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LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
The latest issue of Variety has a number of articles covering Pacific Rim. Print issue went out on Tuesday I believe, and the articles are now online as well:
Inside Pacific Rim with Guillermo del Toro - excerpted from Pacific Rim: Man, Machines & Monsters The Inner Workings of an Epic Film, in bookstores June 18.
Article is pretty long, so here's a quick snippet:
Some of the stills and concept art from the previous article's image gallery:
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Pacific Rims Legendary Marketing Challenge
Pacific Rim Visual Effects Get Operatic Twist
Image background from the above article quoted for super large size:
The Business of Pacific Rim:
Some of the examples from the article gallery:
Inside Pacific Rim with Guillermo del Toro - excerpted from Pacific Rim: Man, Machines & Monsters The Inner Workings of an Epic Film, in bookstores June 18.
Article is pretty long, so here's a quick snippet:
That night he screens the footage again, more calmly this time, for a few lucky fans at a nearby hotel, taking questions from them after and hanging out with them as they munch on popcorn and hot dogs. This is the Guillermo del Toro they love: exuberant, generous, and warm. But they dont realize that not so long before, del Toro had been in a suspended state. He needed a tonic, something to restore the pleasure of filmmaking and the wonder hed felt as a boy watching movies in Guadalajara. He had needed a movie where he could feel creative freedom and a sense of support from partners who wanted to make the movie as badly as he did.
He found all that, and more, in Pacific Rim.
The director of a movie has been likened to the general of a small army. The comparison seems especially apt when the movie has huge sets, hundreds of extras, and several production tracks running simultaneously. But like a good general, an effective director is a leader, not just a commander. A director who handles people well can inspire cast and crew to perform miracles. A poor leader will find few willing to go beyond the call for the sake of the show.
Like the desperate band of misfits fighting from the Shatterdome to save the world, the Pacific Rim company found themselves stretching their resources, wrestling with complex technology, and pushing themselves beyond their limits. Guillermo del Toro led them through every challenge. Yet few realized that del Toro, having decided to change his approach to running the set, was in uncharted territory himself.
I made a life decision that this movie needed to be huge in scope but run very, very tight on the production, he says, and the first person to change was me. He had never shot a movie in less than 115 days; on Pacific Rim he would have just 103. The only way he could finish on time was to schedule a splinter unit so he could direct it early in the day, before main unit, and on his off days. For much of the schedule, he would work 17 or 18 hours a day, seven days a week.
Del Toro also decided to take a new approach to directing actors. If you watch Pans Labyrinth or The Devils Backbone, I had an obsession that was really, really all-consuming with making the actors move in an extremely mannered way that matched the camera moves, he says. In those movies I wanted it to be balletic, but I also wanted it to be almost like a ritual or a dance. But on Pacific Rim I needed to allow the actors to breathe a lot more. I wanted to shoot a lot looser and even allow for improvisation, which I had never done.
One thing did not change about del Toros approach: He demands total control. Everything, 100% goes through me sooner or later, he says. I do not delegate anything. Some people like it, some people dont, but it has to be done that way.
Some of the stills and concept art from the previous article's image gallery:
Pacific Rims Legendary Marketing Challenge
Thomas Tulls Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. have dared to hope that auds will find Guillermo del Toros giant-monsters-vs.-giant-robots opus as compelling as Star Wars, and that theyll flock to it again and again, be it in cinemas, theme parks, graphic novels, games or apps. Legendary, which developed the property and put up 75% of its nearly $200 million production budget, needs the film to be a monster hit, given its economics and the leverage it could afford Tull in negotiating a new studio deal, if, as expected, he ends his companys longtime partnership with Warner Bros.
Pacific Rim also represents a coming-out proclamation of sorts for Legendary, which is growing into a more full-fledged independent that hatches and bankrolls more homegrown movies. With its recent acquisition of the savvy boutique marketing agency Five33, Legendary plans to implement and execute the marketing strategy for all or its upcoming tentpoles.
Jon Jashni, Legendarys president and chief creative officer, says the company had always planned to evolve toward creating its own content, and self-financing more of its pictures. He insists the effort to develop Pacific Rim as an original tentpole wasnt tied to the expiration of Legendarys Warner deal at years end.
If we stay at Warners, this would still have been a part of our strategy, Jashni says, noting that Legendary intends to fund potential franchise pics in the future, such as Warcraft and Hot Wheels.
For Pacific Rim to be the kind of phenomenon Legendary is banking on, the picture must draw on an audience beyond the core fanbase of Kaiju and Gundam aficionados. Jashni says Pacific Rim is aimed at all quadrants.
Warners marketing strategy has been to rev up core fans first, then expand from there. Del Toros appearances at last years Comic-Con and this years Wondercon, and the action-oriented trailers, have stoked the fanboys. Sue Kroll, Warners president of worldwide marketing, told Variety, We have the benefit of strong reaction from the core, but we are also enjoying an outstanding reaction to the materials from general consumers.
