Hollywood Road

All disputes surrounding the Oscars are all disputes over fame and fortune.

In addition, regarding the fame and fortune of the Oscars, even the US Internal Revenue Service has intervened, and they want to collect taxes from the gift bags presented by the academy to the award presenters!

Since 1989, the Academy began to give gift packages to Oscar guests, which has since become an Oscar tradition. In addition to the nominees, award presenters can also get a gift package to express their gratitude to the star guests who attended the Oscar ceremony for free.

Under commercial hype, this tradition has become a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In this year's Oscar package, a diamond-encrusted bra and underwear, a 22k gold leaf and a crystal mallet are worth nearly $100,000. , and this is only part of the gift bag.

Although the content of Oscar’s gift packages varies depending on the recipient, the $10,000 “Victoria’s Secret” gold-encrusted and diamond-encrusted underwear can only be obtained by the leading actress nominees.

In addition to gifts for attending the awards ceremony, Oscar also specially prepared gifts for the losers of the leading actor and actress and director awards, which will be given out after the awards ceremony. There is a gift bag for the frustrated Oscar this year to comfort the wounded soul. 3-day free night voucher at Premier Hotel in Las Vegas, Las Vegas.

It is indeed enviable for Hollywood stars to attend awards shows and receive gifts at the same time, but the IRS has focused its tax collection attention on it this year.

Just one day after the awards ceremony, the Internal Revenue Service stated that stars who received Oscar gift bags must pay taxes on these gifts. It should be known that they have the same obligation to pay taxes as the general public, and hope that these stars can also "go forward" on the issue of paying taxes.

Only death and taxes are eternal.

In a country where tax resistance started, tax payment is definitely the top priority. Although Murphy received the Oscar package and gave it to the driver who provided the service for him, he still informed the accountant that he should not forget this when filing taxes next month. gift bag.

The reputation of the country of ten thousand taxes can also be seen from this gift bag.

As the noise about the Oscars subsided, Murphy threw the statuette into the safe and resumed his work. The statuette represented the past, not the future.

He still needs to work hard in the future.

Post-production work continues on A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones.

Previously, Murphy had collaborated with Joel Griffith to complete the initial cut of ten episodes, and temporarily handed over the fine-cut work to the editor team, while he rushed to the small city of Venice to supervise the production of special effects in the digital field.

In the whole episode, there are not many pictures that are actually generated by computer CGI special effects. The three baby dragons hatched by Daenerys Targaryen in the last episode are undoubtedly the representatives.

This is also one of the two most important special effects production scenes in the services provided by Digital Domain for "A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones".

According to Murphy's understanding, the dragons in Western legends are basically large lizards with wings, or it is more appropriate to say that they are dinosaurs with wings.

Therefore, the special effects team referred to his requirements, and when initially designing the model, they referred to quite a few images of juvenile dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park".

But this is just a reference. If you want to make an unforgettable dragon, it is definitely not enough to install a pair of wings on the dinosaur. It needs to determine its own core and skeleton on the basis of the reference.

Murphy only put forward the vision and the goals that should be achieved. How to do it specifically requires the meticulous work of a professional team in the digital field.

The "sculpting" in the digital field is carried out from the inside out, first the skeleton is built, then the muscles are wrapped, and finally the skin is covered.

They took Murphy's dragon as a flying dinosaur as the core concept, and decided that the design of the dragon's bone structure was similar to that of a bird. Therefore, in order to build the original skeleton of the dragon, the special effects team found a "easiest bird to find". Hairy chicken.

This chicken, which has lost its life, is thus endowed with great value.

The special effects team scanned it comprehensively, then attached controllers to key parts such as the wings, tracked the dynamics of bones and muscles during movement, and then transformed it into a baby dragon crawling in the special effects software. muscle movement.

Observant special effects artists also discovered that when the chicken's wings are spread, the skin at the junction with the body is almost transparent, so when the dragon stretches its wings in the play, it is also processed into a translucent film.

What this featherless chicken can provide to the special effects artists is the movement of the dragon's muscles and bones; and the appearance of the dragon is even more of a headache for the special effects team.

In fact, in order to make the fictional dragon appear more realistic in appearance, the special effects team studied more than a hundred kinds of animals. Just to find suitable skin textures and scales for the "young dragon", they referred to more than a dozen lizards.

