Tintin Screening Presented by Autodesk

Autodesk together with Paramount Pictures and Weta Digital invited industry professionals to a private advance screening of Steven Speilberg's 3D film,“The Adventures of Tintin” held December 13, 2011 at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles. David Morin, Autodesk representative and Co-Chair of the ADG Virtual Production Committee (VPC) led a Q&A session with Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri, that followed. The audience was a good mix of cinematographers, producers and VFX artists, many of whom are members of the Previs Society and VPC- another offshoot of the ADG Technology Committee.

I was eager to attend this event--the Q&A in particular since there is concern among the ADG membership that no Production Designer was credited. I had read David Denby's review in the New Yorker the day before in which he briefly describes the making of the film:

The play between fantasy and realism is what gives the film its special look. Spielberg and his collaborators (Peter Jackson was the producer) have come up with the equivalent of Hergé’s clean-limbed, lean-forward manner (the characters in Hergé’s comic books seem always to be moving into the next panel). The animators labored for two years establishing settings—a street, a ship, a Moroccan city—and then the actors worked in a featureless room with reflectors attached to their bodies while dozens of digital cameras all around them picked up their movements. The animators used the movements—shrugs, strains, thrusts—to build the animated version of the characters, and added the completed figures to the preset backgrounds. The technique is similar to the one that James Cameron used for “Avatar,” but the look is drier, plainer, airier.

I give Tintin two "thumbs-up" not only for beautiful 3D cinematography but also 3D CG characters that are finally crossing the "uncanny valley." The characters eyes are lifelike; the hair and fabrics are finely detailed showing realistic movement (esp hair) in the wind. The hybrid nature of the film and the use of actor performance-capture was commented on by audience following the film. Letteri emphasized that the animator as artist is at work.  Yes, the actor performance is used as a template but it is interpreted by the animator.

The lighting and settings were beautifully designed. All of the settings were designed and drawn up just as if they were to be built as if in the real world but instead modeled in the virtual world. Letteri told how the original source material from Hergé's studio was used as reference material by the artists. They tried to remain as true as possible to the original books but when they found the lighting to be flat and uninteresting Speilberg suggested they go dark- resulting in the dramatic film noir look.

The animation itself is captivating. As Denby states, “The Adventures of Tintin” is a virtual non-stop scramble of running, jumping, swinging, dangling, plunging, and flying." Many of the action sequences according to Letteri were conceptualized by the animation team and developed in advance of the script. I found the morphing and use of scale as device for the transitions particularly imaginative. In some of the flying scenes however I felt too much animation and could not watch or risk a bit of motion sickness.

During the Q&A Letteri described how he and  Peter Jackson introduced Spielberg to the virtual camera while Avatar was in production, shutting down Avatar for a few days to produce a screen test he presented us and included in this "making of" trailer:



Tintin and Letteri's approach to filmmaking with the virtual camera are highlighted in an interview last year in Below the Line News:

After five years of work on Avatar, what became most apparent to Letteri..., is that much of what he used to consider postproduction, he now has to do before any shooting commences. “Avatar gives you that direct feedback,” he said. “It’s taking the last century of filmmaking and apply it to a virtual world. When you are doing that, you want to retain as much as what you know about making good films as possible.

Now that Cameron and company have set up a system for creating a film with largely virtual elements, other productions are picking up on it. Peter Jackson’s own Tintin— with Steven Spielberg directing the first installment — was shot using the same technology that Cameron set up.

Letteri also noted that during production of Tintin, all departments worked together simultaneously.  They used an Avid on set to feed editorial and the film itself was kept manageable by working in game-quality cgi. Time was not lost rendering and rendering shots that might be edited out of the story. They did a final quality render at the end after editorial were satisfied.