Is this thing on? Oh it's on.

...although really, how could anyone have seen it coming? And yet, how could we not? What follows is exactly what it appears to be, Cheap Trick performing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" live, in its entirety, even madder and more perfect than I possibly imagined, featuring a blend of hubris and humility that only Cheap Trick could muster.









Worth registering at Lala.com to hear the full length clips, but even the samples give you an idea what you're in for. Pretty much every song has its own highlights, but I was especially impressed with the last two. Talk about audacious! A remarkable interpretation of A Day In The Life (not that anybody could possibly COVER it), and the Paul medley from Side Two of "Abbey Road." Wonderful.

What do you think? Are you as tickled as I am by this?

And so, the celebration of Beatles Week continues....

I LOVE Yellow Submarine. Loooooooove Yellow Submarine. I'm old enough to remember The Beatles upending New York, which remains a pivotal cultural memory of mine. I dove in all the way, too, including my golden, gleaming Yellow Submarine lunchbox, 1968's de rigeur fashion accessory.





(That one's not mine. I wish. I've watched ebay, Beatlebay, Christie's, and others, and have never seen one for sale in even GOOD condition. Most are pretty well banged up and rusted, and still run in the $700 range...if you can find one at all.)

So maybe I'm too close to it to be objective, but I'm not sure I'm ready for Robert Zemeckis to apply the same 3D motion capture technique he used for "The Polar Express" the upcoming "A Christmas Carol" (starring Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey, respectively, in multiple roles), and "Beowulf," to be applied to a new stereoscopic 3D version of Yellow Submarine.

I'll be honest, the Carrey picture looks wonderful, but I found the other two a little disturbing. In fairness, I (stupidly) didn't see them in IMAX 3D, so I'm not exactly giving them a fair shake. The 2D version is the equivalent of foreign language dubbing...but still.

On one hand, whenever I hear about somebody revisiting The Beatles, I think of Robert Stigwood's "Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band," starring Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees. (What's that? You thought The Bee Gees had top billing? No way, man. Frampton. Look it up.)



That was 1978. I LIKE Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees, and there were some genuinely good performances in it that stand the test of time, notably Earth Wind & Fire's "Got To Get You Into My Life" and Aerosmith's "Come Together." Despite the best efforts of these and many other talented people, 1978 was an AWFUL year to be a Beatle fan. I felt like I had to hide.

Until 1978 became a WONDERFUL year to be a Beatles fan. one the kindest, sweetest, most generous and humane movies ever made, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," told the tale of a handful of teens doing their best to see The Beatles live in the Ed Sullivan Theater on Feb. 9, 1964. The movie isn't about that show, or about Beatlemania. The fact is that no movie can adequately capture how big The Beatles were, and this one doesn't try. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" shows how The Beatles reached beyond the hype, and touched the lives and hearts of these particular people.

Instead of running to hide from an awful movie, I now felt like I had to run to tell everyone what a wonderful movie this is.





And, as you can see there at the bottom, co-written by, and directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Hmmm, all of a sudden, I'm not quite so worried about him redoing "Yellow Submarine."

"I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was groundbreaking in one small way, and two big ones. The small one is that it was the first movie to show the intimate side of fandom -- including the competition among fans to prove oneself "the BIGGEST fan." It showed in a compassionate and empathetic way the way that identifying with a performer changes your own identity, and in this case, for the better. I certainly feel that way about my own Beatles fandom, and I'm certain Mr. Zemeckis does too.

More broadly, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" was the first movie to mingle historical events and footage with narrative storytelling on this scale. (He certainly did a bit of it in "Forrest Gump" a bit later.)

It was also the first movie to entirely immerse itself in music. You can take music out of virtually any picture where music played a pivotal role or strongly underscored the cinematic experience -- "Singin' In The Rain," "Blackboard Jungle," "Apocalypse Now" -- and they wouldn't be all that different as movies. You wouldn't even have to swap out the songs for something else. Just take 'em out, and reflow the edit. No biggie.

Without these particular songs, there is no "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." It could possibly be done, but only as a stunt. To tell this real story, you need these real songs -- all 17 of 'em -- by these real performers.

So anyway, if anybody is going to do anything with The Beatles in a movie, I can't think of anybody better than Robert Zemeckis. I'm also not going to be an idiot: I'm going to see this one in IMAX 3D. I encourage you, likewise, to accept no substitutes.

