Hi
I have during a long time been thinking about an idea of mine, and I wonder if there is anyone who think it’s a good one.
I am one of those who love the books of JRR Tolkien, but was quite disappointed by the movies.
Wouldn’t it be possible to start a project dedicated to make a completely 3D-animated film of the books? You could make it completely faithful to the books, and with opensource and no timelimits, it could in time be gradually improved until it looks completely realistic.
You could have a webpage where anyone can publish models of the characters and landscape and such, and where you then can put them togather into animations, and gradually into a whole movie.
Please tell me if you think this is a good idea or if I’m just nuts…
Technically the bulk of it is animated, took hundreds of paid professionals the better part of a decade, millions of dollars and hardware that would probably make NASA take notice.
Besides everything that was allready said I think that would be a very dull movie to watch. The trick about getting books on on screen is cutting the story down and getting rid of everything which doesn’t help the dynamics of the movie or sidetracks on the main story. Bringing a book one to one to the screen just doesn’t work.
The book(s), I assure you, are no better. The only things separating them is your own imagination. I’m sure you’d manage to anger a few die hard book fans with whatever it is you muster.
I don’t think you’re nuts. I just think it would be better to invest time and effort into your own material rather than someone else’s.
Compared to the butchering most long literature gets when translated into film, I thought LOTR was remarkably faithful to the book. Some side plots were removed, of course, and some of the character development was shown rather than told, but when I watched the film, there were very few scenes that did not match how I imagined them when I read, and re-read, and re-read the book. Some of the scenes were so close to how I’d imagined them it was eerie.
If there were a germ of an idea here, it would be to pick out a scene that didn’t make the film, a short bit of side action or character development, and make a one or two minute animation out of that.
The up side is the story, concept art and character development are already done. Somebody could jump right in with storyboards and Modeling!
Just another practical thing I’m wondering about, how would you get the rights to make the movie from the books by The Professor? It would be rather nice to actually get a serious answer to this due to its relevancy in any situation where you would make a film from someone else’s work, is it legal because the move were going to be OS or something?
No. Some copyright holders might even consider open sourcing to be equivalent to placing their work in public domain.
The simplest way to find out whether the rights are available is to ask. Start with the author, unless it’s a work for hire, the rights start out belonging to the author (work for hire, they belong to the person who paid the author.) If the author sold or licenced the rights, he know who he sold or licenced them to.
If you don’t know the author’s address, send your request in care of the publisher. Authors generally let their publisher know where to send royalty checks.
Seriously, if I were you, I would either make a trailer, or do a favorite scene or characters as you see them, or better yet make your own story, then after that decide on redoing the whole thing. Back when I was young and ambitious I wanted to do a 2D animated version of the Hobbit, and that was only one book! Back in those days though, things were still mostly analog, so shooting frames on a VHS camcorder was pretty much impossible. Plus I really couldn’t draw that well. Huh.
I don’t even want to touch the legal issues here, but the main problem would be, that IF this project would start you and every one here would be long dead and forgotten before an open source, time limitless project of the Book would ever be finished. And I’d wager some one would have done a couple of new films of the book by then with big bucks.
nuts!
if an author´s work is cut buy the EDITOR anyway, so the book published is already “not original”. wenn the film making is in progress, as siad, they convert a book into the film which implies that u can´t do it 1 : 1.
maybe u could collect models from all over the world on one site, maybe u could animate some scenes, but quality will suffer and differ, no comparisson to hollywood´s battle scenes with 10000+ of orks and 100000000+ of dollars (didnt count the 0´s) @ropsta : your avatar´s genius
Do not be upset with other’s scepticism.
. LOL. I kid.