It appears that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader will be shot on digital cameras.  The first two films were shot on traditional 35mm film stock, but the wave of the future appears to be in digital film.  Cinematographer Dante Spinotti was recently interviewed, and mentioned it’s use on Narnia.

Q: Why not go with a digital camera you’d already used? Why did you decide on the Sony F23 for Public Enemies?

Spinotti : Michael [Mann] likes depth of field, images with deep focus, and that camera has a chip that’s more like 16mm that gave us that depth of focus. It’s the same reason why I chose the same camera for the film I am going into now, The Chronicles of Narnia. The depth of field works in our favor. The camera also has an advantage in the sense that it is much more elastic. You can adjust gamma curves and gain for incredible control over the image. You can also shoot much bigger energy in the sense that you can have a zoom lens and the camera can move around in a quicker way.

(more…)

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J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as most of us know, were great friends and colleagues. Now Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” is coming to the Big Screen!

Press Release:

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC

NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS

PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”

Los Angeles, CA (Tuesday, December 18, 2007) Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson; Harry Sloan, Chairman and CEO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM); Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs of New Line Cinema have jointly announced today that they have entered into the following series of agreements:

* MGM and New Line will co-finance and co-distribute two films, “The Hobbit” and a sequel to “The Hobbit.” New Line will distribute in North America and MGM will distribute internationally.

* Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh will serve as Executive Producers of two films based on “The Hobbit.” New Line will manage the production of the films, which will be shot simultaneously.

* Peter Jackson and New Line have settled all litigation relating to the “Lord of the Rings” (LOTR) Trilogy.

Said Peter Jackson, “I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to put our differences behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New Line. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a legacy we proudly share with Bob and Michael, and together, we share that legacy with millions of loyal fans all over the world. We are delighted to continue our journey through Middle Earth. I also want to thank Harry Sloan and our new friends at MGM for helping us find the common ground necessary to continue that journey.”

“Peter Jackson has proven himself as the filmmaker who can bring the extraordinary imagination of Tolkien to life and we full heartedly agree with the fans worldwide who know he should be making ‘The Hobbit,’” said Sloan, MGM’s Chairman and CEO. “Now that we are all in agreement on ‘The Hobbit,’ we can focus on assembling the production team that will capture this phenomenal tale on film.”

Bob Shaye, New Line Co-Chairman and Co-CEO comments, “We are very pleased we have been able to resolve our differences, and that Peter and Fran will be actively and creatively involved with ‘The Hobbit’ movies. We know they will bring the same passion, care and talent to these films that they so ably accomplished with ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy.”

“Peter is a visionary filmmaker, and he broke new ground with ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” notes Michael Lynne, New Line Co-Chairman and Co-CEO. “We’re delighted he’s back for ‘The Hobbit’ films and that the Tolkien saga will continue with his imprint. We greatly appreciate the efforts of Harry Sloan, who has been instrumental in helping us reach our new accord.”

The two “Hobbit” films – “The Hobbit” and its sequel – are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, with pre-production beginning as soon as possible. Principal photography is tentatively set for a 2009 start, with the intention of “The Hobbit” release slated for 2010 and its sequel the following year, in 2011.

The Oscar-winning, critically-acclaimed LOTR Trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide at the box-office. In 2003, “Return of the King” swept the Academy Awards, winning all of the eleven categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture – the first ever Best Picture win for a fantasy film. The Trilogy’s production was also unprecedented at the time.

For more information about “The Hobbit” films, please visit www.TheHobbitBlog.com.

About New Line Cinema Corporation:

Celebrating its 40th anniversary year, New Line Cinema is the most successful independent film company in the world. Its mission is to produce innovative, popular and profitable entertainment in the best creative environment. In addition to the production, marketing and distribution of theatrical motion pictures, the fully-integrated studio has divisions devoted to home entertainment, television, music, theater, merchandising and an international unit. In 2005, New Line partnered with HBO to form Picturehouse, a new theatrical distribution company to release independent films. A pioneer in franchise filmmaking, New Line’s Oscar-winning The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the most successful film franchises in history. New Line is a division of Time Warner, Inc. (TWX).

About Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., through its operating subsidiaries, is actively engaged in the worldwide production and distribution of motion pictures, television programming, home video, interactive media, music and licensed merchandise. The company owns the world’s largest library of modern films, comprising around 4,100 titles. Operating units include Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc., United Artists Films Inc., Ventanazul, MGM Television Entertainment Inc., MGM Networks Inc., MGM Domestic Networks LLC, MGM Distribution Co, MGM International Television Distribution In, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Home Entertainment LLC, MGM ON STAGE, MGM Music, MGM Worldwide Digital Media, MGM Consumer Products and MGM Interactive. In addition, MGM has ownership interests in international TV channels reaching nearly 120 countries. MGM ownership is as follows: Providence Equity Partners (29%), TPG (21%), Sony Corporation of America (20%), Comcast (20%), DLJ Merchant Banking Partners (7%) and Quadrangle Group (3%). For more information, visit www.mgm.com.

About Peter Jackson/Wingnut Films:

Peter Jackson is one of the world’s most successful filmmakers. His monumental achievement co-writing, co-producing and directing The Lord of the Rings trilogy (with fellow Academy Award winners and frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) earned a total of 30 Academy Award nominations and 17 Academy Awards. Jackson and Walsh received their first Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for their acclaimed film Heavenly Creatures. Jackson, through his New Zealand-based Wingnut Films banner, also was responsible for the globally successful 2005 remake of King Kong which earned over $500 million worldwide and 3 Academy Awards. Currently, Jackson is directing an adaptation of The Lovely Bones, from the acclaimed best-selling novel by Alice Sebold. He is also developing a trilogy of films with Steven Spielberg based on Tintin, the world renowned comic book series by Herge.

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Last Friday, IGN had the opportunity to interview producer/screenwriter David Goyer, where he spoke at length about the novel “Here, There Be Dragons.” The rights for the novel have been snapped up by Warner Brothers, pushing the book up the sales charts very quickly. For example, Amazon pre-sales ranked the book around 5,000. On September 29th, with word spreading of the movie news, “Dragons” was ranking at 644. As of this writing, it is sitting at 1,493.

The book takes place in two worlds, our world (In London, during World War I) and a fantasy world, and features three characters that go on adventures. The three adventurers turn out to be real life authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams.

Here are three questions extracted from the interview:

IGN: Does this story focus on these characters when they’re in their twenties at Oxford? I’m just wondering what the age range is for these characters.

Goyer: They were all slightly different in age. C.S. Lewis would be the youngest, probably his early twenties. Tolkien a little older, the mid-twenties or later twenties. Charles Williams was at least a good ten years older than the two of them and sort of functioned as a mentor. We liked that as well because for casting possibilities. We can pull from these different age groups.

IGN: It’d be funny to see if Here, There Be Dragons and Peter Jackson’s Temeraire end up going head-to-head in cinemas. The end of this decade will be all dragons onscreen.

Goyer: They both have dragons. Dragons is in the title of the first and the seventh books. Ours is not… yes, there happens to be a dragon in this first book but there are many, many other creatures and characters and things. So it’s not exactly a head-to-head dragon fest.

IGN: So how does one actually refer to the property since we can’t really call it the Dragons franchise?

Goyer: The franchise is actually called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica. For instance, the second book is called The Children’s Crusade. The Imaginarium Geographica is actually the fictional almanac of that other world. It’s kind of the almanac that maps all of these mythical lands and I guess it is what you would call the MacGuffin for the series. James’ studio is actually producing for Simon & Schuster an actual Imaginarium Geographica. It’s just this big book of maps of all these fantasy worlds.

[Read the rest at IGN]

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We know this is a Narnia website, but seeing as how J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends, this is a very related article (and very exciting): In a Variety article talking about MGM’s move back into the tentpole business, the trade mentions a few highly-anticipated projects that are in the works:

‘Over the next few years, MGM is planning to release half a dozen films, some in the $150 million to $200 million-plus range. Studio is ready to unveil such high-profile projects as “Terminator 4″; one or two installments of “The Hobbit,” which Sloan hopes will be directed by Peter Jackson; and a sequel to “The Thomas Crown Affair” with Pierce Brosnan.

