Author: Robert Greenberger

We love cool, new technology, as much as the next guy. But when the technology comes from Lucasfilm, where so much movie magic has been conjured up since 1977, it caught our attention. This press release just arrived:

VANCOUVER, B.C. – August 9, 2011 – Alembic 1.0, the open source project jointly developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm Ltd. was released to the public today, it was announced at ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Alembic is the computer graphics interchange format developed by the two entertainment giants last year and focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. It was designed to handle massive animation data sets often required in high-end visual effects and animation, which are routinely developed and produced by companies such as Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm Animation Ltd and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The studios each saw the need for a tool like Alembic, something that would fit within existing pipelines and allow for customization at the facility level without impeding the ability to share work.

In addition to the features announced at last year’s SIGGRAPH, Alembic 1.0 includes automatic data de-duplication. The software automatically recognizes repeated shapes in complicated geometry and only writes a single instance to disk. This makes Alembic 1.0 use dramatically less disk space than promised without requiring any extra steps on the part of the user and can improve both write and read performance as well. In the case of hero deforming humanoid characters, including hair, shot caches have been reduced by more than 70%.  For complex, deeply hierarchical and mostly rigid assets like the Transformers characters, tests have shown cache reduction in the order of 98%.

The code base for Alembic is available for download on the project’s Google Code site and more information can be found online at: http://www.alembic.io

Joint development of Alembic was first announced at last year’s Siggraph by Lucasfilm’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The companies joined forces when it became apparent that they were independently developing software designed to solve a problem universally faced by the visual effects and animation production community: how to easily share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of what software was being used.

Alembic includes tools that allow collaboration while working with a generic, extensible, data representation scheme. In essence, it distills complex and often proprietary, animated scenes into application-independent files with baked geometric results. These baked results can be fully re-importable across the range of supporting software.

“Alembic addresses a fundamental issue in a world where assets are shared across many companies. Alembic’s production-ready ability to seamlessly translate shapes across a wide variety of applications saves time and resources,” said Rob Bredow, CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks. “By releasing Alembic as an Open Source project, users have the opportunity to improve the software based on their needs and experience. We’re really starting to feel the positive effects of Open Source, as a community of visual effects and animation professionals come together to solve problems more effectively today than ever before.” (more…)

Some eagerly anticipated Blu-ray debuts are making noise by hosting limited screenings in theaters. First up is the Coen Brothers’ now classic The Big Lebowski. The DVD comes out on August 16 and that day there will be a screening at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. that will include a special Q & A with Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore and T Bone Burnett, as well as a screening of the film and other festivities. Not only will the Blu-ray be out that day but it also is the debut of Jeff Bridges’ self-titled album.

Tickets are now on sale on Ticketmaster. 

A few weeks later, on August 31, Universal Studios will release their Al Pacino hit, Scarface, for a one night run at more than 475 theaters across the country. The showing will be a t7:30 local time from coast to coast and is being presented by NCM Fathom and Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Fans who attend this special event will also get an exclusive look at a 20-minute special feature that showcases interviews with popular filmmakers and talent expressing how this epic feature redefined the gangster genre, leaving an enduring influence on cinema.

Tickets for the Scarface Special Event are available at participating theater box offices and online. For a complete list of theater locations and prices, visit the NCM Fathom website (theaters and participants are subject to change). The Scarface Special Event will appear in more than 475 select movie theaters across the country via the new digital cinema projection systems.

The newly restored print will make its appearance on disc September 6. For a limited time only, the Scarface Special Limited Edition Blu-ray comes with collectible SteelBook^TM packaging, 10 exclusive art cards, a digital copy of the film and a DVD of the original 1932 Scarface.

The Ultimate Universe’s next Spider-Man will be a half-black, half-Hispanic teen named Miles Morales. As revealed in today’s USA Today, the new Ultimate Spider-Man #1 will be the most radical next step in differentiating the imprint from the core Marvel Universe.

Brian Michael Bendis, one of the Ultimate Universe’s chief architects, will write the new series, debuting in September, with art from Sara Pichelli. But first, Morales will be introduced in this week’s Ultimate Fallout #4. The miniseries’ title refers to the repercussions felt in the superhero community over recent events including the death of Peter Parker.

“The theme is the same: With great power comes great responsibility,” Bendis told the newspaper. “He’s going to learn that. Then he has to figure out what that means.”

The notion of making Parker’s successor a man of color was partly inspired by the NBC series Community. Star Donald Glover had been campaigning via Twitter for consideration as the lead in the Sony reboot of the live-action film series, a role that was given to Andrew Garfield. Last fall, the season premiere featured Glover in Spider-Man pajamas. “He looked fantastic!” Bendis said. “I saw him in the costume and thought, ‘I would like to read that book.’ So I was glad I was writing that book.”

