In a recent edition of Empire Magazine, Spielberg and James Cameron gave and interview about motion capture and similar techniques used in Avatar and Tintin. An interesting article but with little about Tintin except this titbit.

You can find a PDF of the full interview here. Thanks to Archibald for the link.

Total Film’s web site has a feature entitled The Adventures Of Tintin: Everything We Know. It is a recap of how Spielberg acquired the rights, the problems of financing, the cast and working with Peter Jackson.

There is no new information but there is some confusing / wrong information.

On the script Total Film says “The first draft was knocked up by Coupling writer Stephen Moffat, only for him to turn his back on the project”. This is not entirely true – The script was complete but Moffat was prevented from working on the script for the second film because of the writers strike in America. By the time that finished, he had been offered a chance to fulfill a life long ambition to write for Dr Who.

See Moffat Walked Away From Tintin and Moffat Denies Quitting Tintin for our original coverage. Note also how Total Film report that Moffat walked away from $2 million yet the original newspaper reports it was £500,000. A great example of the guesswork and the constant inflation inherent in the game of chinese whispers that is reporting on Hollywood.

Total Film go on to give credit to Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish for the bulk of the script writing duties where as the original press release gives them equal credit and the info at the time suggested this was just minor changes to Moffat’s script. However Total Film go on to say:

“….have condensed events from three of Hergé’s stories (The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure) in order to introduce the major characters ….”

This is (probably) wrong.

Comments from Spielberg have previously put the first film as covering The Crab and events up to the end of Unicorn. Also Professor Calculus has never appeared on any cast list and Red Rackham’s Treasure would be unthinkable without Calculus and the shark submergible.

In the first bit of Tintin Movie news in ages, legendary composer John Williams has finished his work on the score for Tintin.

This titbit of information appears near the end of this article: Endlessly devoted to his music

At home in Los Angeles, he takes a one-hour break from writing each day at dusk, he says, to walk at a golf course near his house. After his walk he returns to the piano, working until he has finished the day’s writing task: two or so minutes of music. Williams has just completed a chamber music piece for the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest in California and the score for “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,’’ a Steven Spielberg movie due out next year.

It may be short of news but mentioning John Williams gives me an excuse to feature this video.

It turns out the new photos from the filming of the Tintin movie I reported on the other day are not so new after all.

According to regular readers Sam and Proman, these have been out for a while and originally appeared on Tintin.com. Somehow I had missed then when they first came out and despite having looked twice, I still cannot find their original appearance.

Note: The photos below are copyright to someone, probably the production company behind The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn or Moulinsart.

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.

“There will be no cell phones, no TV sets, no modern cars. Just timeless Europe.” – Steven Spielberg

Le Monde magazine interviewed Steven Spielberg about his work on Tintin. The interview was presumably done in English and translated to French for publication and I’m translating it back into English via Google so the wording may not be spot on. However, the meaning is clear, the Tintin movie will not be some hideously re-imagining of Tintin. Spielberg goes on to say.

“Peter Jackson and I have the opportunity to honor the art of Hergé, his tone, his palette, his characters.” He denies [The translation is garbled here, possibly "to amend the famous Tintin tuft"?] He added: “The body language is very important. There is no question of touching it. We religiously respect the art of Hergé.”

From this interview, it certainly sounds like the Tintin movie will stick closely to the classic Tintin look-and-feel though they have previously described it as “film noir”. We may have a better idea in the new year as Peter Jackson has previously indicated that the first images of the CGI will be released in January.

Also due in January is an announcement on Peter Jackson’s choice of books for his film or films. The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun are widely tipped as favourites.

Source: Steven Spielberg révèle ses secrets pour adapter Tintin au cinéma (via Spielberg, Jackson Talk More “Tintin”).

Peter Jackson is in London for the opening of The Lovely Bones and mentioned Tintin at a press conference:

“Tintin is great. It’s made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film”.

That is it for Tintin news but for more on the Hobbit and The Lovely Bones see: Peter Jackson says Tintin film is ‘finished’

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

Jamie Bell (Tintin) is currently filming The Eagle Of The Ninth in Scotland. The film is about a Roman legion that went missing in 2AD. Currently there is a dispute because local builders are being snubbed in favour of Hungarian builders. And where is all this taking place? On the shores of Loch Lomond, source of Captain Haddock’s favourite tipple UPDATE: See comments below.

Gad Elmaleh, the Moroccan actor and performer, who is appearing in Tintin:Secret of the Unicorn as Omar Ben Salaad, talks about Tintin and Spielberg.

I have to confess that my French is almost non-existent so I have no idea what he is saying. So here is a sample of Gad Elmaleh in English.