Aug

19

TALKIES: Guillermo Del Toro gives tidbits on The Hobbit

by Zack Lee | Filed Under TALKIES 

In what could quite possibly be the best news I’ve heard in the past few months regarding movies, I stumble upon a tidbit on The Hobbit. As I mentioned previously, Guillermo Del Toro will be directing The Hobbit. And briefly, for those that don’t know, Guillermo Del Toro is the man behind Hellboy & Pan’s Labyrinth…and The Hobbit is the prequel to Lord of the Rings. So to get down to why I’m so excited about this project is because of how Del Toro intends on making it. I’m sure everybody remember’s the old classics like, The Labyrinth, Dark Crystal & The Neverending Story. Wellll, Del Toro plans on making The Hobbit like the old classics and not focusing so much on CGI like most movies do nowadays. I have this thing about how bad some of the CGI graphics are sometimes…but I won’t go into that, instead, peep an excerpt:

Like Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, del Toro has a soft-spot for the traditions of model-making and real-world workshop effects - something that he intends to carry through to The Hobbit.

He explained, “You have to be very careful not to rely on a single tool – and this is another thing that I share a passion for with Peter Jackson. We both are huge fans of ‘old-world’ techniques like maquettes, models, miniatures, paintings – and in the case of The Hobbit, I do intend to continue this trend and bring much more animatronics into the mix.

“We need to keep that art form alive, because it brings a textural power to the movie that ultimately affects the content. The creatures somehow seem more tactile and more tangible than CG.”

It’s clear that The Hobbit will continue the artistry of the model-making seen previously in del Toro’s previous work – but he’s not one to neglect the power of computer animation either. “I think that some creatures are better served by being completely CG and others are better served by being completely animatronic – and others are only possible if you mix the two.”

We naturally enquired if he planned on continuing with a CG Gollum: “Absolutely. I think that it worked perfectly on the [Lord of the Rings] trilogy and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

Roll over to IGN.com for the rest of the interview!

Exactly.



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