Exclusive: Weta V/FX Supervisor Joe Letteri Talks 'Tintin'

Joe Letteri has served as visual effects supervisor at both Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital. In doing so, he's had a hand in creating the most innovative and creative visual effects in film history. His career spans from The Abyss to the Oscar-nominated Avatar. Screen Junkies caught up with him at the VES Awards to discuss Steven Spielberg's first entry in the Tintin trilogy he's tackling with Peter Jackson.

First up, he discusses what we can expect Tintin to look like:

"We’re experimenting with a number of different looks. When you do 3D you have a range of options to go with, slightly sort of cartoony. You go more Pixar style where there’s realism but still exaggeration. The problem with going completely photoreal with human characters is you want to honor the comicness of it. So we’re still feeling our way around it."

MORE FROM JOE AFTER THE JUMP.

He then went on to describe introducing Spielberg to the Avatar technology used on the film:

"Tintin was a similar process because Peter [Jackson] sort of suggested to Steven the difficulty of doing a film that’s based on a comic character, trying to do live-action is always difficult to cast and to get the feel of the characters properly. So he suggested the idea of trying to do it as essentially a performance capture film. So Jim [Cameron] showed Steven and Peter what we were doing with 'Avatar' and they shot a couple days on the stage and loved the process. We shot 'Tintin' the same way. People are definitely picking up on the process. Jim has shown it to a lot of people. A lot of people came through the 'Avatar' set. He was pretty open and happy to demonstrate the whole technique. Because he’s designed it like a live-action set, it’s actually easier to pick up than most people think. From the outside it might look daunting but once you get in there on that stage and start working with it, it’s very much like shooting a live action. That was the whole point. You have all this technology in a way to remove the technology."

He makes it sound so easy. Something must be holding up the works though since we shouldn't expect to see The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in theaters before late 2011. Spielberg, Jackson, and Cameron probably spend most of their time gathering for regular let's-rub-our-beards-together sessions. What, you think this kind of technology comes out of thin air?