds it back from being a masterpiece. It's a technical masterpiece, to be sure, but as a complete film, not so much.
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Yeah, this is word for word how I felt about (I saw it only once though). I still liked it, but I just like Cameron's other movies more, except for True Lies which I liked less.

I am however really happy that movie became so popular, Cameron deserves it for taking so many technical chances, and if it means more movies from him, and more good sci-fi being made, all the better.
 
ryutaro's mama said:
I know for a fact that mocap capture is only a small part of the process and that the animators play a huge role.
Click to expand...
In all previous mo-capped films, this was true. Mo-cap was only a rough starting point for the animators to work off of. In Avatar, this is much less true than it has ever been in the past. The character animation in Avatar was not done in the same way it was done in, say, LOTR. At least if we're talking the about facial animations.

I don't want to minimize the contributions of all the "traditional" hand animators that worked on Avatar, those contributions were legion. But the mo-cap-to-digital-performance "conversion process" used in Avatar was as hands-off as Cameron could make it. He did not want animators inserting themselves into the acting process. He had entire new technologies invented so he could remove them from certain critical sections of the work flow. He obviously couldn't completely remove them, but he went a long ways in that direction.

The old way:

Mo-cap a performance. Hand it to a technician so they can clean up the glitches. Hand the cleaned up data to an artist or artists so they can come up with a performance based (partially) on the captured movements. Endless tweaking is done. The director eventually takes a look and make suggestions. Further "takes" are done. Lots of experimentation. Different approaches. Lots of opportunity for the artists to add their particular "style". Eventually a performance is agreed upon, one that may or may not be similar to the actors original movements/expressions. Move on to the next scene.

The Avatar way: (as I understand it)

Mo-cap a performance, including a hi-res capture of the actor's face. (Note that this particular performance need not ever be used in the final film.) Begin building a digital "rig" that takes the facial mo-cap as an input, and outputs a "finished" performance. The rig is a program, basically. When the program sees a dot on the face of the actor move in a certain direction, it automatically moves a certain sub-set of muscles in the avatar. Of course, the output would look like utter shit at first. Disturbing, most likely. The wrong muscles would likely be moving the wrong amounts. A real horror show. In the old days, they would just let an artist "fix it". In Avatar, they just kept tweaking the "rig" itself until the output started looking less scary. Eventually, after months of adjustments, well before they even started shooting the movie, they had working rigs (conversion algorithms) for each of the principle actors that could do what Cameron wanted: Take an actor's facial performance, and turn it into a digital puppet's performance, with very little "artistic" input being added during the process.

Only then, did they start shooting the movie itself.

(Again, this is not to minimize the amount of artist-directed animation that Avatar required. The new automated mo-cap process was only responsible for a tiny percentage of what we saw on the screen. It was however responsible for a a good chunk of the amazingly realistic Na'vi stuff.)
 
Solo said:
Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture.
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And to this day is still the only animated film nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps that will change this year with "Up." But then people will discredit that by saying it only got nominated because they needed 10 nominees.
 
Scullibundo said:
I know I posted the transcript of this earlier in the thread, but it appears it wasn't even close to the whole transcript and now we get the full video of it.

The Envelope Roundtable - directors talking about the market of sequels and toy adaptations. You see Cameron and Reitman get pretty fired up.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mov...ble-sequels-board-games-vs-original-work.html
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From the article:
Hollywood may be bombarded by sequels, franchises and toy adaptations -- yet many of the year's most acclaimed films derive from little else besides their makers' imaginations. Five of the directors who've succeeded in creating something wholly original this season contemplate why Hollywood continues to be enamored by decades-old properties, with James Cameron taking the sternest tone. "You can make money on a movie that's not based on something else," he said. The drive for profits "is not an excuse for people to constantly be whining about how the business is failing and we have to do all this commercial stuff in order to pay the payments on our corporate jets."

Damn, Jim!
 
PhoncipleBone said:
And to this day is still the only animated film nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps that will change this year with "Up." But then people will discredit that by saying it only got nominated because they needed 10 nominees.
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Rightly so. Of all the animated films in the recent years, is this really the one worthy of it? Beauty and the Beast was the shit, Up was...eh nothing too special. It was really lame actually. With the talking dogs and everything, I thought I was watching a Dreamworks film for a second.

The opening showed promise and then it fell from there.
 
Discotheque said:
Rightly so. Of all the animated films in the recent years, is this really the one worthy of it? Beauty and the Beast was the shit, Up was...eh nothing too special. It was really lame actually. With the talking dogs and everything, I thought I was watching a Dreamworks film for a second.

The opening showed promise and then it fell from there.
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I totally disagree with you. I think it wholeheartedly deserves a best pic nod and is one of the best animated films put out the past decade. The problem is that if it does get one people will say it is only because they needed to fill the 10 slots, not because it was deserving of being called a "best picture nominee."
 
Coraline was great. But if any kids film needs to be nominated it has to be Where the Wild Things Are (I know it's not animated).

As for animated movies, like I said before Wall E. One of the most ambitious and best of the decade.
 
xrich said:
aw, that was all of it? seems like there should be more
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It was a 70-minute round-table, they're just carving out chunks a few at a time to publish.

Where the Wild Things Are was wonderful, but certainly would not qualify as animated.
 
GhaleonEB said:
It was a 70-minute round-table, they're just carving out chunks a few at a time to publish.

Where the Wild Things Are was wonderful, but certainly would not qualify as animated.
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I really hope when they are done they put the whole 70 minute video up.
 