+++

Gratuitous multimedia:

1) The Yellow Submarine 6-sheet. Found this in a UK poster collection. Sorry they didn't have an image any bigger than this to show it, but this bad boy is 81 inches by 81 inches!




The Beatles as "The Forces of Good." Check. Screenplay by Erich Segal, author of "Love Story." Check.



2) The original Yellow Submarine trailer
3) The Robert Stigwood Sgt. Pepper Trailer





Notes: Trailers used to be a lot longer than they are today, eh? The good news is that this covers a whole lot of my favorite imagery from the movie. Bad news for anybody who thought that The Beatles were actually in the movie!





See? I told you it was bad. And that Peter Frampton had top billing.


4) Although this last clip is from December 1967, Jimi Hendrix added "Sgt. Pepper" to his show the week the album was released on June 1 of that year. (Yes, I remembered that off the top of my head. I can allllmost remember my own birthday, but I'll never forget this date.) This was much to the amazement of The Beatles, and to the consternation of the rest of the English music scene, who had yet another aspect of Jimi's talent to humble them.

Seriously, if you're going to don Sgt. Pepper garb and sing a Beatles tune, watch and learn. As the man says, "Watch out for your ears."

The Hollywood Reporter reports that 65% of the 2010 Super Bowl is already sold out, including all of the first-half "A" spots. The prices are running in the $2.7-2.8 million range - just off the 2009 rate (as high as $3 mil, but largely in the $2.8-2.9 mil range), but still ahead of 2008.

It's not that CBS doesn't have its hands full, and its work cut out for it. Last year at this time, NBC had already sold 85% of its spots - but they're feeling good about getting there in fine shape. It's certainly far from the cratered, post-apocalyptic vision painted in most of the press.

Now, I'm not much of a football fan, but I never miss the Super Bowl. It's an even bigger deal for commercials than for sports, at least for me. But I think it's true for the world at large. Yeah, most people tune in for the game or the half-time show...and the shows have been getting bigger and better of late, with unforgettable sets from Prince, Paul McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen in the past few years.

But the ads are important for US in this business for several reasons. One, they're a look at the state of the art. When somebody spends roughly $100,000 to show a commercial, you can be sure that they're spending a lot more than that to get absolutely top-shelf production. You want to see the technology that's going to shape the next few years of our industry? Start with the Super Bowl.

The other reason is that they're often inspiring. The best of them remind me of the power of storytelling, and that that power can often be increased by packing it into a short span. The commercials in the Super Bowl make me glad I'm in this business. If you're not watching the Super Bowl, I frankly don't think you care enough about your trade. Otherwise, how could you even imagine missing the best of what the best can do?

Hopping off my high horse, here's one of my all-time favorites...which has other folks on THEIR high horses. GREAT rotoscoping and compositing, and a great story too. I wish I could find a higher-quality version, but this one's pretty dang good.



Cat Herding - Click here for more free videos


There's a higher-quality version at the director's page at his agency website, John O'Hagan at RSA -- which also contains pages for directors including Joe Carnahan, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Sam Mendes among many others.

Here's also a little piece on the "making of" Herding Cats, at The Inspiration Room.

And since we're talking inspiration, here's a Super Bowl commercial by Ridley Scott that's also not too bad.




You can see it even bigger and in higher quality here.

To be precise, we're talking about breakthrough technology from the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, which is part of the Jim Henson Company's Creature Shop. Some of the company's early technology received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement, but the work that led to their recent Engineering Emmy is even more impressive: motion capture with real-time rendering and 3D compositing, in full quality, full resolution.

Read that last sentence slowly. Real time. 3D Models. 3D compositing. Ready for broadcast and streaming output.

No rendering.

The technologies are simple enough by themselves: "mechanical hand controls, a control computer, and a digital puppet workstation which renders the live on-screen image of the character." It also integrates technologies from AMD and NVIDIA to display finished quality 3D rendering from mental ray, and composited into a virtual environment in real time.

If you're interested in reading more, the Henson Company's page has a lot of wonderful information. But first, let's roll tape. This is a clip from "Sid The Science Kid," airing on PBS Kids. As you watch it, keep in mind that all the performances are taking place and being fully rendered and composited in real time.





