Dumbworld: A Sacramento Based Blog on Entertainment, Media and Art

I went and watched Benjamin Button this week and really liked it.  I have to admit, your boy even got a little misty eyed.  I’m a big David Fincher fan (Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac), and although it started out a little slow, he did not let me down.

Wired magazine has a pretty good breakdown on what went into transforming Brad Pitt into Benjamin Button.

the director had to find a way for Button (Brad Pitt) to “reverse-age” convincingly. CG was the answer: Make a 3-D model of Pitt’s visage, fast-forward it five decades, and stick it on the torso of a diminutive actor. Problem is, current-gen performance-capture techniques — sticking a bunch of dots onto the actor’s face, recording their movement, then applying the data to a 3-D model — miss subtle nuances; the resulting virtual visages often look stiff and creepy (see: The Polar Express).

Enter Steve Perlman from special effects company Reardon.  See the Wired slide show here.

Also, Oliver Peters has a pretty good blog on the editing workflow for Benjamin Button.  Also, don’t miss Oliver’s 12 tips for better film editing.

Dumbworld- Entertainment- Media- Art

And the winner is. . . Suri Cruise (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes seed).  Help bring about the coming armageddon more quickly by clicking here for the rest of the list.

The highlight of going to see the new Indiana Jones movie for me (see here for my thoughts on it) was seeing the trailer for the new David Fincher movie (director of Fight Club, 7even, and Zodiac), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  See the trailer here.