It is not as cool looking as Professor Calculus’ shark submarine but it is more functional than this real shark submersible.

Today marks 50 years since the exile of the Dalai Lama from Tibet.

His flight and exile from his native country followed an unsuccessful uprising against the invading Chinese army. Since then, the Dalai Lama has campaign for justice for his people. According to the Dalai Lama, five decades of repression has caused untold suffering amongst the ordinary people of Tibet.

It is somewhat ironic that in The Blue Lotus, Herge went out of his way to depict the Chinese people as being a sophisticated, civilized people, repressed by the brutal Japanese. Eighty years on, it is the Chinese who are the brutal invaders, repressing the Tibetan people who Herge depicted in his greatest book, Tintin in Tibet.

Campaign for a Free Tibet

I found this whilst combing the net for Tintin goodies.

The Pocket Essentials guide to Tintin is a handy guide to Tintin and all his adventures. Another spam website (I’m not going to link to it) had the guide listed but clearly had translated the sales blurb for the book from English into something else and back again. Why I don’t know but I love the results.

It makes we want to get Google’s Babelfish on to the job of translating the actual Tintin books.

The latest Star Trek trailer looks great and has some very brief shots of the supporting cast, notably Simon Pegg (Thompson). The casting in this film looks great with all the cast looking their future characters. Could it be that we are to have a really good Star Trek film for the first time since Wrath of Khan?

According to Variety magazine, Steven Spielberg is about to wrap up filming after just 32 days. Of course, when we talking about filming we are really talking about motion capture data. No cameras (in the traditional sense) are involved in this process. The raw motion capture footage will then be handed over to Peter Jackson who will now spend the next 18 months converting the data into a 3D world.

With the short 32 days period of motion capture being done by Spielberg and the long hard work of post production in the hands of Peter Jackson, there is some debate about whose film this is. Spielberg will be getting full directing credits and Jackson will be down as producer but in reality it is starting to look like the final film will owe more to Peter Jackson than Steven Spielberg.

The Variety article highlights how closely director and producer have to work in a motion capture film, challenging the traditional concepts of the roles. The collaboration between the two film makers is being likened to how Spielberg and George Lucus worked together on the Raiders of the Lost Ark films. Kathleen Kennedy, long time producer of Spielberg’s films, said that the transitions between the two creative talents are relatively seamless and that “They are amazingly collaborative”…

Officially Peter Jackson is down to direct the second film but that will only go ahead if the first one is successful. Yet it may be that Jackson, as producer and controller of the film’s technology, has far more influence over the first film’s success than Spielberg. In a way, this makes me happier. Jackson has shown with the Lords of the Rings and King Kong that he understands fan’s emotional connection to source material and can be sensitive to it. Steven Spielberg’s work has often been with original scripts for the big screen and when they have been adaptions, it has been from relatively obscure books. There is also a very European (or at least British) idea that Jackson as a New Zealander will be more in tune the European nature of Tintin than the American Spielberg.

Source: Spielberg, Jackson dig into ‘Tintin’

Lucy Knisley is a wonderfully talented comic artist who uses Herge’s ligne claire (clear line) to create bright and colourful comics that have unexpected depth to them. Such as this strange exploration of the artistic drive through conversations with, amongst other things, a fridge.

From Heart Seed Snow Circuit (and thanks to Drawn! The Illustration & Cartooning Blog.)

The occasionally reliable Daily Mail has some on-set Tintin gossip from Daniel Mays and Mackenzie Crook, who are playing Alan and Ernie – sidekicks to Red Rackham (Daniel Craig). Both are comic actors with Mays having starred in the TV sitcom “Plus One” and Crook is most famous for his part in The Office. The pair of them are the comic relief in Red Rackham’s crew, a role very familiar to Crook after his work in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.

‘You’ve got the actors wearing funny tight bodysuits fitted with hundreds of motion-capturing devices and as you act, you can see yourself on a big screen with costumes superimposed on this character that looks like you. . . but isn’t.

‘In front of you there’s a camera that picks up every aspect of your face.

Five people with hand-held cameras are filming you. And Steven Spielberg is sitting there with a camera device manipulating all the images.

‘With all the people on the set and backstage, it’s like a Shuttle launch – just fantastic!’ Mays enthused when we met for drinks at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard.

Early on during the production Spielberg, sick with a cold, had to go to see a doctor. ‘We came in and there was Peter Jackson directing us via satellite from New Zealand,’ Mays laughed.

Source: Baz Bamigboye on coffee with Jessica Alba, Tintin’s secrets and school with Keira Knightley

Following on nicely from our post on the Tintin Board Game, Paramount have begun soliciting for merchandising partners for The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. There is nothing about this on the Paramount Licensing site but the License Mag Blog has this brief piece of news: Upcoming TinTin Film Ready for Licensing.

I have no further information on this other than the photo.

Found on: Lola – Bits & Pieces

Update: Regular reader Pe-Ads pointed out this resource about Tintin Board Games which contains more info on the game above plus several other games.

In the 1920′s and 30′s, before RADAR was developed, there were various attempts at developing an acoustic system that literally listen to the sound of approaching planes. An example of this can be seen in King Ottakar’s Scepture.

In the UK, massive concrete acoustic mirrors were built that focused the sound into a microphone, allowing planes to be detected earlier. Now these crumbling structures are to be saved as national landmarks.

Its amazing that technology Herge used as cutting edge science in his early books is now needing preservation orders and listing as a national landmark.

More Info: Britain’s vast cement “listening ears” designated a national landmark