Did I mention real time?

The fact is that motion capture for films and games has been around for years. In fact, MOST games have some kind of motion capture. The character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings was entirely a motion capture performance. Henson is one of the companies doing this kind of thing. Those are most definitely NOT real time processes.

The animation on Sid the Science Kid is in its own way quite primitive -- but not the motion. It's flexible, fluid, and dynamic...because that's how people are. The camera swoops through space...because that's how cameras are. The action is taking place in a studio with people, and being output in full quality, full resolution, composited in virtual 3D spaces, in real time.

Here's a nifty peek behind the scenes from the Wall St. Journal.





Variety adds some technical detail: "For any given project, as many as six such characters can interact at once, their every move tracked by 36 infrared cameras and played back in real-time on one of six huge screens surrounding the stage." The article also points out that for shows like Sid, the real-time output goes into Maya, where a Mental Ray pass adds nuances like fluid dynamics for the hair.

In the end, producing a fully-rendered 3D show takes about as much time to produce and post as a regular 2D sitcom. And even without a finishing pass, the output is ready for broadcast and streaming. As Henson begins licensing this technology, and hardware and software continues to refine, expect much bigger things to happen very, very quickly.


++++

Henson has of course been doing much more than Muppets over the past 50+ years. Yes, Henson's puppetry goes back to the mid-1950s, although for most of us, it begins with Sesame St. in 1969. I'll save for another time the stories of how Sesame St. was my primary influence for creating nature documentaries (no kidding), but it's enough for now to observe that you've seen Henson creatures in The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Farscape, and many, many others.


(Although Yoda was voiced by Frank Oz, who also voiced Cookie Monster, Bert, Miss Piggy, Henson and Co. had nothing to do with the design or performance of Yoda.)


The Henson Creature Shop recently put together a reel that captures some of the wide range of styles they've worked in over the years.




++++

Last but not least, I've always been a huge fan of the music woven into Henson Company productions, going back to the songs from Sesame Street, and the great Muppet Movie songs (including the Academy Award -nominated "Rainbow Connection." Later, after you've finished reading this, check out Willie Nelson's leisurely swinging, sweetly heartfelt rendition. Def Jam has disabled embedding, but follow the link to YouTube.



.


But first, here's the one I can't get out of my head, from our boy Sid the Science Kid. Schoolhouse Rock for 21st century indie kids: "I Love Charts." Seriously, one of the best new songs I've heard this year...maybe even the last couple of years. I think you're going to dig it as much as I do.

One of my favorite Netflix features is that you can stream movies in your queue. Add this one to your queue so that you can start streaming it to your computer right now: Henry Poole Is Here. The trailer's vibe makes it seem wacky...but it's not. The music is all wrong, NOTHING like the music in the movie. But it might still give you some idea: it's slow, quiet, lyrical, a little sad, and very sweet, about what you might find at the end of your rope.





And you can start streaming it now.

I gotta tell you. We've really gotten into the two of us, watching movies gathered close around the laptop in bed. You can't do it ALL the time, but it's very intimate. This is the perfect movie for that.

While it's not streaming, this next one is a picture with a similar slow, sweet vibe. Again, the music is all wrong - the score is by Michael Penn, and gorgeous. So are the shots - gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, which the trailer gives absolutely no sense of. But again, hopefully, a little sense that this reaches way past cliches, way past the pain, into building something new and real.





We watched this one on the big screen (REALLY big - a 100-inch front projection system), but still a very, very intimate picture.

(The big screen ain't just about me, btw. Every time we've moved, my wife wouldn't even consider a house that doesn't enough throw-room for a projector. She bought one of those laser measuring thingies to make it easier to figure out.)


That streaming Netflix thing really is off the hook. As you might guess from other of my entries, I'm not buying the Blu-ray hype...but the built-in Netflix streaming in many newer models is tempting enough that my wife said it's time for us to start looking around at our player options. (Ah, that's my girl!)

So anyway, two movies that will reaffirm your faith in life, in love, and in moviemaking.

As a guy who regularly talks about trends in media consumption and distribution, allow me to make the observation that people who talk about trends in in media consumption and distribution are idiots. Including me. We're hardly ever right about anything.

