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by Giovanna Marchello
CALL HIM WIZARD!
© PARAMOUNT PICTURES
JOE LETTERI’S DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY CREATES THE MATTER OF DREAMS WINNING AWARDS AND FANS THE WORLD ROUND
Perception is the t keyword in Joe Letteri’s work. The creator of visual he award-winning aw blockbuster films like “The Lord effects for b of the Rings” trilogy, “King Kong” “Avatar” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is a charming gentleman who, in the course of a 30-year long career, dedicated his intuition, inventiveness and craft to the creation of looking-glass worlds for millions of ecstatic spectators worldwide. From the heart of New Zealand, a remote nation whose luxuriant nature is the perfect natural setting for the films he realizes, Joe Letteri explains to us how his appreciation of art grew from his fascination for the way in which artists, from the renaissance to realism, observed and perceived reality and reproduced it. He understood that perception is the basis, the clue to how people look at something and acknowledge it as real. Most of the art Joe Letteri creates is fantastic and real at the same time, as he puts it, and
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his goal is to “capture reality and reproduce it so that the images they create speak to you in a real way.” Like many boys, in his youth he enjoyed drawing dinosaurs. Rather uniquely, later in life he created the dinosaurs for Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”. His approach to the virtual reconstruction of a dinosaur or of a helicopter crash is at one time artistic and scientific. The staging, objects and creatures are all digitally created but the starting point is the same of any artist or craftsman, which is the observation of reality. In this sense he is an artisan. “Twenty years ago it was more intuitive, now everything is scientific”, explains Joe Letteri. A great deal of research is carried out beforehand for each creature and object and landscape that has to be reproduced. The observation and measurement of the material, physical properties, the mechanics of movement and structure, texture and how the light reflects and refracts on the surface.
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