It has already announced a “Pink Panther” sequel and the next 007 pic “Bond 22,” due out in November 2008. “Rocky Balboa” unspools in February.

The pics are all franchises that MGM owns the rights to through its 4,000-title library. The goal is to release two or three tentpoles a year, all of which will be made with financial partners, including Wall Street money or other studios.’

[via Coming Soon]

The Hobbit would be made in partnership with New Line, and the Variety article mentions the possibility of the book being adapted in two installments. Just don’t look for it next summer.

[via Chud]

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It would be fair to say that the New Zealand film industry is home to some of the most imaginative minds in the business. And this Christmas the international box office belongs to not one but two New Zealand directors.

Peter Jackson’s lifelong dream comes to fruition next week when King Kong premieres in New York.

While Shrek director Andrew Adamson gives us that magical C.S. Lewis classic, The Chronicles of Narnia – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“It’s always hard because you’ve seen it so many times by the time you finish…I am very proud of the film and I still find myself emotional at times…Particularly when I see it with an audience and see them responding to the emotional parts,” Adamson says.

The film is a huge flight of fancy, “particularly with the battle scenes” he says.

“C.S. Lewis wrote them so briefly and spent more time describing the meals than the battle and in some ways it was great as a director because it meant I could delve into my imagination and go back to my childhood and remember what I was imagining when I read them.

“In other cases it was a curse because it meant that everyone who had read the book, over 100 million people, they all had their own impression.”

[Read the rest at tvnz]

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IN ACCOUNTS OF 20TH-CENTURY LITERARY movements and happenings, the 1950s is often ignored. Yet this decade, viewed as a quiet time in English literature, birthed three of the greatest-ever series: Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy was completed, as was JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. And CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, seven volumes, topped them all.

All three writers are still read today (Tolkien topped a BBC poll of most popular author of the century, possibly a result of the success of Peter Jackson’s films) but it is undoubtedly Lewis who has attracted the most controversy, both over his personal life and his writing. This unassuming Oxford don – he liked nothing better than a pint in the evening at the pub with some sympathetic colleagues and fellow writers – has been called a fake and a phoney, a promoter of sexism and racism. The attacks have been renewed with the arrival of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in cinemas and the publication of a new biography, CS Lewis: The Boy who Chronicled Narnia, by Michael White (Abacus, £10.99).

Since the 1988 publication of academic Kathryn Lindskoog’s study, The CS Lewis Hoax, which asserted that “much of what has been published by or about Lewis since his death has been fabricated”, referring partly to Lewis’s posthumous 1977 publication, The Dark Tower, Lewis’s literary legacy has been under threat. AN Wilson’s 1990 biography of Lewis pilloried Lindskoog’s claims, but the damage had already been done. Then, in 2001, celebrated children’s author Philip Pullman launched an unprecedented attack on the use of Christianity in Lewis’s Narnia, the series of books that see four siblings, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, step through a wardrobe from our world into a parallel one, where they are guided by the lion Aslan: “It’s not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much, so much as the absence of Christian virtue,” he told an audience at a literary festival. “The highest virtue, we have on authority of the New Testament itself, is love, and yet you find not a trace of it in the [Narnia] books, a peevish blend of racism, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.”

[Read the rest at the Scotsman]

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Andrew Adamson credits director Peter Jackson’s success with The Lord of the Rings trilogy for convincing Hollywood big budget fantasy adventures are what cinema audiences want to see.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE film-maker is convinced he would not have received the money to fund his adaptation of CS LEWIS’ book without fellow New Zealander Jackson’s trailblazing.

He says, “(Jackson) made this possible by showing you can do a faithful adaptation of an English classical fantasy and that the audience are ready for that.”

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New Zealand Post has announced to their customers today in their Annual Stamp calendar that on October 5th, 2005, they will be releasing a set of stamps depicting Peter Jackson’s remake of the 1933 film. Also it has been announced that there will be a set of stamps for the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe directed my Andrew Adamson, which will be released on December 1st, 2005. These release dates are subject to change and are not yet confirmed.

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New “Kong” and “Chronicles of Narnia” resin collectibles!

Revealing news at Toy Fair was the announcement that Dark Horse had signed on as the exclusive distributor of upcoming product from WETA Collectibles.