However, money talks. DVD buying peaked between somewhere around 2007, and has been trending downward since then. While Blu-ray buying is on the rise, it doesn't amount to much in the overall video buying world - certainly nowhere near enough to compensate for the decline in overall DVD sales. Says a senior analyst at Screen Digest, "We don't expect BD to be driving even minimal sector growth until 2010."

Now, it's easy to blame this on an economic downturn...which wasn't happening in 2007. It also doesn't take into account one of the most remarkable statistics I've come across in a long, long time:

47 percent of consumers now own a high-definition TV, up from 35 percent a year ago.

Read that again, slowly. HDTV ownership is up by nearly one third in the past year.

Nearly half of America owns an HD TV.

And yet, the number of people who say that they are likely to NOT buy a Blu-ray player in the past year is UP a little! 93% of people surveyed say that they are NOT likely to buy a Blu-ray player in the next year!

Read it again: HD television sales are UP nearly 30% this year over last year. People are LESS likely to buy a Blu-ray player this year than last year.

It's not the economy. Millions of people saw the value in buying an HDTV. They do NOT see the value in spending a fraction of that on a Blu-ray player.

It's not the cost of disks. You can rent a Blu-ray disk for hardly more than an SD DVD disk.

It's not any lack of confidence in the quality of Blu-ray. Anybody who bought an HD set saw Blu-ray aplenty in the store.

It's that they don't see the value in Blu-ray over the HD programming that they get from cable and satellite.

In other words, they could get a Blu-ray player for about the price of a month of cable with premium channels...but then they don't need the Blu-ray disks.

In my case, I watch TV around 5 hours a day, which puts me right in the middle of the pack for adult America. With the exception of an odd commercial here and there, 100% of what I watch is in HD. I watch a ton of movies in HD. This week, that includes "The Dark Knight," "Tropic Thunder," and "X-Files: I Want to Believe." I haven't watched them yet, because they're parked on my DVR. I'm also not in a hurry for the first two, because I saw them in HD on Demand BEFORE they were on Blu-ray. (I'm not in a hurry for X-Files because I'm not convinced it's good enough to spend my time on...but hey, it's there.)

I also watch quite a bit of TV (most of it network TV - woo-hoo!) and live sports (go Red Sox! - and for the record, my wife can be even more into sports TV than I am...but we both dig it.) No Blu-ray equivalent unless I'm willing to wait a looooong time.

I've talked about this often enough in other posts (follow the tags), but this is the first time that my instincts about the mainstream have been confirmed, as follows:

HD = good.
HDTV = will spend many hundreds, if not more, to buy one.
Blu-ray = yawn, even for $200-300, if not less

What do you think, kids? Given that I choose to write about this stuff on a regular-ish basis, and that EVERYONE who does so is mostly wrong...am I wrong this time? Why do YOU think that interest is Blu-ray is so low relative to HD TV buying, and waning?

I noted in my entry on the Tron sequel that a speedy look at Joseph Kosinski’s IMDb profile reveals virtually nothing -- not even his birthday. I’m amazed that nobody has gotten around to it yet, but he doesn’t even have an entry at Wikipedia.

(I wonder if it's related to the absence of an entry on the Tron sequel. Probably. The only power in the universe I can think of that's more powerful than the masses converging on Wikipedia is Disney.)

And so we ask,





who is this man, and why is he directing the sequel to Tron?

I first discovered him a year before any mention of him helming the Tron sequel, the same way that millions of other folks did: I saw this AMAZING commercial for the Xbox 360 videogame, “Gears of War.” On top of footage of horrific battles and a massive, terrifying monster, he lays a haunted, heartbreaking version of “Mad World.” It makes for an unsettling mix of violence, sorrow, humility, fear, and overwhelming mortality.

Hit the HQ button. Set it to full screen. Turn it up.





Here’s Kosinski talking about his work on the spot, which, remarkably enough, started with the song.





That version of “Mad World” is by Gary Jules, and was first heard by most of us in the remarkable “Donnie Darko.”





"Donnie Darko" was enough to propel the song to #3 in the UK in 2003, but its presence in the Gears of War commercial drove it to #1 at iTunes in 2006.


If you like that, you should also check out the full-length version. It lacks the blunt-force trauma of the shorter version, but it gives you a stronger sense of Kosinki’s cinematic vision. Again, click the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.






