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Post by merprincess on Aug 13, 2017 14:24:46 GMT -5
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Post by yougottaloveariel on Aug 13, 2017 20:47:12 GMT -5
Well (not to sound EGOTISTACAL)My love / HATE rant is well
APT!!!!!!!!!!!
In addition to technical limitations convincing effects the right lead actress well is GONNA be tough (Though someone who posts here often feels she COULD do it)
Pam Dawber of Mork and Mindy fame played the mermaid in Shelly Duval's version as well as Shirley Temple in HER show Both were more faithful to the Anderson Tale (Do a Computer search)
Disney JUST DOES NOT seem to give the film the respect and PRAISE IT DESERVES (Blame J Katzenburg)
EVEN if the resturant existed back in 1989 they would have done nothing
This is only proven by a old letter I found going today while through my papers. A suggestion for a Little Mermaid Product idea I had WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in 1990 for a book
NEVER saw the light of day despite one phone call of rejection was really proud of this idea too had ALOT of dreams ideas back then
Got REALLY depressing to the point that;s what friend's etc called me for feeling so darn down in the dumps
One of them committed suicide few years back for his life hit ROCK bottom
I'm still here though
On a happier note Pat Carrol was in latest ep of Rapunzel as Crazy Old Woman
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Post by buckmana on Aug 14, 2017 18:24:38 GMT -5
Maybe it would be technically easier to remake it as CGI, even though it would take longer to make and be initially costly. Mostly because the effects sequences would be easier then trying to film it live action.
For live action, you need a strong swimmer, then they have to be trained in how to swim mermaid style. And then you'd need someone who could sing as well. In addition to that, you need a lot of scuba divers as an offscreen support team, both for emergency rescue and because they've got the extra airtanks the merpeople are using to breathe in-between takes,
I assume they'd do a shallow water filming, because filming at depth has it's own set of problems. The Abyss used an abandoned concrete silo that was large enough to house a set the size of an oil rig, which they then filled with water. After every day of filming, anyone who was down there had to go through hours of decompression just to leave the set. It also meant that if there was a medical emergency, they literally couldn't bring the person to the hospital, because decompression can't be rushed, no matter what extenuating circumstances there are!
It may not just be TLM that is affected though. There's an comic series called Fathom that at one point, they were going to make a live action film version. Naturally with a name like that, you know it involves merpeople and underwater sequences! They talked about it for a few months, then the project was just dropped and never started.
Mako Mermaids also ended oddly, the third season was only 16 episodes instead of the regular 26. They kept talking about this evil mermaid Aurora and I though the remaining 10 episodes would be about tracking her down and defeating her. Given the level of threat she represented, nobody would want her swimming loose in the oceans! It just felt to me like they didn't finish the story!
Specifically for TLM, I think Disney just don't like it. If they'd truly supported it, we'd sea a lot more promotion then we actually do. Maybe they're afraid if they do even one big thing to revive the franchise, they'll never be able to push it aside again. So they take the safer path of keeping TLM out of the spotlight as much as they can.
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Post by merprincess on Nov 20, 2017 3:40:24 GMT -5
yougottaloveariel I wonder if that someone is me?... π You know, in all honesty, I'm well aware I probably don't look the part as well as the girls who get hired at Disney. I've already accepted that. Plus I'm an unknown, which may be a plus but again probably isn't when you factor in stars like Dove Cameron who while she isn't my first pick, would be a shoe-in for the role given the company's logic and her abilities. It's a difficult role to play, no wonder Disney would have trouble casting her! You have to straddle the line between not being way too youthful and generically saccharine to the point where it's more like a parody than a true interpretation, but not being too relaxed or motherly, unintentionally aging up the character or getting rid of the wonderful energy she has. You can't be too modern, but you can't be too old-fashioned. Ariel's got an air of relatable timelessness - she seems like any real teenager, but she doesn't really use a lot of slang or references from any one particular era (besides maybe some fish-related verbiage). She's graceful and charming as princesses tend to be, but also a bit of a mischievous rascal and of course always an adventurer and a determined dreamer with a wide array of emotions throughout besides just the one-dimensional "I'm a mermaid princess and I'm pretty and sing and I want the prince", as I've seen her played far too often. Besides looking and acting the part, you have to sing the crap out of it too, and this is a role you really can't get away with autotuning, since her pure vocals are such a key plot point. On top of that, as it is a leading character, Disney is looking for star power. Household names will no doubt entirely make up the cast list. Even if they don't fully meet the requirements, if it's someone you've heard of, Disney might benefit from having their name attached to it because that is how this works nowadays. buckmana Also a good point, depending on what direction Disney