Same. I don't give a shite about Little Boy Reitman or the Precious director.

I just want to hear Tarantino, Cameron and Bigelow! Also I hear they still talk a bit but it has to be awkward between Bigelow and Cameron since they are exes.
 
ryutaro's mama said:
This brings something to mind:

How genius the release windows for both Titanic and ABUHDAR were.

You line yourself up for 3 holiday weekends in just one month's time....

Of course this only works well if your movie has legs...
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Oscar Season is about to hit too. Which is just going to keep the decline extremely small, or even increase.

And they locked up all Imax theaters till March. They'll lose them then to Alice in Wonderland. But that is some ridiclous Ticket pricing they can milk in full.

PhoncipleBone said:
And to this day is still the only animated film nominated for Best Picture. Perhaps that will change this year with "Up." But then people will discredit that by saying it only got nominated because they needed 10 nominees.
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I don't think any of the animated features this year deserve the nom from what I've seen. Last one I honestly thought deserved it was Ratatouille. Unless foreign can count also.

I'm still really disappointed by making the count 10 which feels like nothing more than a sham to let studios slap on more stickers to their box about Oscar nom films. I can't even think of 5 films I'd really like to nominate let alone 10. And if it ends up with shit like Star Trek, next to Avatar, next to Up. Where it seems to be more about major blockbusters than Quality films. Just going to sour me even more to the idea.

I'm all for the foreign side though. 10 noms for those is perfect.
 
Discotheque said:
Same. I don't give a shite about Little Boy Reitman or the Precious director.

I just want to hear Tarantino, Cameron and Bigelow! Also I hear they still talk a bit but it has to be awkward between Bigelow and Cameron since they are exes.
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I think both Reitman and the Precious guy have added to the roundtable, certainly more than Bigelow who barely has anything of interest to say. :P
 
Yeah Reitman spoke a lot. But I'm sure Bigelow has a lot of interesting stuff to say.

And also there will be the inevitable topic of lack of women directors. Seriously, can you name one?

Not only that but she's the best in her genre now (well Cameron is still on top but it's close). She directs some really tense action films and the Hurt Locker demonstrated how on top of the game she is.
 
Discotheque said:
Rightly so. Of all the animated films in the recent years, is this really the one worthy of it? Beauty and the Beast was the shit, Up was...eh nothing too special. It was really lame actually. With the talking dogs and everything, I thought I was watching a Dreamworks film for a second.

The opening showed promise and then it fell from there.
Click to expand...

Nearly every year I can think of an animated feature that is better written and directed than one of the nominees since the Incredibles. I don't like Up as much as I liked Wall-E which I didn't like as much as Ratatoille, but they were all worthy best picture nominees.

This year's animation category outside of PIXAR should be pretty impressive with Up taking the prize even if I wouldn't be surprised by an upset.
 
BertramCooper said:
This movie confuses me like few others have.

On the one hand, it's an exhilarating experience. An absolutely mindblowing moviegoing event. I've seen the movie three times (once in Liemax 3D, once in a regular screen, and once in RealD), and it's a consistently thrilling piece of cinema.

With that said, it's extremely hard for me to overlook the generic narrative. While it might have been a fairly original story when Cameron first conceived it, it sure as hell isn't now. I could see every single plot twist from a mile away, including
Grace's death
. That definitely bothers me. There's a very been there, done that feel to the script, and I think that really holds it back from being a masterpiece. It's a technical masterpiece, to be sure, but as a complete film, not so much.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. And I was taken aback by the sometimes "hammy" performances, the retakes on some of the Aliens characters and how little Sigourney had to do in the film. It is a visual marvel; amazing animation, effects and 3D with a great final battle scene. But I'm not sure that alone can hold the film up for me. Just my take.
 
I was reading an article on "What Avatar Did Wrong" and I had to laugh. Second highest grossing film of all time, Golden Globe winner for best picture and somehow I don't think people are worried too much about what it's doing wrong.
 
Discotheque said:
Yeah Reitman spoke a lot. But I'm sure Bigelow has a lot of interesting stuff to say.

And also there will be the inevitable topic of lack of women directors. Seriously, can you name one?

Not only that but she's the best in her genre now (well Cameron is still on top but it's close). She directs some really tense action films and the Hurt Locker demonstrated how on top of the game she is.
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I haven't seen The Hurt Locker yet, so I don't know how far she's come - but this is basically rubbish. Bigelow the best action movie director? Give me a break. No, its not close between her and Cameron and she is definitely nowhere near the top of the genre.

I will also never forgive her for Strange Days.
 
msdstc said:
So looks like Avatar is holding up for another solid weekend... wonder if it will pass titanic within the next week.
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I'm guessing next weekend, or shortly thereafter.

Also, I didn't see this segment of the LA Times roundtable posted (though Sculli will call me a cunt I'm sure if it's been posted to let me know):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mov...ectors-roundtable-the-scene-i-had-to-cut.html

It's about scenes they had to cut. Cameron talks about what he thought was the emotional scene of the movie - the one near the end that was completely finished - that he cut for pacing.
 
GhaleonEB said:
I'm guessing next weekend, or shortly thereafter.

Also, I didn't see this segment of the LA Times roundtable posted (though Sculli will call me a cunt I'm sure if it's been posted to let me know):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/mov...ectors-roundtable-the-scene-i-had-to-cut.html

Scenes they had to cut. Cameron talks about what he thought was the emotional scene of the movie - the one near the end that was completely finished - that he cut for pacing.
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Already posted you cunt! :D
 
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