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I thought I was the only one addicted to this story. Elfquest has inspired me to become and artist, as well as helped me through life, I've been reading elfquest for about 10 years and have collected everything I possibly could get my hands on, from the small pewter figures to the larger actionfigures, all the games, books, and even audio recordings.
what ever happened to the movie?
what ever happened to the movie?
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Welcome Tony!
Alas this Tribe is really quiet!! You would have better luck I think connecting with the folk directly on www.elfquest.com the forums there are very active.
Info on the movie can be found here: www.elfquest.com/news/Movie2.html
It's great to see another fan!!
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I discovered Elfquest years and years ago and now I've been able to share it with my child as well! I went to Comicon this year and ran into Cutter himself. it was great to see some Elfquest fans.
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as far as i know, what happened to the movie is what happened to a lot of movies in hollywood, they need 30 million to make the movie and have 15 million.
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The movie got shut down due to a change in management. Whoever owned the studio that was funding the movie sold it to another, bigger studio and they canned most of the projects that were currently in the workd. I think Wendy and Richard are still reeling from the impact.
It will happen, though. It HAS to! :) -
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wasn't a team of animation studios? french italien and japanese?
that's the Last thing i remember hearing, and that was at least 2-3 yrs ago. -
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well, my dad was involved with them and the movie project for a while. (they did the animation test of cutter on the elfquest.com website). I think what it came down to was that Wendy and Richard didn't have enough experience in hollywood and made a couple of easy mistakes. Looks like we're just going to have to wait a few more years until someone else comes along to pick up the project.
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I heard that the reson the production stopped was because the new group that bought the original production company involved in amking the film decided it would make a really good Live-Action film. Wendy and Richard were not comfortable with the limitations of such a project. They wanted the original concept (animation) to be completed.
I can't imagine the undertaking a Live-Action version of ElfQuest would be. (Images of Lord of the Rings come to mind.) It would be interesting to see though.
I would preffer an animated version. It would be too hard to find anyone as incredibly beautiful as the elves are. Animation can portray their other-worldly features much better. -
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Ack, unless it was totally LOTRs style I would be SO worried about making this live action. Elves are just.. smaller! And.. four fingers? It's the facial expressions and the huge eyes that make the elves for me.. I can't imagine live action..
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Live action would just look wrong. The thing about LOTR in it's transition from book to movie is that it's visual tone was never firmly set, like Elfquest's has been. Even if it was CGI, the rendering would require slight alterations from Wendi's stylizations. That'd be lame, and probably creepy. You just KNOW the elves would end up with a 'grey' alien feel.
Cue image: Cutter and Skywise kidnap Adar in order to give him an anal probing. I really doubt Richard Pini would be down with THAT one.
God, could you imagine being the casting agent who has to figure out who would play Cutter? No matter who you got to play him, there'd be some world class bitching going on.
Then again so would having the animation be of the quality of the clip on that link. -
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That last part is so true. No one seems to be able to draw the elves just like Wendy. I just had this image that she'd be hand drawing every single cell. That said, I do hope there's a mix of hand drawn and CGI. I think that would be cool. I also hope they don't make it too campy. Elfquest is awesome because it's not PG. There are gay elves, poly elves, violence (not that I advocate, but it's there), and swearing. They would loose Elfquest's dark edge if they were to get rid of that...
It's too bad they didn't pitch this to a Japanese animation studio. I think it'd make a great series, and the Japanese would eat it up!
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do realize that the animation test you're talking about was made quickly as a test of what might be possible. the artist actually did make that cutter test using wendy's cell drawings, although, i'll admit, he missed some details, like cutter's 4 fingers instead of 5 on each hand. i'll admit that i'm a little partial towards the 3d render test on the elfquest website because the artist is a friend of mine, but the comics are practically storyboards for a movie already.
as for live action elfquest, it would probably be funny, but i saw some pretty good motion capture done by an actor who plays tarzan down at disney. he was doing cutter's trial of heart on the bridge of destiny. it turned into believable motions for cutter, though they never got past doing some simple wireframe tests of that at the animation studio. -
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Wow that's awesome!! I wish we could take up a donation hat or something to get it jump started, hahah!! I'm sure it's more money than we could ever find though, heh...
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.too true. that's really probably the only thing that has been holding a film back for the last 15-20 yrs.
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Hmm, I'm not a graphics guy, but would it be possible to use a series of Wendy's drawings to create a 3D rendering program, that would project the images to a flat surface with her specific proportioning?
A human artist could then use the rendering as a basis for a hand rendering that would be relatively close to Wendy's style. This would allow for multiple people to work on the project without having unpleasant variations in the style rendering.
Like having Japanese artists increasing the already huge size of the Elves' eyes. Eeew.
Given the mass popularity of the series, it probably wouldn't be difficult to assemble a team of freshly graduated animation students and other members for a production team. Assuming that there was a core of seasoned people to hold things together, many people would probably work relatively cheaply, both for the privelige of being on the project and the notoriety factor that would come with working on the movie.
It wouldn't surprise me if there was enough people who are in love with the idea that if a team could be created that met the strict criteria of the Pinis as far as creative control and production values, investment shares could be offered to fans to gather the $ needed for production. It'd be a case of having to make sure that the project would be followed through to completion, without any massive production overruns.
Quite literally, the production could be fan driven. Nice idea. -
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I guess that just depends if the artists are Elfquest fans. It's just too bad that this got all tied up in money :( I do hope when they make the movie that Elfquest keeps it's darkness, it's adultness. There are elves and fairies and wolfie friends, but this isn't a kid's show ;)
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being in a production company at the moment, i can tell you that it gets pretty expensive pretty fast when you're doing something like a full movie. even if you cut out labor costs, it's still pretty expensive to just get the hardware and software together for a movie. That's not even getting into the rendering time and associated costs.
Well, the demo on the elfquest site of a 3d cutter IS actually a series of drawings by wendy that were turned into a 3d model (you'll notice his texture is wendy's actual drawings). from there you can do cell rendering, as is common in modern disney movies (that also cuts waaay back on rendering time).
We could gather up fresh animators who were interested in the elfquest project, but even if they were cheap, the movie would still cost somewhere in the 20-30 million dollar range because of the sheer number of man hours required to make an animated movie. Perhaps now it might be had for a little less money now that technology has advanced and become more acessible.
Now, making the movie wouldn't be so hard. The elfquest graphic novels are already practically storyboards and i've read through a possible script that went through books 1-4 (up to the end of the war for the palace). Seeing as how hollywood is so fond of comic book adaptations from obscure comic books nowadays, it might even be something we could get away with pitching to a studio.
The real problem I'm getting at is that computer resources are needed moreso than just raw labor (as far as costs go), so unless we want to hire legions of fans to do an old fashioned hand drawn animation for free, we're going to need some funding.
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