would go, no matter what the mermaids will have to have some form of core strength. Either for directly swimming, but also for work with harnesses and other special fx equipment and stunts (though I'm guessing Ariel wouldn't be doing all her own stunts and some stunt mermaid performers would probably be hired). Any project that involves going under the sea for the majority of its runtime is difficult to translate into live-action. The musical didn't fare fantastically on Broadway and a lot of it came to the very ideation of it being an underwater story and how that was to be translated onstage. For a film like TLM, I'd imagine a lot of it would have to be done with CGI. It's impossible for most actors to hold their breath under water to film multiple takes of probably in total to be an hour's worth of underwater footage, not counting the multiple takes of each scene in that one hour. I don't think any scene involving talking or singing would be recorded under water...which is most scenes... and probably if they were to go the underwater route, they'd have to prerecord every line of dialogue besides just prerecording the music, hence why CGI would be a better option, at least for scenes with lots of dialogue and mouths moving up and down singing to music (all music scenes are lip synched, with the exception of projects like Les Miserables where the singing was filmed live. There's absolutely no way at all for live singing to work in this hypothetical arrangement). It's not like Disney will easily find their perfect people who are 1) talented in every aspect, 2) look the parts, 3) can hold their breath for that long, and 4) are well-known - and #3 is the most optional of all of these since there's a chance barely any scenes would actually be filmed underwater. I agree with you that Disney really overlooks this franchise. Which is such a shame because it is so beloved, it set off the Disney Renaissance, it was the first of a line of wonderfully scored Menken/Ashman Disney musical film collaborations, and quite honestly it's a franchise that could make an amazing comeback since mermaids are such a big trend lately and so are Disney live action films. Musical theatre is really in a revival as well, with the live shows NBC and FOX have done (sidenote: Disney is buying FOX- thoughts? legit my first though was "Does this mean Anastasia is a Disney Princess now?" π with the answer to that being a resounding No, lol). Also Broadway shows are much more mainstream than they were back in the late 80's through the 90's and 2000's. The Tony Awards are watched by so many more people every year and we have shows like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen making it big not just on the Great White Way but in popular public consciousness as well. Not to mention Disney's own musical adaptations are getting more and more ambitious. The musical version of Frozen was released just a few years after the film, with previews in Denver this summer opening to great reviews and a Broadway premiere set for February 2018. And Disney is hitting home run after home run not only with its animated films like Frozen and Wreck-it Ralph and Moana and now Coco, but also with its live action films. Say what you will about Beauty and the Beast (2017), but it sure did make the company HEAPS more money. Meanwhile, Aladdin and The Lion King were just announced. For Aladdin, the main character is a relatively unknown actor (a breath of fresh air! He looks the part and I'm really hoping he'll be able to play him with charisma and have a nice singing voice too!), and Jasmine is an actress who previously was in a Disney Channel project Lemonade Mouth, and then there's Will Smith as the Genie and includes a cast of some other characters that deviate from the original source material a bit. The Lion King has a CAVALCADE of star names, including the one and only BeyoncΓ© as Nala. The only relatively unknown people I see are the child stars playing young Nala and young Simba, but I think even they have either Broadway credits or some other acting credits, some even including Disney Channel credits. And that film from what I'm hearing will be mainly CGI (...so why is it called live action again? I have no problem with CGI, just make sure your audience knows what they're signing up for!). Again, just a thing I've noticed, but Disney really likes to pull people nearly exclusively from other Disney affiliated entities: Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel, ABC, Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Disneynature, Lucasfilm, Muppets, Disney Parks, Disney Live, Hollywood Records, Radio Disney, Walt Disney Records, Disney Theatrical, New Amsterdam Theatrical Productions, Touchstone Pictures, Lifetime, VICE, A&E, Hulu, Freeform and now FOX. Makes you think a little. Now more than ever is the perfect time to really do something big with Disney's The Little Mermaid. They tried, remember ABC's TLM Live scheduled for this October? Indefinitely postponed. Sure the live action film has been tentatively announced, but I predict it'll be in development he** for a while before it can truly deliver a product all audiences will be happy with, from us die-hards to the everyday folks out there who still can appreciate a well-done musical fairytale. Lin-Manuel Miranda is attached as a co-writer and is working on the music, with Marc Platt producing, and Alan Menken returning for the music as well. That's all we know for sure. No date thrown out there, no additional info about their vision or a possible cast or anything. They'd really have to shake up their formula a bit to make a splash for TLM live action to truly be a hit. Only time will tell. lol thanks for reading my rant, boy I sure do have a lot to say about this!
