Legendary director Steven Spielberg is taking his first steps into all-digital, motion-captured filmmaking with his much-anticipated The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn.
The Hollywood giant spoke to The Los Angeles Times recently about the project, and about his experience working with a completely computerized world.
“It was based on my respect for the art of Hergé and wanting to get as close to that art as I could,” says the director, referring to Tintin‘s author-illustrator, who created the international blockbuster graphic novel series (200 million copies in print) starring intrepid cub reporter Tintin, and his irrepressible canine companion, Snowy, as they venture through the pre-WWII world.
“Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe,” Spielberg said. “It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”
Spielberg has had loads of experience with massive, CGI-filled blockbusters and digital creatures, even breaking new ground in the pioneering days of the CG Age of film with Jurassic Park, but he has never attempted a fully computer-animated movie, and he says the new experience has expanded his artistic horizons.
“I just adored it,” he says. “It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.”
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is set to open around the world on December 23, 2011.