What I did IMMEDIATELY after seeing that first clip was to find out as much as I could about it. I quickly found the director’s website, josephkosinski.com. It turns out that he’s directed quite a few very, very high-impact spots over the years – even if, to be honest, I still haven’t seen most of them outside his website.

The website is in Flash, so links beyond that one are a no-go. The site is also a little old, I think – the clips are small-ish, and dog slow. It’s still worth poking around – lots of great info about the spots, including credits...but watch the spots here before you visit.

One of his commercials is among my recent favorites: “Lincoln Effect,” and it includes the great tagline, “Starships Don’t Need Keys.”





Since we’re talking about directing “Tron 2.0,” I want to draw your attention to “Apple, iSPEC,” a short film that, according to the credits, “postulates the evolution of the personal media device and experience, placing the viewer within a digital recreation of the Colorado Lounge from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining.’”

Sound freaky? Well, it is. It also evokes a postulatory (I guess) evolution of the world of Tron, from one oriented around the dark, to one oriented around light. Regardless, the camera moves through the opening scenes, including a very interesting new software UI, exactly as you might imagine it moving through a Tron sequel.





That one was all CG, and frankly looks it. Not in a bad way, but for all that it offers a strongly personal camera perspective, there are clearly no people in this environment. It’s truly gorgeous, though, and I’m not shocked that it won the Autodesk iDesign Award.

I learned that from a brief bio formerly posted at the site for his (former?) company KDLAB. The site’s just a landing page now, pointing you elsewhere, but I found the bio floating around, apparently untethered.

Also jumping out at me from his bio: graduating from “Stanford University with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1996 and from Columbia University with a Masters of Architecture in 1999. Since then, he has taught Advanced Digital Design at Columbia and serves on the beta board for Discreet in the development of their next-generation design software.”

Let’s add this up: engineering, plus advanced design, plus next-gen software development, equals TRON, baby!

To really, really see this pay off, check out “Nike, LesJumelles.” That’s French for “The Twins.” Watch it first, and then we’ll talk.





A profile at Autodesk’s website talks with Kosinski about using an alpha version of 3D Studio Max and some other Autodesk tools to put it together.

He offers a slightly more artistic take at Archinect, where he discusses the "twin" motif. Here’s the money quote:

“I did some investigation into the relationship between speed and energy and rediscovered Einstein's concept of “Time Dilation” - something which had always seemed fascinating to me. Basically, it states that as you approach the speed of light, time seems to slow down for you, and speed up for everything else that isn't moving.”

Man, oh, man, I cannot WAIT for this movie! After reading that, and seeing those, even if I’d never heard Tron, I’d want to see a full-length version of whatever this cat is up to.

That first Gears of War I saw came soon after “LesJumelles,” when Kosinski had moved to Venice, CA’s "Anonymous Content"...after being recruited by one David Leo Fincher, who is credited as “Creative Consultant” on "Gears of War, Mad World.”





A last note about college degrees in mechanical engineering and architecture, and work in the world of software design: it’s not all that many steps from building devices, to building buildings, to building a world. Because whatever else is true about the world inside the game of Tron, it reflects the strong mechanical and engineering design of a software/hardware mind. It’s not enough for the world inside Tron to be beautiful. It has to visually make SENSE.

I’m going to end this post where it began, with the original version of “Gears of War, Mad World.” This clip opens with that, followed by “making of” footage from Digital Domain, with block renderings and motion capture footage intercut with the final version. Like many of the best magic tricks, it becomes even more impressive once you see how it’s done. You’ll see the technology, but you’ll also see how Kosinski and his team turn it into art.





Kosinski is our boy, all right.


Bonus clips:

It turns out that our boy is quite at home with sequels. I showed his sequel to Gears of War, above. Here’s the third sequel. You know the drill: HQ. Full screen. Turn it up.





And here’s his sequel to “Les Jumelles.”





Here's a 2005 montage of his work. Most of my favorite bits are in the “Les Jumelles” and “iSPEC” pieces, but check the intro: very, VERY Tron.





And a special bonus digression on commercial directors who, like Fincher, transitioned to features. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Errol Morris (The Fog of War), Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Tony Scott (Top Gun, and more others than you remember), Mark Romanek (24 Hour Photo), Tony Kaye (American History X), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind), Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and Ridley Scott (take your pick).

(Who am I leaving out? Let me know in the comments.)

I should also note that some of these guys have done some of the best music videos of all time. Romanek: “Constant Craving,” "Are You Gonna Go My Way," “Closer,” and one of the all-time greats, Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt." (I wrote about it here.)






Fincher’s videos are so off the hook that, as with Kosinski, I looked him up the first time he caught my, with Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” another on my short list for best ever.






Check it full screen, and loud. Some obvious nods to “Metropolis,” only with crotch grabbing. “Rated M, for Mature” – no kidding -- but a real joy to watch again. Throw in “Vogue,” “Forever Your Girl,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” "End of the Innocence," and “Cradle of Love" off the top of my head.

Anyway, I like commercials. I like music videos. I like movies. Storytelling is storytelling.

Which brings us back to Kosinski and the Tron sequel. I have no idea if the guy liked the first Tron, or even if he saw it at the time. (I'm guessing he was around 8 when it came out.) But as I look at his work again, I can’t imagine anybody better equipped to direct the second one.

More specifically, a review of the rapidly emerging news about the slice of nerd-vana that may or may not be named Tron 2.

Those of us who became devoted some classics of science fiction filmmaking between, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1977 and 1983, have reasons to cast the stink eye in the direction of latter-day sequels, prequels and such. One of those classics is 1982’s “Tron,” and you don’t need me to explain why.





Yet even in this post-stink-eye era, the word on its sequel is nothing but good so far – including the news that it’s being shot in stereoscopic 3D. As soon as you hear that, your reaction is probably the same as mine – how could it NOT be?

Details have been coming fast of late, so it seems a good time to review where we are so far. Let’s start with a wonderful a bootleg clip of the trailer from 2008’s Comic Con. The quality is pretty nasty, because it’s, well, a bootleg. The clip itself drags a bit (less a well-paced trailer than a look at the “look” of the movie so far, I think), but you can definitely see where they were at the time.





The art and science of the final release will of course be light years (har har) ahead of this, but so far, so good!

A few things to note:

• This is still online! Disney is notoriously protective of its properties, yet here this clip remains. I think they get that this barely embryonic footage is worth something, and was, after all shown publicly. I doubt any mercy will be shown for leaks…or to leakers…from here on.
  
  
• I got chills hearing the roars of approval when the light cars, and especially Jeff Bridges, appear on screen. Even without the pictures, I’d have gotten chills just hearing it.
  
  
  
  
  
  (Here’s an interview in The Guardian that includes some of Jeff’s very endearing enthusiasm for the project.)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• No Bruce Boxleitner in the trailer? No worries. He didn’t sign on until later in 2008, although he’s still listed as “rumored” on IMDb.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• It was at the time of the trailer called “TR2N.” Cool-looking, yes, but virtually unpronounceable.
  
  
  
  
  
  The name has changed a few other times, but IMDB suggests that we may have landed on Tron 2.0 for now. I'm not convinced. Disney released a videogame called “Tron 2.0” in 2003.
  
  
  
  
  
  It was generally well-received -- both the hardcore game nerds and the gen pop give it roughly a B -- but Disney seems like a creative-enough bunch to come up with a unique name. Indeed, reports as recent as a few weeks ago have said that the title is in fact NOT set. Read on for details.
  
  
• Did I mention the roars of approval? That for me is the big takeaway from the trailer.

One of the first questions to come up is, who’s involved? One sign of the project’s legitimacy is the presence of Steve Lisberger, who directed and wrote the story for the original, now here as a writer and consultant. Here’s a wonderful intervie... with Lisberger, as well as the best discussion I've seen of the showing of the trailer at Comic Con.

Something to be truly excited about is that two of the screenwriters, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have done quite a bit of heavy lifting as both writers and producers for television’s “Lost,” my vote for richest storytelling in the history of the medium, by a pretty long shot.

The key name is of course the director, Joseph Kosinski. A speedy look at his IMDb profile shows…nothing, except a pre-production credit for Logan’s Run. To be released in 2010, sez IMDb?! I don’t think so! (Although it turns out that Kosinski did in fact sign to do “Logan’s Run” first.) And no mention of Kosinski at Wikipedia!

I'd actually heard of him a couple of years before he signed on for Tron, when me and millions of other folks were bowled over by his commercial for Gears of War. Hit the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.