The Italian artist used Glover as the inspiration for Morales’ look much as the Ultimate Nick Fury was largely inspired by Samuel L. Jackson who went on to play Fury in the Marvel Universe film series beginning with Iron Man  in 2008.

“It’s certainly long overdue,” Bendis said. “Even though there’s some amazing African-American and minority characters bouncing around in all the superhero universes, it’s still crazy lopsided.” It should be noted that the Spider-Man who operated with organic webshooters in the 2099 speculative future line of comics was a Hispanic named Miguel O’Hara. Morales will also be the product of a mixed heritage, much as Alonso himself is from a mix of cultures (his father is Mexican, his mother is British).

“What you have is a Spider-Man for the 21st century who’s reflective of our culture and diversity. We think that readers will fall in love with Miles Morales the same way they fell in love with Peter Parker,” Axel Alonso, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, told the paper. Parker’s supporting cast, including Gwen Stacy and Aunt May will figure in the early storylines.

Spider-Man was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962 and by 1999 it was decided the series (and the larger Marvel Universe) was a little too insular for the casual reader. Then-president Bill Jemas decided a parallel line of books could take those core concepts and retell the stories using modern storytelling and characterizations. The Ultimate Universe was introduced in 2000 and was an immediate success, powered by Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Spider-Man. By 2010, though, the UU and MU were strikingly similar so things were dramatically shaken up in a series of cataclysmic events that shook the UU’s status quo, beginning with the wholesale slaughter of half the X-Men, including Wolverine. Those events continued to play out, leading to Spider-Man’s heroic sacrifice, taking a bullet from the Punisher, intended for Captain America.

Krazy Kat & The Art of George Herriman A Celebration
By Craig Yoe
176 pages, Abrams ComicArts, U.S. $29.95/Can. $35.95

As a kid, my first exposure to Krazy Kat were the 50 animated shorts that were produced between 1962-1964 and ran with Beetle Bailey and Snuffy Smith cartoons in a thirty minute block. I found the cartoons charming if a little odd and it was years later before I finally saw some of George Herriman’s wonderful comic strip work. While a comic genius, I knew little about him or how the world perceived his amazing creation.

Thankfully, Craig Yoe, a man with a keen eye for pop art and culture, has assembled a work dedicated to Herriman’s art but also serves as a biography. I now know that the Herriman was born as a light-skinned, Creole African-American in Louisiana before moving west where he did his professional work. In California, he began as a newspaper cartoonist and did everything from political cartoons to sports cartoons before settling down to produce the daily adventures of The Dingbat Family. At the bottom of the panels first appeared a cat of indeterminate gender and a mouse. In time, the mouse began throwing things at the cat and audiences picked up on the drama so Herriman was encouraged to give the two their own feature.

In time, Krazy Kat and the brick-tossing Ignatz Mouse were joined by Offissa Bull Pupp and other denizens of Coconino County, Arizona. They soared in popularity while Herriman took full advantage of the comic strip form before it became rule-bound and limited. The dailies and later Sunday pages rarely repeated themselves and careful reading showed a literary and poetic quality to the writing that belied the physical comedy.

Herriman’s characters enchanted a nation between 1913 and 1944, when he died way too soon at 63. They remain enshrined in Arizona folklore where Herriman maintained a vacation home and became fascinated with the Native Americans who lived in the vicinity. (more…)

Pontiac, MI., July 25, 2011—Walt Disney Pictures’ fantastical adventure Oz The Great and Powerful,  directed by Sam Raimi, went in front of the cameras at the brand-new Raleigh Studios in Pontiac, Michigan, on Monday, July 25, 2011, boasting a stellar cast that includes Academy Award® nominee James Franco (127 Hours) as the young wizard, Golden Globe® nominee Mila Kunis (Black Swan) as the witch Theodora, Academy Award® winner Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener) as Kunis’ sister Evanora and two-time Oscar®-nominated actress Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine) as Glinda, the Good Witch.

The cast also includes Emmy® and Golden Globe® nominee Zach Braff (Scrubs, Garden State), who will play Franco’s circus assistant as well as lend his vocal talents to one of the CGI creatures in the story — Finley, the winged monkey who accompanies the magician on his journey to Oz; and 12-year-old actress Joey King (Ramona and Beezus), who will voice another CGI character in the story, China Girl, who also joins the future Wizard on his excursion through Oz. (more…)