Sneak Peak at Director’s Commentary from New Moon

MovieWeb has a sample of what we can expect from the director’s commentary that will be included on the DVD for New Moon.

The Special Effects of New Moon

Ed of the Earth’s Mightiest site talked to Susan MacLeod the visual effects editor Of  New Moon. In the three-part, audio interview they cover:

The Edward Apparition

The Crystal Effect (AKA vampire sparkles)

The Wolves

Target Previews New Moon DVD Footage

The Target website has a video preview up of some of what is on their version of the New Moon DVD. If you go to the Target website and click the icon on the main graphic, you can get to the content. Ty to Mschicklet for the heads up.

Win a Red Cloak From Volterra

You can help the victims of the Haitian earthquake and win a New Moon costume at the same time.  Eric Moro, the Editor in Chief of IGN Movies, writes:

” I wanted to let you know that we are hosting a very special eBay auction – all proceeds from the auction are going to Habitat for Humanity to help those affected by the earthquake in Haiti. The reason why I’m writing is because we have a cool piece of costuming used in NEW MOON that’s being auctioned off. It’s one of the eye-popping red robes worn during the shooting of the San Marco’s Day Festival in Volterra, Italy.”

Check out the Ebay auction here.

New Moon in MTV’s Top 9 of 09 Moments

New Moon By the Numbers, a Year End Update

According to Box Office Mojo, New Moon moved into the number 4 position of best selling movies of 2009 overtaking this summer’s The Hangover. One thing to note is that the movies that are ahead of New Moon all opened in the spring/summer and recently closed their tallies after a 4-6 month run.

What’s going to be interesting is to see if New Moon will crack the $300,000,000 before it closes out in around March. It’s also going to be interesting to see where Avatar ends up in this mix since it’s tickets are more for the 3-D experience. As usual, in the what does this mean to the average movie goer, Larry explains it all.

E! has an interesting look at “The Year’s Biggest Bombs” only it’s not what you might think. It’s a look at what was spent to make a movie vs. what that movie made back in ticket sales.  Some interesting stats according to E!:

1. New Moon beat Harry Potter. In bang for buck. New Moon made more than 12 times its $50 million budget ($635 million worldwide); Half-Blood Prince “only” made about four times its $250 million price tag.

2. Harry Potter beat everything. The sixth boy-wizard adventure was the year’s overall No. 1 film, with $924 million in the worldwide bank, even if Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was the No. 1 film domestically—and the only one to top $400 milllion stateside.”

In other driving factors, there is the rumor mill. You never know what brings people back to theaters. On the IMDB one person claims to have seen an Eclipse preview right after her showing of New Moon. Mind you she is the ONLY person who seems to have seen this and according to her she wasn’t able to snap any photo with her camera, but can remember every second of this trailer that she saw once with blow-by-blow, detailed accuracy. What’s amazing is how many people on the IMDB reported to racing out to see this, it then went to Twitter, and yep that’s the making of a viral rumor. Nonetheless, viral rumors, no matter how illogical and in this case not true, drive the boxoffice.

Now none of this accounts for piracy, meaning how many people saw the movie without paying. According to the New York Times, Twilight is number 5 on the list of most pirated movies in 2009. Star Trek holds the number 1 position. No clue where New Moon will fall in the 2010 list.

No matter where New Moon ends up, regardless it’s quite an accomplishment for a film that is predominantly female box office driven.

Tippet Studio Rising to the New Moon Challenge

Tippet Studio, that did the CGI work for New Moon talks about the process. If you are not normally into CGI articles, make an exception, and read this one. It is incredibly well done.

“The challenge wasn’t just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren’t distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art Director, helped to make sure those requirements were fulfilled, combining real-world attributes and CG magic.

“At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable.”

Check out the full feature here and make sure you click on everything
! There’s a lot of content! Via Twilighters Anonymous

New Moon Movie Mistakes

According to FilmoFilia New Moon ranks up there with the movies with the most mistakes this year. However, the thing you have to remember is that these mistakes are found by viewers, it’s not as if there is a special “find the mistakes” rating society that checks out every film of the year. So, naturally the larger selling films have the most mistakes reported if for no other reason than lots of people saw those films.

Regardless it’s all in there in good fun. If you want to check out some other films with classic moments of “oops” watch Dorothy’s magically growing and shrinking braids in The Wizard of Oz, Hugh Grant’s changing tie in Love Actually, and Julia Robert’s growing and shrinking pancake in Pretty Woman.

Check out the FilmoFilia article here.

New Moon’s Make-Up Artist Keynote Speaker

This just in from Make-Up Artist magazine:

Norma Hill-Patton, the make-up department head on The Twilight Saga: New Moon, was recently featured as a keynote speaker at the first-ever International Make-Up Artist Trade Show (IMATS) in Toronto. Industry professionals and Twilight fans listened to Hill-Patton as she talked with IMATS Show Director and Make-Up Artist magazine Publisher Michael Key about her career and creating the looks for New Moon’s vampires, wolves and Volturi characters.

Later in the day, a long line of fans waited to get her autograph and gathered to see her do live Edward and Jane make-up recreations in the Make-Up Artist magazine booth.

(Photo credit:  Deverill Weekes/Courtesy of Make-Up Artist magazine.)

For more photos of Hill-Patton at IMATS, visit http://www.imatsshow.com/toronto/photo_gallery.php. And to learn more about the New Moon make-up and Hill-Patton’s career, check out Issue 81 of Make-Up Artist magazine—featuring Dakota Fanning on the cover as Jane. http://www.makeupmag.com

Charles Porlier, the make-up department head for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, will be the keynote speaker for the 2010 Vancouver, B.C. IMATS (April 17-18). Visit http://www.imatsshow.com/vancouver/ to see the latest details on the show.

New Moon Easter Eggs

No, we don’t mean the Easter Bunny is visiting Forks.  For those of you who don’t know the term “Easter Egg” in a film context, according to Wikipedia it means, “A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. The term was coined – according to Warren Robinett – by Atari after they were pointed to the secret message left by Robinett in the game Adventure.[1] It draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many Western nations as well as the last Russian imperial family’s tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Carl Fabergé which contained hidden surprises.”

So using the Twilight movie as an example, Easter Eggs would be Stephenie’s Cameo appearance and the take-off on the Twilight cover with the “edible art” routine.

So here’s what we were just told by Summit:

“Here are details on a special NEW MOON exclusive from Chris Weitz, please feel free to share with your readers.

Director Chris Weitz has a list of 5 things from NEW MOON you may have missed, available only on the Twilight Tracker iPhone & iPod Touch App.  The Twilight Tracker App can be downloaded here — itunes.com/twilight

Check this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly for 5 additional items, and see NEW MOON again to spot the hidden easter eggs!”