I was actually a little skeptical about the Tron sequel before I found out that the guy who did THAT was directing the movie! And while you may be skeptical about a commercial director taking on Tron for his first feature, I've put together some of his spots and other shorts that relate to what he might be up to with Tron, and some of the striking things he has to say about it. You'll love it. Even if you'd never heard of Tron, Kosinski is one of the most creative people you'll have come across in a long, long time.

In the meantime, here are some more of stories that have put the Tron sequel back in the news of late. First comes this article at /film the week before last, featuring the first picture of a costumed actor. Later that day, a picture from the set in Vancouver, standing in for New York City.





(I’m only including a few photos from the articles I link to at /film. It’s a great resource for folks tracking stories like this for the entire “reel world” that you should check out.)

The fella who sent in the picture is breathless with wonder:

“I was in total awe of how much equipment and gadgets they had. Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last five days is easily some of the most expensive stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s probably is $300 million, even if it’s canadian dollars.”

(Presumably written by an American who hasn’t noticed that the US dollar is getting its ass handed to it by the Canadian dollar…although because they’re Canadian, they’re doing it very, very politely.)

It took Disney only 3 days to tell us that the budget of Tron 2.0 is NOT approaching $300 million, a figure that had also been mentioned in the Vancouver Sun.

In reporting that debunking, /film includes a picture of a camera, and some tantalizing tech details:

“[‘Benjamin Button’ cinematographer Claudio] Miranda has challenged his crew with the task of having all the flexibility of standard 2D cameras including ambitious use of shots as well as Steadicam in 3D.” … “Amongst other setups, we will be rigging an F-35 to a GF-8 crane and Mini-Scorpio head to get a bird’s eye view out over the night streets of Vancouver.”





Remember the stereoscopic part? I recently had a chance to speak to John Daro at FotoKem, where a number of recent stereo smashes have been posted. He was speaking generally about stereo 3D DI…most definitely NOT about Tron, I promise…but he gave me insights into how the Sony F35 CineAlta camera works for stereo features.





Quite a bit of footage from the F35 crosses his desk, most of it shot at 1920x1080, 4:2:2, recorded at 880 mbps to the Sony SRW-1 HDCAM tape recorder that you can see prominently docked to the back of the F35.

Yes, tape. There’s a ton of it out there, even for high-end digital cinema. And yes, 1920x1080. As Russell Lasson noted in 21st Century Cinema for Creative COW Magazine, virtually all digital cinema is 2K, and as Panavision’s John Galt noted for us in The Truth About 2K, 4K, and The Future of Pixels, the majority of 2K is shot at 1920x1080. Even the Academy aperture for a 2K scan is only 1728 pixels.

So don’t get your panties in a wad about the Tron sequel or anything else being shot at 1980 for the big screen. You’ve already seen a ton of movies shot this way.)

At 4:2:2 for a stereo 3D shoot, the SRW-1 takes two HD-SDI feeds, and records them to a single tape: left-eye/right-eye for frame one, left-eye/right-eye for frame two, etc. John digitizes via the Sony SRW 5800 into the Quantum Pablo, which splits out two separate streams in real time as it digitizes.

The SRW-1 records only – only! – a single stream of 4:4:4. Shooting that way would of course call for a dedicated deck for each eye.

So if the report about shooting Tron 2.0 is accurate, that’s almost certainly how it’s being recorded. In any case, John will be going into much, more detail on the 3D DI post process for the upcoming Stereoscopic Issue of Creative COW Magazine.

Another recent report about Tron 2.0 is that it will be scored by the masked electronica dance duo known as Daft Punk.





With the original scored by the iconic Wendy Carlos, they have as much to live up to as anybody involved in the production of Tron 2.0. They can be cheesy – not necessarily a bad thing in this context – but I think they’re a great choice.

The most-viewed Daft Punk clip I found is this bit of genius by a youngster named Austin Hall, set to their song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” also known in this permutation as “Daft Hands.”





The uber-geeks at Ain’t It Cool News got an updated report on the plot in the last few weeks, which you can take a couple of ways. One is that, far from being mere fanboys, the team at AICN have established themselves as a genuine force to be reckoned with. For example, site founder Harry Knowles emailed James Cameron about some of the “Avatar” rumors he’d been hearing, and Cameron replied.