Collectibles will include high-end resin pieces and prints for two major 2005 motion pictures: “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Kong: The 8th Wonder of the World;” the official title for Peter Jackson’s remake of the 1933 classic “King Kong”.

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As we look forward to the upcoming big screen production there are a few key points in the book that we hope find their way into the motion picture. I am not talking about scenes or images that I can’t wait to see at the theater, but themes that bind not only this book but also all the Narnia books together. Themes like redemption and healing, brotherhood and the undying Good vs. Evil. C.S. Lewis was a deeply spiritual man, and being so he could not separate his spiritual ideas from his books. Ideas like a redeeming savior, however the literary idea of a redeeming savior is not a new idea. Any book can be a good one if it tugs on our heartstrings with a savior of man that has to die. However the themes that propel the Narnia series past the rest of the literary world are not based upon just one savior, but more touching themes that hit us at home in our chairs reading it. If the motion picture can hold true to these, then it may also one day be a classic story just as the book has become.

The most prominent of these themes, as it over arches the whole book is brotherhood. The brother that Edmund is, the brother he should be, and the brother he is to his sister, especially Lucy. All of the other themes fall into play under this one idea of brotherhood. The redemption he seeks from his family after his fall, the redemption given to him, and the Evil White Witch, choosing him to in act her plan against the Good Aslan.

The opening of the book finds the Pevensie children, playing hide and seek in their uncle’s house. Lucy stumbles into the magical land of Narnia first. After her comes Edmund, at this time they were the only two to have come to Narnia. At first when questioned about Narnia he denies ever being there showing Lucy to be a liar. When the evil witch tells him to bring his brothers and sister on his next visit, he finally comes clean with them. When they all are in Narnia they are befriended by a family of beavers and Edmund sneaks off to find the white witch. After betraying them many times and lying to his brother and sisters he finally finds his way back to the good side after a run in with Aslan. Weather or not the White Witch wins you will have to read the book or wait for the movie.

Lets take a look at this very short synopsis of Edmund. When we first meet him he is bad tempered from pretending. Next he is lying to his brother and sister:

“Oh, yes, Lucy and I have been playing – pretending that all her story about a country in the wardrobe is true. Just for fun, of course. There’s nothing there really.”

He wants to spite Lucy, and put on a show for his older siblings. Once they all got into Narnia and they found out Edmund was lying about the whole ordeal, aside from getting the cold shoulder from his siblings they marched on after a robin they came to the beaver’s house. Edmund made his escape then to go to the white witch. All the while planning to be King and have Peter serve him. He doesn’t want them turned to stone, but:

As for what the Witch would do with the others, he didn’t want her to be particularly nice to them – certainly not to put them on the same level as himself

His delusions didn’t end until people started to die and in the heat of the battle he finally turned on the witch and broke her wand. After his meeting with Aslan he was knighted and pardoned.

We can track the journey from being a selfish bad tempered boy to a knight in Aslan’s court, A King at Cair Paravel, King Edmund the Just. With all this betrayal and deceit the other children still take him back, as a brother. This shows great character on their part, if the movie can portray the difference between Edmund and his siblings with the great art of characterization, then we are looking at a good movie. Susan however, has a dichotomy all her own in the whole series of Narnia books. I would like to see hints of her disbelief in this movie.

There is a lot that could be done in the upcoming motion picture The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and all of it could be great. I wouldn’t get your hopes up to high for this film, because the books were written by one of the greatest authors of his day and to transpose those to film would take someone like Peter Jackson. We can only hope for the best. However if the motion picture can hold true to these themes and ideas, then it may also one day be a classic story just as the book has become. Edmund takes his journey through evil to arrive with Aslan (God), his siblings still are able to forgive him after his betrayal, and the timeless idea of Good fighting Evil. These are just a small taste of the themes in this classic children’s story. If the movie can play out these ideas through acting and screenplay we are looking forward to one of the best pictures coming out December 05. I look forward to seeing the portrayal of Edmund and a tear jerking Lucy, Peter the high king and his Queen Susan, who should have a dichotomy larger then the other two but smaller then Edmunds. We can expect a somewhat open ending to leave way for Susan to become the lady she turns out to be, and even Prince Caspian in the near future.

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