Posts by BenWilson
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I actually wonder how many USians think NZ isn't an actual country, but a dramatic construct used when a scriptwriters needs to invoke a remote and rural place. Where they talk funny.
Kind of like Timbuktu? A weird, fantastic place at the other end of the earth, the end of a long and eventful voyage, probably beset by many hardships. When I was last in Germany, they thought about Australia like that, and NZ was merely an add-on. Not one person I met said they would ever even contemplate going so far. People considered themselves widely traveled if they had been to France.
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I don't think Avatar was green screened. Motion capture onto a rendered world is a whole different kettle of fish. The absence of background in their sets was more to do with the total lack of need, rather than any trick played with color and backdrop. All they were interested in was those little dots on the actors.
It's also way more expensive than just pointing a camera at a cool landscape and some costumes.
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btw, I believe that in California you can swim and ski on the same day too, maybe that's why Hollywood is there.
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Whilst the scenery in LOTR was beautiful, it wasn't that which made me the most proud of the film. It was that NZ had managed to make a movie of that magnitude, under the direction of a New Zealander. I kept thinking from abroad not of the wonderful landscapes of NZ, but more of the teams of NZers behind the scenes making the whole thing happen. NZ is great for scenery, sure, but I've spent most of my life in the city, so landscapes aren't what NZ means to me.
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Was deepest, darkest, shaky Avondale
sans-a-PASer for the weekend?,Yes, I was busy. Oh....you were talking about Jacqui :-0
Much though I absolutely loved the Tolkien books and was a total fan of Jackson's adaptions, and would go so far as to say that their production was a contributing factor in my return to NZ, I was that proud of the place, I don't much want to talk about this dispute. It seems likely that sanity will prevail eventually, and it's been interesting to read the ins-and-outs.
Moving the movie is not without cost either, so I think that the negotiation would need to be really buggered to actually lead to that. The cost would be in both money, and more importantly, time, something MGM is running out of.
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There's no nudity in The Hobbit but I seem to recall 3 scenes involving nudity in LOTR the book. Neither appeared in the film, of course. Firstly, after escaping the Barrow, the hobbits strip off the clothes the wights put on them. Second, Frodo is stripped naked by the Orcs in the Tower of Cirith Ungol. Third, Gandalf describes lying naked in the snow after his battle with the Balrog.
Curious how that's unacceptable, but battle scenes involving thousands of people, with graphic decapitations, impalings, limbs hacked off, throat biting, being crushed underfoot, or by falling ladders or catapulted rocks, plummeting to death, burning alive, being swallowed, multiply impaled with arrows, cannibalism, close ups of piles of bodies, piles of burning corpses, mountains of skulls, etc, is considered fine for children.
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Man, it's difficult to watch a bunch of nice actors, who apparently have no sense of the bigger picture, being manipulated to act against their own interests like this
Not just their own interests. Actors are the tip of the film production iceberg.
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I don't see why this shouldn't be treated as any other industrial relations issue.
Well, not all disputes are equal. But yes, I expect the process by which they are usually resolved will apply in this case - the corporation will make the usual highly plausible threat that the work will vanish, the union people will fight amongst themselves about how much they really want to risk that, and then will come back with some compromise to both internal factions, which the corporation will then make a counter-offer to (probably over better conditions in place of cash), and at some point a deal will be struck.
I very much doubt that it would be in the union's advantage not to compromise at some point. If The Hobbit is lost, things won't go very well for them at all.
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Hmmm. It appears that The Standard has assigned me a side in the class war.
I'm definitely feeling a thick fog of class war around this whole issue. As with most wars, the grunts are the ones who will actually die, and the civilians.
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I suppose this is why you and I both are contractors by choice.
Yes, it's also why I hover right on the cusp of that even scarier capitalist institution, the Capitalist. Not long now...
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