Hey folks, Harry here and damn man, woman and childlings... this report has me going into shivers... I WANT TO SEE A SPIDER-MAN MOVIE LIKE A CONDEMNED MAN IN AN ELECTRIC CHAIR PRAYS FOR A BLACK OUT! I don't know how many of you folks saw STUART LITTLE... I imagine it was probably less than it should've been, but the thing that most impressed me about their animation... even more so than the hair... was the natural way that Stuart's clothes hung, absorbed and bounced light... It reacted in the manner that clothing works... If you compare it's cg to that of the clothing in the new FINAL FANTASY trailer... you'll see what I mean or like JAR JAR or the other Gungans... their clothing seemed slightly off... but the cloth on Stuart made me think of the quality of cloth on Stop Motion puppets... which... um... is real. The movement was just... far far far better... I can't wait to read the further reports from Preston... but this one rules like a Florida judge... decisive...

Hi Harry,

Got some interesting news on the ol' Spidey front today at the London Effects and Animation Festival (LEAF).

Essentially the festival is a series of seminars from prominent people in the special effects industry, and Gregg Anderson from Sony Imageworks was there to give a talk on his work for Hollow Man. I'll go into detail in a highlights report I'll send to you once its over, but for now I thought I'd send in a few tidbits of info that'll be sure to spark a few talkbacks.

First of all Gregg began by saying that there were three films that Imageworks were working on that were won because of the strength of their character animation work. For those of you who don't know their recent credits, they include Stuart Little and the invisibility transformation sequence from Hollow Man, both of which are awesome examples of the quality of work that these guys can produce. Anyway the three movies they're lined up for are Stuart Little 2 (no surprises there), Harry Potter ("..it's gonna involve all kinds of weird creatures, like centaurs and stuff...") and finally Spiderman (whoa that made a few people sit up). Well Gregg went on to give a great talk about Hollow Man but when it came to the end and there was time for questions there were no prizes for guessing what they were about.

Question one went something like "What sort of work are you doing for Spider Man?" and I thought "he's gonna go wide eyed and clam up, just like the ILM guys do when you mention Star Wars..." but he didn't! Excellent! He said that Imageworks are signed up to do the all the effects for the picture which will include doing Spidey and the Green Goblin in CG because they'll have to do stuff like running up walls, swinging around the city, doing backflips and the like and flying around on the goblin glider. For my two pennies worth I think Sam Rami has got the best team for this kind of work, maybe even better than ILM (I said maybe) since character animation is something Image works have done so well with.

So onto question two... "Spider Man involves lots of stuff like swinging from skyscrapers, are you going to do the city in CG or film it and composite on the characters after?". The answer as near as I can remember was: Sure probably both, but Sam wants to do some shots where your swinging through the city with him (oh man that's cool!!!), so obviously we cant film over fifteen blocks, so were looking at modeling the New York city skyline using photogrammetry (Photogrametry is the technique they used in Fight Club to zip around the city at the beginning of the film) then well get the really realistic feel that Sam wants for the film. Ah man I'm thinking this is going to be one cool film... but I digress. Gregg went on to say that Sam is a great lover of the comics and feels a great responsibility to do a film that will faithfully recreate the comic's style in a way that the fans of the comic will love. Great I thought, now tell us what the costumes will be like I thought.

But then nooo! No time for anymore questions! Damn.

Hmm well I wasn't going to let that get in the way of my answer so I wandered down to the front and waited for him to come down from the stage. "Gregg can I ask you a quick question?" I said in a nonchalant, kinda not too eager sounding way. "Sure" came the reply. "What are the costumes going to be like?" I enquired. His was answer was well they're still in pre-production at the moment but they're doing loads of test to get the right kinda spandex look for the character. "What color is it?" I asked. Well red and blue pretty much like the comic book but with parts of it made to be more like a real suit (I'm paraphrasing here since I got the feeling he was talking about the eyes).

Well that was all I had time for, I'll send you the edited highlights of the Shrek stuff,Perfect Storm's behind the scenes and Pixars new animated short "For the Birds" soon.

Oh yeah you can call me... er...

Preston.