So this wouldn’t be the first time that AICN has had info leaked to them...sometimes from official sources, intending to whip up a storm. It also wouldn’t be the first time that a studio has leaked something substantially true, but with important details obscured. And as the author points out, anything can change over the next two years. But his one rings true.

You can find plenty of other good stuff at AICN (as well as some adult language – step gingerly). I've been following it since early web adopter Roger Ebert – whose site remains one of the web’s great film resources -- pointed us to AICN back in 1996, when it was just Harry Knowles and his father. (Harry also co-hosted “At the Movies” with Roger a few times.)

One of AICN's Tron sequel tidbits is this impromptu conversation with Kosinski in 2008.

And this story includes the news that the name of the movie is not Tron 2, but “something with a colon."

This week they've also posted another exterior shot from Vancouver this week. Below is greatly reduced from the original.





As with the other photos we’ve seen so far, admittedly not much to see, but trainspotters will note that this is in fact another train, and that it has indeed been spotted.

This little summary is far from complete, but it’s enough to catch you up on where we are so far. For more perspective on this news, especially on director Joseph Kosinski, see here.



PS. In an article for Creative COW Magazine, CGI pioneer Steve Wright tells how the effects in Tron actually set the industry back!





This is the sidebar in an article in on how commercials were actually the driving force in widespread adoption of CGI. Pretty slick stuff, and well worth a look.

In my Monday-morning breakdown of the numbers after the opening weekend of Monsters vs. Aliens, I noted a disproportionate share of the dough coming from 3D screens:

• $58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
• 28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
• .03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross!
  
  Now, IMAX is a name you know. Until very recently, it has been synonymous with big-screen stereoscopic projection. Really, it's the first major brand in this space.
  
  Here's the next brand to watch: RealD. Right now, they make the 3D systems used by roughly 90% of the installed screens. (The other big name besides IMAX: our pals at Dolby. But that's another story, and I'll get to it soon.)
  
  RealD recently announced that their specific slice of the pie was a big one: over $25 million of the total take came from screens using their systems.
  
  The 3D screen rollout has obviously slowed, for obvious reasons...and there are equally obvious reasons why someone might want to sign up for one of these screens anyway: there's obviously money to be made. Of course, if everything obvious was true, or everything true was obvious....well, you get the point.
  
  In any case, look for more from RealD soon, right here at your friendly neighborhood COW.
  
  
  

The folks at Reuters were among the world press who covered the Game Developer Conference earlier this month. It truly is a massive event, this year held March 23-27 in San Francisco. Among the tidbits from their coverage on April 1:

Some say the iPhone's unique features -- GPS capability, connectivity, a touch screen -- and sheer variety of content gives it an edge over its more established handheld console competition

Yo, Reuters: kind of late to the game, boys. You could have read THIS three weeks earlier in Creative COW Magazine's Games Issue:

Our notion was that if Nintendo had announced this device as a games machine, and said, "It's got a camera, it's got a GPS, it's got all your contacts, it's always connected, it's multi-touch, it's got accelerometers, and oh by the way, there's 75 million users with credit card accounts already active," you'd say, "Are you kidding me?" But Apple DID it.

That's from Bob Stevenson, Chief Creative Officer (GREAT title) at ngmoco, a "Next Generation MObile COmpany" made up of some truly sharp games developers from companies including EA.



While far from the biggest company in the market -- only 6 of 'em when we spoke to Bob -- but I think absolutely the one to watch. After you read our conversation with him, I know you'll agree.



Back to Reuters:

The DS franchise has shipped more than 100 million units and the PSP more than 50 million since both came to market in late 2004.

They threw that away in one sentence, but three weeks earlier, I had put it in a much wider context in the COW Magazine. I posted an expanded version what I wrote in the mag here at my blog on March 23, before GDC opened, and a week before Reuters picked up the story. I have to tell you, I write a lot of stuff, and I really like this piece. Games really are a big deal for our business, and game developers are among the folks who are quickly pouring into The COW.


(Turns out that there's a lot of VIDEO in VIDEO GAMES. Who knew?)

Of course, lots of other people are pouring into The COW too.



So anyway, you can hang around and wait for the world's leading news agencies to get in the game and tell you what's happening out there...or you can read it weeks earlier here at The COW.