The dragon in the play is dynamic, and when interacting with the outside world, the changes in appearance also need to remain dynamic, such as the dragon breaking out of the egg, the state of the liquid droplets dripping along the scales, and the dragon's eyes and skin. Various colors and reflective situations under different light conditions require special effects artists to achieve the authenticity of every small detail.

To get the little lizard with wings, Murphy assembled a special effects team of up to 25 people to produce the titles of the entire episode. They needed to get the design concept to the final effect as soon as possible.

"The title is only 90 seconds long, why not do something that can't be done in the feature film?"

Before starting production, Murphy called all the production staff together for a brief meeting, "If done well, the audience can know the development of the character from it."

The opening title of a TV series can do many things. Besides bringing the audience into the plot, it can also tell the audience the information about the time and space they are about to see, and create their own world.

In the beginning everything was very simple, no animations, flat stuff.

The special effects design team came up with an original opening script as quickly as possible, a crow flew from King's Landing to Winterfell, but Murphy always felt that this would make the audience wonder what kind of scene this was in. Stories played out in the environment.

The special effects team made another five maps. It is suggested that these maps can be cut out as soon as the location is changed in the TV series. It seems that the effect is very good, and you can clearly know where you are now, but it seriously interferes with the narrative of the series.

This way of changing the map will cause extremely serious hindrance and interference to the narrative. Murphy simply asked to put the map in the opening title and become a part of the opening title.

However, this also raises a question, what else is outside the map?

Murphy has been thinking, the crew has enough budget and excellent technicians, he can do whatever he thinks, what should he do now?

His choice was to create the most complex and elaborate map imaginable to man.

These will form the title credits of the episode.

It is not easy to make the most complex and exquisite map, and Murphy led the special effects team to put in enough effort from design to production.

The first was to create maps that would animate like the real thing, with each map being accompanied by the family crest of the owner.

According to Murphy's idea, Helena Espora, the art director of the crew, referred to Da Vinci's mechanical design manuscript. The design inside has a kind of eternal beauty. The complexity of bringing it to life, the emblems of various families certainly cannot be compared with the products of modern society, the things inside should be made of wood, metal, leather and cloth, which are handmade things anyway.

What the crew has to do is to look like the real thing, without making people feel like a CG effect or a product of that magic camera.

Murphy believes that the camera with a motion control system should be used to shoot the opening sequence. The reason for using a motion-controlled camera is mainly to make it look real.

Afterwards, Murphy asked someone to make a sketch of the Red Fort, which is one of the main buildings in King's Landing. The special effects team made a template of the Red Fort on the CG board and showed it to Murphy.

Murphy was quite satisfied, and the team of twenty-five people began to enter the state.

Secondly, it must be faithful to the original work to a certain extent.

Up to now, Murphy already has a map of Westeros and a hand-painted map of Essos. These two are very beautiful, both drawn by George Martin himself. The special effects team put these two Go to photoshop and adjust their size until they match each other.

The size of the map, the distribution of locations and the boundaries are all strictly in accordance with George Martin's original map. It is also crucial that Murphy tried so hard to respect the original because he found that since the establishment of the project, after the vigorous publicity and hype of Twentieth Century Fox, it is like The "Harry Potter" series was average that year, and the number of fans of "A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones" is increasing.

It was busy until April, when the 90-second title was actually produced.

In the title, the astrolabe is constantly moving around the center of the heat, and the coat of arms on the astrolabe shows the history of the story vividly.

Then, a complex map came into view, overlooking the entire map with the eyes of a supervisor. With the rotation of the gears, city-states of various countries emerged on the map. War and politics made these city-states grow and change.

From the Red Castle in King's Landing to the Godswood in Winterfell, and then to the stormy narrow sea, the 90-second title will lead the audience to overlook the Seven Kingdoms from the air, which also implies many aspects of "Game of Thrones". information.

Editing the opening titles to the finished episodes, adding soundtracks and editing sound effects, the first three episodes of "A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones" are basically completed, and the next few episodes have also taken shape, but Murphy Don't worry, TV dramas are different from movies after all, you can wait for the audience's feedback before finishing the final work.

As the date of "Winter is Coming" gets closer, Stanton Studios and Twentieth Century Fox have also stepped up their publicity campaign.