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James Cameron: “There’s nothing we use now that I used when I started.”

From the Little White Lies interview with James Cameron:

Is there any reliable old technology that you use to make films now?

Interesting. There’s nothing we use now that I used when I started. Nothing. There’s photochemistry, which to me is obsolete. Mechanical movement is the same. As gorgeous as the Panaflex camera was – and it was a beautiful machine – it’s obsolete. Digital camera technology is so advanced now that I wouldn’t ever dream of going back to one of those old cameras. Large-scale physical miniatures, too, they’re gone. The last time I worked with miniatures was on Titanic. I still have the 42-foot long Titanic model, but it’s like a Model-T Ford. No, maybe something higher, like a Duesenberg or something.

The point is, we wouldn’t do it that way any more. We don’t work that way. We can’t. There’s too much flexibility with CG models. And they don’t degrade. I’m always repairing that damn Titanic. It’s always getting bumped into, railing getting snapped off, dust getting on the deck. We just do physical models, we don’t do matte paintings on glass, we don’t do photochemistry any more. And I think movies look better than they’ve ever looked. I know Chris Nolan disagrees, and he thinks that shooting on 65mm IMAX film is great, but you could achieve the same result digitally if you chose to.

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The Groundbreaking Animation of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”

I recently saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in cinemas, in 3D.

If you have any appreciation for animation, I urge you to see this movie while it’s still in cinemas. The artistry of it blew me away.

I am so so happy that it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, because it absolutely deserves it! The animation and artistry of this film is incredible.

Just to give you an idea, I’m someone who usually has little interest in superhero movies and knows almost nothing about the Spiderman universe. This movie was funny, endearing, and totally took me along for the ride.

The animation in this film is inventive and groundbreaking. It’s a mix of 3D and 2D animation techniques, designed to look hand-crafted and give the movie a very unique “comic book” look. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.

In fact, it took the animators one year just to get 10 seconds of footage they were happy with, before they progressed with the rest of the movie.

If you have no prior interest in Spiderman (like me), but you enjoy good storytelling, beautiful animation, and you have an eye for art and details, please check out this movie. It will exceed your expectations.

(Try to see it in 3D if you can, because the “comic book look” of the movie is designed with multiple layers, and it’s really worth seeing it.)

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Fate

From Ian Nathan’s Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

If you put it in a script it would sound corny and contrived. No one would believe a word of it, but then so much of Jackson’s career has been decreed by what you would call fate.

Says Kamins, ‘It’s the big theme for him. He has always believed that fate was going to point him in the right direction.’ Jackson’s manager cannot think of a single conversation in all the time he has represented him where they have sat down and discussed what he should or shouldn’t do with his career. ‘Peter sort of functions by his own compass — that fate will deal him the right set of cards. And in this particular instance maybe more than any other, he was proven completely right.’

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Blade Runner – Esper Edition

Elon Musk recently tweeted out a link to the “Esper Edition” of the Blade Runner soundtrack. I had listened to the original soundtrack before, but this was the first I’ve heard about the Esper Edition.

You can listen to it in its full glory below. I love how this edition incorporates bits of dialogue from the movie.

Also, I only just now realized that Demis Roussos performed vocals on the soundtrack (“Tales of the Future“). I had always wondered whose voice that was, although in retrospect the connection is obvious.

Here’s a taste of Demis Roussos’ discography:

While researching the connection between Blade Runner’s soundtrack and Roussos’ involvement in it, I came across this terrific write-up by Nick Soulsby:

The soundtrack to Blade Runner remains a singular achievement; a soundtrack that invoked the past and the future, that remained suspended like Shrodinger’s cat in a state of unresolved being, that plays ancestor to an impressive clutch of modern musical forms while simultaneously sounding like a product of the modern age, or the first fruit of music yet to come.