Herge’s 100th birthday, today, May 22nd

We celebrate Herge’s 100th birthday today. BTW, did you know he has an asteroid named after him? And thanks to an early morning tip from I, Effendi, here’s a great article from today’s NYT about 3 upcoming Tintin Adventures in 3-D! (links to article):

“LOS ANGELES, May 21 — If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing newfangled 3-D glasses.

…The new projects aim to be more than mere gimmicks. Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson have been working on the “Adventures of Tintin” project for about a year with Mr. Jackson’s special effects company, Weta Digital.

Part of the decision-making process included a week of motion capture work on the “Avatar” set in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles last November. That visual information was sent to Weta in New Zealand. There it was married to a computer model of Tintin, the young, red-haired Belgian adventurer of comic-book fame, who is wildly popular in Europe though less so in this country. The results persuaded both directors to push forward with the trilogy…”

From Variety: “Herge’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer animated characters,” Spielberg said.

“We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created,” Spielberg continued.

…Jackson said WETA will stay true to Remi’s original designs in bringing the cast of Tintin to life, but that the characters won’t look cartoonish.

“Instead,” Jackson said, “we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people — but real Herge people!”