Two new photos from the filming of Tintin have surfaced.

This shot (reportedly) shows Jamie Bell with another, unidentified actor and members of the crew. Snowy is simply a piece of cardboard on the end of a broomstick and just there so that the actors have something to react to when filming the scene.

Actually, that should be capturing, not filming, the scenes. There is no film or even video involved in this process.

The strange, wet-suit style, costumes the actors are wearing are covered with markers. These markers are tracked by sensors placed all over the room and their location are precisely recorded hundreds of times a second and stored to a computer. This data is then used in the CGI animation process allowing the director to create any style of image they want but based on the real movement of actors.

There is a second photo over at As Aventuras De Tintim, a Brazilian Tintin blog: EXCLUSIVO: Novas imagens do set de Tintim. I cannot find these images anywhere in the mainstream yet so this is a real scoop for them.

Nick Frost, who is playing Thomson against Simon Pegg’s Thompson, has been talking about filming Tintin. No major revaluations but some interesting comment.

Peter kind of re-wrote the scripts most evenings because he was in New Zealand, and so you would go in, in the morning with three or four pages of new dialogue and they were like “we are shooting this in 30 minutes, so GET READY!”

… [We] all had those terrible tight fitting black motion capture suits. Which is fine if you’re Daniel Craig, cause I’m sure his was handmade and looked beautiful but I looked like a big Tyrannosaurus Rex’s egg.

… I went out to W.H. Smiths and bought all the books and I was surprised at how adult they were. I read one where Tintin and Haddock were on a plane and Haddock gets drunk and hits Tintin on the head with the bottle…

Snowy was an odd little thing on set, because he was just a wire frame dog with a broomstick sticking out of him and someone would follow us around, moving him on set.

Source: Nick Frost Talks Tintin Effects and Directing Duo

A couple of re-imaginings of Tintin.

Tintin Versus Predator

Tintin Versus Predator

Tintin (not) doing the Batusi

Not Batusi – Tintin and Snowy by Jeff Lemire

This picture and news story turned up in my morning reading because the dog’s name is Tintin. Personally, if I had a terrier I would call it Snowy even if it wasn’t white but that is just me.

Tintin is being scanned at a special veterinary CT scanner in New Zealand. Read all about it: CT scanner for Massey