Early marketing, says Jashni, focused on the high-concept hook. To use del Toros gleeful description: Giant (bleeping) monsters vs. giant (bleeping) robots.
Jashni, too, sees the films scale as an asset. People want big summer entertainment, he says. Weve got to indicate that.
But the Legendary exec also readily acknowledges that using flash wont work by itself.
Weve brought the tasty, but were also going to bring the nutrition, he says. That nutrition began to show up in the marketing campaign last week, with the unveiling of a featurette about Drift Space, which reveals one of the pics conceptual conceits.
Within the world of Pacific Rim, the pilots inside the robots must link their minds, sharing memories and thoughts. In this link, called the Drift, pilots have no secrets from each other; when lonely, troubled pilots Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) must team up, they experience what Jashni terms the fastest speed-dating of all time. If the bots and monsters hook the fanboys, this aspect of emotional intimacy figures to play to femmes.
The TV campaign will ramp up next week and will target kids, teens and families, with spots on NBA and NHL playoff games, Good Morning America, the Today show and network season finales.
Jashni maintains that the fanboy psychographic isnt limited to men anymore, and that character helps sell a movie to all audience segments. Theres an emotional aspect to this movie, and theres a bombastic aspect, he says. Some women will respond to the emotion inherent in the movie, some will respond to the spectacle. Same is true for men and adults.
To reach all those viewers, though, the films marketing must overcome the perception that Pacific Rim is Transformers vs. Godzilla. (In fact, a Google search for that mashup, with the words Pacific Rim returns about 21,300 hits.)
The comparison is only a problem if we fail at differentiating the film from the other properties, says Kroll, who remains confident audiences will be satisfied with the pictures big action sequences and the fact it looks so new and fresh.
And Warners marketers arent exactly bristling at the comparison with Transformers. They feel if they have to be pigeonholed with something, it might as well be a multibillion-dollar franchise.
Pacific Rim Visual Effects Get Operatic Twist
What words come to mind when you think of a summer tentpole? Thrilling? Spectacular? Thunderous? When director Guillermo del Toro talks about Pacific Rim, his favorite description is: Operatic.
That was one of the first words I said to the entire team at ILM, says del Toro. I said, This movie needs to be theatrical, operatic, romantic. We used a lot of words not usually associated with hightech blockbusters.
To get that look on his giant-robots-vs.-giant-monsters epic, del Toro made an unusual request of his visual effects supervisor, cerebral Michigander John Knoll.
We went for a very, very, very, very saturated color palette for the battle for Hong Kong, del Toro says. I kept asking John to tap into his inner Mexican and be able to saturate the greens and the purples and the pinks and the oranges.
Del Toro also asked Knoll not to necessarily match the lighting from shot to shot.
Its pretty unorthodox to do that, says del Toro, but I think the results are really beautiful and very artistically free and powerful, not something you would associate a big sci-fi action movie.
Del Toro wasnt entirely kidding about Knoll getting in touch with his inner Mexican.
I do think John can let his hair down, says del Toro with a laugh.
Asked what hes most excited about in the pics vfx, del Toro first mentions neither robots nor monsters but something subtler: water. Since the creatures emerge from the Pacific, much of the action is in the ocean or in Hong Kongs Victoria Harbor.
The water dynamics in this movie are technically beautiful, but also artistically incredibly expressive, he says. We agreed on making the water become almost another character. We would time the water very precisely. Id say Get out of the wave (on this frame).
Sometimes the helmer would use classic art, such as Hokusais engraving the Great Wave as a common point of reference. I would say Give me a Hokusai wave, says del Toro. I think (the vfx team) did a tremendous job; we use the waves and weather in the movie very operatically.
Del Toro decided after principal photography was complete to let Pacific Rim go 3D, then insisted that Industrial Light & Magic render the visual effects in stereo, eschewing post-conversion of the all-CG shots.
He asked Knoll to go the full Ann Arbor and be a strict disciplinarian as he oversaw the 3D visual effects shots. Del Toro was worried that exaggerated 3D would have the unintended side effect of making objects in the frame look small (the technical term is hyperstereo).
That would be disastrous for a picture determined to establish the huge scale of the monsters and robots. After all, its tagline is Go big or go extinct. Its a credo the production team took to heart.
John is pretty adept at keeping the 3D expressive but keeping the optics of it realistic, explains del Toro, Thats exactly why I thought it was imperative that he and ILM were in charge of creating the 3D aspects of the shots, because thats what I wanted.
Image background from the above article quoted for super large size:
The Business of Pacific Rim:
Brand reps in Hollywood are quick to point out that its tough to put together major merchandising programs around a film thats not a sequel or based on a popular property. Retailers want proof that products will sell before stocking them on shelves. Yet some risks have paid off: Sales of foul-mouthed talking bears took off for Universal and MRCs Ted; and action figures and games sold well for Real Steel, both overseen by Striker Entertainments Russell Binder. Now hes helped Legendary line up potentially lucrative licensing deals tied to Guillermo del Toros Pacific Rim that are as impressive as its onscreen giants.
Some of the examples from the article gallery: