While the world grapples with Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture take on A Christmas Carol and wonders what's in store for us with Avatar, filming has been quietly happening on a film that may very well be the biggest game changer of all. Peter Jackson has confirmed to the BBC (via Digital Spy) that he's completed filming The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, a movie that will be presented entirely in motion-capture iand in 3D.
"Tintin is great," he said. "It's made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film. So the movie, to some degree, exists in a very rough state." And then, quite unusually for a guy who has committed to this newfangled 3D format, Jackson had a few words of criticism for the experience. "The only thing I get annoyed about is the image being a little dull. It does feel like you're looking at the movie with sunglasses on. But literally, that could just be about getting brighter bulbs in the projectors."
Jackson's reputation as a vanguard in visual effects and storytelling has cooled somewhat since King Kong turned out to be fairly disappointing, but I still think he has it in him to make Tintin-- a property no one in the States really cares about-- something special. Let him finish promoting The Lovely Bones and hole up for two years finishing the thing, and Jackson may be able to make the effects of Avatar look ancient.
