TheOneRing.net would like to wish a very healthy and happy Birthday to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings actor/director Andy Serkis!
Andy is 47 and was born on this day in Ruislip, Middlesex, England. We all know him as Gollum/Smeagol in the LOTR films, and he will return in that role for the upcoming The Hobbit films. Andy has recently been named the second unit director The Hobbit!
Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian has an interesting article today about what the future holds now that Peter Jackson is filming in 48fps:
The cinema, said Jean-Luc Godard, is truth, 24 times per second. That’s not truthful enough for some people. This week, Peter Jacksonannounced that he is shooting his new version of The Hobbit at 48 frames per second, a massively more expensive process that captures movement and detail with far greater accuracy. In his blog, Jackson says that we have tolerated the sprockety old 24fps speed for far too long, and this is like “the moment when vinyl records were supplanted by digital CDs”. Jackson calls for cinemas worldwide to switch over to 48fps projection speeds to show his Hobbit, which is of course in 3D; he dismisses “purists” unhappy at the consequent textural loss of blur and strobing – comparable, perhaps, to art historians who lament the cleaning of an Old Master canvas, which removes its grainy, characterful darkness.
Are we witnessing that most unreliable phenomenon: the game-changer?
[Read More] (Thanks to Ringer Irfon and QuackingTroll for the tip!)
Peter Jackson was kind enough to give us a glimpse inside Gollum’s cave in the above shot from his Facebook account! And if you look closer, you can see Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins! [Check it out]
Sir Peter Jackson has started his direct communication with fans worldwide through his newly created Facebook account! The first article is titled ’48 Frames a Second’ and talks about shooting The Hobbit in the much faster film speed. Here’s an excerpt. Follow the link for the complete article:
Time for an update. Actually, we’ve been intending to kick off with a video, which is almost done, so look out for that in the next day or two. In the meantime, I thought I’d address the news that has been reported about us shooting THE HOBBIT at 48 frames per second, and explain to you what my thoughts are about this.
We are indeed shooting at the higher frame rate. The key thing to understand is that this process requires both shooting and projecting at 48 fps, rather than the usual 24 fps (films have been shot at 24 frames per second since the late 1920’s). So the result looks like normal speed, but the image has hugely enhanced clarity and smoothness. Looking at 24 frames every second may seem ok–and we’ve all seen thousands of films like this over the last 90 years–but there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly, the image can judder or “strobe.”