Fast Pulses: Potter, Avatar and Heap!
Written by John Freeman on July 16, 2009 – 9:19 am -
• As we noted earlier in the week Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has opened and broken records. Final tallies for its midnight opening on Wednesday easily knocked The Dark Knight from the top spot for such a launch, taking in an estimated $22.2 million as it opened in just over 3,000 US cinemas. The Dark Knight‘s record-breaking tally last year was $18.5 million.
• Hollywood Reporter has a feature on Giant Studios, who have just worked on the motion capture work for Stephen Spielberg’s upcoming Tin Tin project, but have also been working on James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar film since 2006. Already touted as a movie likely to alter the public’s perceptions about motion capture in particular and filmmaking in general, Cameron and his “Avatar” stages have been housed in a former Hughes Aircraft hangar on the sprawling Playa Vista campus for more than four years.
Hollywood Reporter notes that Giant has executed all of the motion capture since the film was greenlighted by Fox in January 2007 but their development work on the project dates to early 2006, several months before Weta Digital signed on to perform final rendering of the captured images and long before Industrial Light + Magic was enlisted to add CGI to final-reel battle scenes.
“We’re the little guys behind the curtain,” quipped Candice Alger, Giant’s Atlanta-based CEO of their work with many big Hollywood names. “But we’ve worked with them all.”
• David Frankel, director of the frankly, nowhere-near-as-good-as-the-book Marley & Me will be directing Warner Bros.’ animated adaptation of Septimus Heap: Magyk, the first book in author Angie Sage’s best-selling book series. Neopets scribe Rob Lieber will adapting the story. HarperCollins are to publish the fifth title in the planned seven book Septimus Heap series, Syren, in September: they’ve just released a superb hardback ‘cornucopia’ guide to the world of Heap, The Magykal Papers, also written by Sage. It includes information on every aspect of Septimus’s world and the creatures that inhabit it: from secret files, to journal excerpts, charm theory, the seven basic spells, dispatches from the Message Rat Office, history, maps and much more, illustrated in four-colour throughout by Mark Zug. More about Septimus Heap at www.septimusheap.com
• Variety reports Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus is to star in a new feature film from Disney based on the teenage novel Wings by Aprilynne Pike. In the book, Laurel, a sheltered home-schooled 15-year-old girl just starting high school, starts to feel different to everyone else — and when she starts to develop wings on her back she realizes just how different, because it turns out she’s a fairy.
Related posts:
- Fast Pulses: 16 January 2009
- Fast Pulses: 16 March 2009
- Fast Pulses: 29 January 2009
- Fast Pulses: 9 January 2009
- Fast Pulses: 11 December 2008
Tags: Avatar, Fast Pulses, Potter
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