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Post by buckmana on Nov 22, 2017 17:32:37 GMT -5
I don't know if Mako Mermaids/H20JAW ever had stunt mermaids, but I know the lead actresses/actors did a lot of their own swimming scenes. Probably because if you could see the face of the performer, it had to be them. Plus, those tails are individually tailored to the performer, so that would be additional cost, making extra tails for the stunt artists. The long distance shots were done in CGI, for when they were swimming at speed. I remember when they first tried that with Ocean Girl, all they could show you was a blip on the sonar screen, because CGI for television wasn't available at the time. This might be a way they could do the singing scenes: Magic Water BubblesDove Cameron is about the right age for Ariel. From what I've seen of her performances so far, she's got a fair bit of vocal talent, given her main live action role required her to have two seperate voices, one for each character she was playing. I assume her "Maddie voice" was her speaking without affectation. She also did a Southern Belle accent once. She is a singer, so she meets that requirement. I don't know much about her athletic prowess, but she did a fair bit of dancing, so she most likely has a degree of physical fitness.
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Post by merprincess on Nov 22, 2017 17:58:51 GMT -5
I don't know if Mako Mermaids/H20JAW ever had stunt mermaids, but I know the lead actresses/actors did a lot of their own swimming scenes. Probably because if you could see the face of the performer, it had to be them. Plus, those tails are individually tailored to the performer, so that would be additional cost, making extra tails for the stunt artists. The long distance shots were done in CGI, for when they were swimming at speed. I remember when they first tried that with Ocean Girl, all they could show you was a blip on the sonar screen, because CGI for television wasn't available at the time. This might be a way they could do the singing scenes: Magic Water BubblesDove Cameron is about the right age for Ariel. From what I've seen of her performances so far, she's got a fair bit of vocal talent, given her main live action role required her to have two seperate voices, one for each character she was playing. I assume her "Maddie voice" was her speaking without affectation. She also did a Southern Belle accent once. She is a singer, so she meets that requirement. I don't know much about her athletic prowess, but she did a fair bit of dancing, so she most likely has a degree of physical fitness. Yes, custom mermaid tails are very pricey! I'm sure if studios buy them in bulk though, there may be some sort of discount. I like the magic water bubble idea from that Sabrina episode, but I think something like that would only be possible if you could work it into the pre-existing plot, which might change the way the story is told significantly. Another idea I thought of that might not be ideal but is a possibility would be having the underwater dialogue be like a voice-over, like "Something There" scene in the original Beauty and the Beast (the scene is happening, and Belle and the Beast are singing, but it's like it's their inner thoughts and their mouths aren't moving). However having a voice-over like that might actually be far more effective story-wise in scenes where Ariel has lost her voice, having her internal dialogue express things (like what the Broadway musical tried to do having Ariel sing in Act 2 but nobody being able to hear her). I just looked up Dove Cameron's age and I'm surprised to find out we're the same age, and in fact she's a little over a month older than I am! I think she's probably Disney's top choice given their pool of people, and she's definitely a strong contender. I'd also make a case for Auli'i Cravalho who was the voice of Moana, I would love to at least hear her sing Part of Your World sometime! π
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Post by buckmana on Nov 23, 2017 15:11:18 GMT -5
I was thinking the effect may need some redesigning for TLM specific purposes. But the basic principle they used can be adapted. A background plate of fish and water, the middle plate with the acting cast, and the water overlay plate that makes it look like they are fully immersed.
However, the complication will be that they need to make the acting cast's hair float underwater, which can't be done on a dry stage. I found a video of the greenscreen shoot for that scene and stagehands were constantly tipping buckets of water over Melissa and Tara to keep them wet. Probably for visual contuinity, if they dried out over the time it took to shoot the scene, it would break the immersion.
But there might be another way to make this happen. What if they filmed the performer doing the "dancing" underwater, but not singing? Then they did another shoot on a dry stage and record the face of the performer as they sing their song. Take that video, extract the face only and overlay it on the video of the "dancing" and it might look like they were really singing underwater.
I assume they'd to do some post production effects to make the face seem like it was immersed in water, but if they're good at their job, they should be able to work that out.
It would be intriguing to see Auli'i sing Part of Your World. But they might not need to actually cast her as Ariel to make that happen. What if they did a special commemoration performance and got all their singing acting cast to do renditions of the numbers from TLM? I'd love to see Dove and Auli'i on stage together. Do you think we could ask them to do a duet? I know Dove has experience with singing duets, but I don't know if Auli'i does.
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