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The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
The Adventures of Tintin is a 2011 animated adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg, who produced it with Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy, and written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish. Based on the Tintin comic book series by Hergé, the film stars Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig. In the film, Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock search for the treasure of the Unicorn, a ship once…
Directed by Steven Spielberg · Shot by Janusz Kamiński · Cut by Michael Kahn · Music by John Williams · 107 min
How it was made
- A week of motion-capture test filming took place in November 2006 on the Playa Vista soundstage where James Cameron was shooting Avatar, with Andy Serkis performing and Peter Jackson standing in for Tintin; the footage was sent to Weta Digital, which produced a 20-minute photorealistic test reel.
- Spielberg said that on every film before this one he had framed shots with one eye closed to preview the image in 2D the way audiences would see it, but because Tintin was shot digitally for animation, he kept both eyes open for the first time.
- Weta Digital and NVIDIA developed new ray-tracing software called PantaRay specifically to improve indoor lighting nuance, a process requiring 100 to 1,000 times more computation than standard shadow-map rendering.
- Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński served as a lighting consultant to Weta during post-production, working toward the film-noir, atmospheric look Jackson wanted.
- Snowy's movements were built from a combination of physical reference models manipulated on set by property master Brad Elliott and motion capture recorded from an actual dog, with his vocal effects assembled from recordings of several dog breeds.
- John Williams wrote most of the score before the animation was finished, deliberately using what he called the old Disney technique of having the animators follow the music rather than the other way around.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Steven Spielberg
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