'Tintin' Wraps Shooting, Begins 18-Month Motion Capture Marathon

The curiously troubled Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson production, Tintin has wrapped principal photography after 32 days of shooting in Los Angeles. Officially titled The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, the film is the first installment of a scheduled trilogy due in theaters in 2011. If you've been following this project at all, you know it's not a simple point-and-shoot proposition. Spielberg has been captivated by the idea of making a movie featuring Tintin, one of the world's most beloved comic book characters, since the early 1980s, and his ambitious plans for the adaptation involve about 18 months of post- production because of the advanced motion capture technology he and Jackson will employ to make the character's world come to life. The Los Angeles Times has a pair of articles this weekend about Tintin, both the film and the historic comic book, revealing a bit more about the peculiar working environment with Spielberg and Jackson. Spielberg is directing the first film, with Jackson expected to be behind the camera for at least the second movie. However, since both men are producing the series - which had serious trouble finding investors last year - Jackson was present on the set for the first week, but then appeared by videoconferencing from New Zealand over the following three-plus weeks, watching every aspect of the production from thousands of miles away. There still remains the question about the project's commercial appeal, particularly in the United States. One could also wonder why a well-known hand-drawn character would need to be redesigned in a more expensive, stylistically extreme type of computer animation. But check out the two Times articles. They're pretty revealing, particularly if you're new to most of this information.