THE HOBBIT (2012/2013): News, Rumors, Pics Till Release

Because some people have too much time.

God, I love geeks!

 

Holy crap.

 

At least he didn't spend Valentine's Day complaining!

 

Damn, you beat me to it. If only I hadn't stopped to watch it first!

Here's a YouTube link:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34zAgYWcYg[/yt]

Man, New Zealand is beautiful.

 

OMG, is it Christmas yet?!

1:29. Blimey, its the Old Gaffer. Sam would be thrilled.

 

http://movies.ign.com/articles/122/1223523p1.html

Reaction to the film's 48fps footage here. *sigh* This has me very worried. His complaints sound exactly like the ones I had about the way Public Enemies was shot. Anything higher than the standard 24fps just totally cheapens the way a film looks and feels.

 

Hopefully they'll have time to fix the finished project. To shoot a film like The Hobbit this badly and for the final product to look that bad is inexcuseable.

 

They had an article about the footage on IGN, and they weren't thrilled either. One of the big complaints they had was the the shooting method makes the CGI stuff look even more fake than it already does. I'm really hopping they can do something to fix this before the movie comes out, because it would be really disappointing for something this big to look as bad as it apparently does right now.

 

http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-hobbits-gamechanging-3d-may-be-a-little-too-ga,73007/

One or two complaints could be dismissed as journalists trying to make a name for themselves, but the overall reaction seems much more negative. The trailer (in 24fps, I suppose?) looked fine, but this reaction leaves me a little worried.

 

Yeah I can see the higher frame rate being useful for some types of movies (like an indie drama or documentary), but for a fantasy movie it seems like you would actually WANT that dreamlike, cinematic sheen.

I remember watching one of the Pirates movie at a higher rate, and it really did look like you were watching behind the scenes footage the entire time. Very cool to watch but almost impossible to get involved in the story.

 

Interesting. 48fps. I'm curious how that will translate to home viewing. 1080p hi-def still operates at 30fps. True, they're experimenting with 50 and 60 fps standards for the future, but probably won't be ready for prime-time any time soon. If the film relies on the higher frame rate, it may loose something when it hits BluRay. I'm genuinely curious how this is going to look in theaters.

With regard to the concerns about this new frame rate, I would agree that this may be very jarring for movie-goers. I remember how weird it was to see old shows like Fawlty Towers, Monty Python and other British shows switch back-and-forth between film for outdoor shots and video for indoor shots. It's amazing what a lack of film grain and a couple extra frames per second does to a moving picture. I cannot conceive of what 48 is going to look like. Yep - could be really weird...

 

It sounds to me like the issue is more that we're just not used to it than anything else. It's going to be jarring. But if 48 FPS becomes the norm, we'll get used to it.

 

How hard would it be to convert it back to 24? Just take out every other frame...


...hell, they could make 2 prints, one with the odd-numbered frames and one with the even-numbered ones. Two versions, just slightly different!

 

This sounds like a different situation to me. That video-style, high frame rate look has already been around for years and years, and it still looks as cheap and uncinematic as ever.

Unless everyone suddenly decides that we want all our movies to look like live stage productions or something. But I don't really see that happening.

 

They are definitely going to do that, too, because many theaters will not be able to play 48 fps movies yet by the time The Hobbit comes out.

 

Cinema Blend posted a neutral to positive reaction to the footage. They say the 3D looked better with the higher frame rate, although they also seem a little uneasy with the different aesthetic the 48 fps creates between The Hobbit and LOTR.

 

Huffington Post's coverage:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/hobbit-48-fps-footage-divides-audiences_n_1452391.html

The key statement is the footage is described as looking like a soap opera. That means it looks like video. That's the complaint I've had about high-def - if you watch it on a 1080 plasma it makes films look like bad 1970s chroma key. I was watching Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and everything was so obviously greenscreened - Doctor Who circa 1976 looked better. But watching the same thing on a 720 plasma, with the filmic look restored, it looked fine and you didn't notice these things.

Fortunately, it is easy to "dial down" things so they look like films. Doctor Who is actually videotaped even today and they run it through a processor to give it a film sheen. It's not too late for Jackson to dial things back on the Hobbit before release (oh, and drop that stupid 3D while they're at it - Hunger Games proves you don't need it to have a huge hit).

Alex