The hero of Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat declared “The cinema is truth, 24 times per second,” as The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw noted while pondering frame rates and cinematic standards last year. Peter Jackson insists that it’s closer to 48 frames per second, as demonstrated by the groundbreaking new frame rate he utilized for this weekend’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. But do scientific theories about the way our brains perceive images and reality — truth unfolding onscreen, in front of our eyes — support Jackson’s brave new vision for cinema, or undermine it?
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The camps are entrenched, the battle lines drawn, and the barbs and quips are flying like cannon shot across the divide. But as the debate rages on Movieline -- and on other sites across the web -- over Peter Jackson's directorial decision to film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 48 frames per second (as opposed to the more traditional 24), no single quip seems to draw the ire of the "traditionalists" more than this one, aimed square in the chest of the old timers: Resisting 48 frames is like resisting color.
As if an argument over aesthetic choice could be so absurdly reduced. Right, four time Academy Award winning legendary SFX master and Hobbit visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri?
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Middle-earth may have some perils of the stomach variety if Kiwi viewers are an indication of things to come. Early screenings of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in New Zealand have left some movie-goers feeling nauseous.
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The biggest question surrounding Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings prequel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, has nothing to do with its strength of story, its Oscar chances, or whether or not Tolkien fans will embrace yet another uber-ambitious adaptation of their beloved fantasy world, but rather: How does it look?
Specifically, how will Jackson's 48 frames-per-second gamble play after months of talk and one particularly disastrous Cinema Con debut? I'll tell you this: The grumblings and rumblings after my screening of The Hobbit - in bold, daring, frustrating 48 frames-per-second 3-D - were decidedly not raves. And that's a very bad sign for Jackson & Co.
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After bringing 12 minutes of The Hobbit to Comic-Con — where Peter Jackson purposefully did not present footage in the 48 frames per second/3-D presentation that perplexed audiences at CinemaCon — the Lord of the Rings filmmaker spoke further about his desire to explore even more ground in the fantasy universe created by J.R.R. Tolkien. One possibility may be a third Hobbit film culled from Tolkien’s expansive LOTR notes and appendices, though Jackson admitted that the author’s posthumously published Silmarillion might present more of a challenge.
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Unveiling 10 minutes of Hobbit footage in 3-D at the revolutionary frame rate of 48 frames per second (vs. the standard 24 fps), as Warner Bros. did Tuesday at CinemaCon, should have been the first big buzz moment for Peter Jackson's return to Middle Earth. The immediate reaction to the presentation, however, was anything but good news for the studio or for proponents of the kind of cutting-edge high frame rate cinema technology Jackson and folks like James Cameron and Douglas Trumbull have been championing as the future of film. Instead, it left members of the blogger corps. calling it "jarring," "non-cinematic," and "like a made for television BBC movie," predicting that audiences will be split in embracing the brave new advance.
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Writing from the set of The Hobbit, Peter Jackson took to Facebook Monday to blog his thoughts on filming at 48 frames per second -- the increased frame rate championed by folks like James Cameron, who will use it to blow minds in Avatar 2 and 3. Jackson is currently filming The Hobbit in 3-D at 48 fps instead of the industry standard 24 fps, and as a result, the Lord of the Rings follow-up will be the first wide release to pave the way into a brave new digital world of filmmaking -- whether or not theaters around the world are ready for it.
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