Before I ducked out of town for the day yesterday, I hit up Paramount Pictures’ panel for Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” The Beard was on hand to discuss the film (and pick up this year’s Inkpot Award), and a surprise appearance by Peter Jackson got the crowd buttered up nicely for the footage.
So let’s start with that. We were first shown test footage from six years ago featuring Jackson as Captain Haddock and an animated Snowy. This was back when Spielberg was still trying to decide what the best filmmaking technique on the film would be. After that, it was a collage of scenes from the film (which Spielberg noted represented some of the earliest renderings out of Weta).
My immediate reaction was that the film is Spielberg through and through. In other words, it has the energy, the cinematic thumbprint of a Spielberg film, the in-scene pacing and editorial signature of so much of his work. I wasn’t fully expecting that, but the truth is, they wanted a system of performance capture that would allow the director to be right in the middle of things.