Animators are still plentiful and important.  A good animator can take mocap data if asked to, and know what to use and what to enhance.   A snarky animator will call it The Devil's Rotoscope and be a sad panda, but that's their problem.

My wife is strongly hoping for more dwarven antics involving Rivendell.
I also have a feeling the White Council might get extended as well.

Also, the whole mo-cap thing strikes me to wonder how Dragonheart was done? I know Tippet worked on it and it sounds like it was combination model/puppet work and CGI. However, not being vfx savvy I am afraid that I am unsure about the rest 

However, I highly doubt that they would do a human face on Smaug. I have a feeling it is more to get the expressions and inflections, since Smaug is supposed to be highly intelligent.

I guess I am unsure how this is bad?

This. Thank you. That's the mindset I had. Even if there's a chance you end up throwing away all the data, there's also a chance it could vastly improve the end product. So why not?

Though I'm sure they've already done an enormous amount of testing and are at least somewhat confident about their methods at this point.

The Smaug mo-cap is the least of my concerns. I do wish they'd give those saturation dials a break. The colors in every shot in the first one looked unrealistically beautiful and perfect. Kinda took me out of it.

Oh I'm sure they have, too.   My point was just that even if you didn't have a plan at ALL, why not go ahead and get the data?   I would.  Ya never know.

However you get there, the ideal result would be a dragon that was believable as a dragon and yet somehow also had the presence of  Benedict Cumberbatch.  That could be quite something.   

And Jackson and WETA do have a pretty good track record with this mocap thing already 

[This post edited for derp.]

Last edited by Zarban (2013-06-07 22:44:39)

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/soci … 3060671195

I agree with this. Cumberbatch is a very physical actor, even with his subtleties. Since I recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness, that is more my recent experience with Cumberbatch's performance. One thing that I noticed in that movie, and the filming of his Frankenstein stage performance, he is very physical in his acting. While he can be subdued, there is still a lot he does his small facial movements, like Dorkman said, that give nuances to a performance.
Also, even as Trey said, a dragon who talks will need a cheat because of the rules of speech. However, I think that they are up to the challenge and will probably employ a huge variety of data to give Smaug life.
I mean, the original Smaug looked almost like a cat to give it the ability to speak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or8G_jDcLNo
I also looked at Voyage of the Dawn Treader's dragon model because it has similarity to what we have seen of the Smaug model. There is definitely a place for mo-cap data, at least because of the articulate eyes, and the corners of the mouth resemble more human contours.
I will be interesting to see the final product.

Last edited by fireproof78 (2013-06-07 16:39:22)

Some good looking footage in there. I definitely think there is a lot of action and potential for some interesting moments. Always love combat training:

However, am I the only one who thinks the set of Laketown looks like Signapore from Pirates of the Caribbean?
Seriously, are there going to be pirates in this movie?

I'm really looking forward to seeing all the new characters from all the different areas of Middle-earth. In AUJ, the only noteworthy characters that weren't already in LotR were young Bilbo, Radagast, and the dwarves; and Thorin and Balin seemed to be the only ones with any sort of depth. Azog I don't really consider a character. More like an annoying CGI vengeance machine. The Goblin King had some spunk, but he really didn't do much. Maybe there will be more of him in the extended cut.

In the coming films we'll see Beorn, Tauriel, Thranduil, Bard & son, the master of Laketown, Dain & crew, the Necromancer/Sauron...

Oh yeah. SMAUG.

Among others. Can't say I have my hopes too high, but I'm still excited.

I can't see what sort of "extra" footage they can have, based on all the other shit they made up and jammed into the theatrical.

In defense of the King Kong extended cut, I find the movie flows a bit better with the extra stuff and I prefer having it in there. It helps that there's like an entire giant monster battle sequence that was cut out, and it's one that I happen to like quite a bit.

NO idea wtf he's thinking with the Hobbit though. The fact that there's only 13 extra minutes speaks volumes, when the original extended editions would easily get into 40+ extra minute territory. You can basically imagine that a solid 30 min in the theatrical cut should really have been in the extended, and would've been if Peter Jackson made this movie 10 years ago.

Unless if features a song as the dwarfs are stuck up in a tree, I'm not interested.