Production – The Fincher Analyst

PIX System: Introduction to PIX

February 8, 2019
PIX System (YouTube)

At PIX System, we help create entertainment and media by bringing creativity, collaborators and assets together. For 16 years, we’ve been creating and innovating ways to give the top creative talent, studios, mini-majors, networks, indie productions, and online content providers the time and resources they need to create. Better. Faster. More reliably.

Our industry leading platform is an open sandbox and secure home base, viewer, community workspace, media mine, think tank and muse – a place on the digital frontier where creative and strategic content and communication are safe and tidy and easily found, shared and worked on alone or together.

PIX Wins Technical Oscar: Our Conversation

Nick Dager
February 11, 2019
Digital Cinema Report

On Saturday night at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored PIX with a Technical Achievement Award. The award recognized Eric Dachs, founder and CEO; Erik Bielefeldt, director of research and development; Craig Wood, technical director; and Paul McReynolds for the design and development of the industry leading security mechanism for distributing media. Prior to the awards ceremony, Digital Cinema Report spoke exclusively with Bielefeldt and Wood to talk about the company’s continued innovation in the evolving world of content collaboration from film to digital to next-generation data rich requirements.

Read the full interview

“PIX, the only addiction I have left.”
— David Fincher

PIX System

PIX System honored at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards

February 9, 2019
Oscars.org

Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate): to Eric Dachs, Erik Bielefeldt, Craig Wood and Paul McReynolds for the design and development of the PIX System’s novel security mechanism for distributing media.

PIX System’s robust approach to secure media access has enabled wide adoption of their remotely collaborative dailies-review system by the motion picture industry.

Scientific & Technical Awards 2018 | 2019

February 10, 2019
Oscars (YouTube)

PIX founder and CEO Eric Dachs thanked Ren Klyce, Ceán Chaffin and David Fincher (present at the ceremony): “your friendship, patience, and talents have had an enduring and measurable impact on our work, and more importantly, in filmmaking.”

Eric Dachs, Erik Bielefeldt, Craig Wood, and Paul McReynolds
(Amy Sussman/Getty Images)

SciTech Awards

Carolyn Giardina
February 9, 2019
The Hollywood Reporter

How David Fincher and ‘Panic Room’ Helped Launch a SciTech Award Recipient

Pix was initially developed to help ‘Panic Room‘s’ sound team.

Carolyn Giardina
February 9, 2019
The Hollywood Reporter

The familiar Pix app is one of the early tools with security features developed to improved communication and collaboration during production, which was initially conceived as filmmaking became more distributed geographically. After being used on more than 5,000 film and TV projects including Black Panther, Bohemian Rhapsody and Mindhunter, its developers will be among those honored Saturday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual Scientific and Technical Awards.

Pix founder/CEO Eric Dachs — who with director of R&D Erik Bielefeldt, technical director Craig Wood and Paul McReynolds will receive Technical Achievement Awards — started his career in sound and it was while working as an assistant to seven-time Oscar nominated sound designer Ren Klyce on David Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room that the idea for Pix was born. “I got a look at how digital technology was changing motion picture postproduction, but I also saw the inefficiency from faxing notes when the work was distributed geographically,” Dachs tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I started writing a really simple prototype application for capturing David’s spotting notes and getting them distributed to the crew via a simple web application. So that [composer Howard Shore] could get the music notes in real time, and the different departments within sound were no longer having to wait for faxes.”

One afternoon during the final mix, Klyce showed Fincher the app and the technically-savvy director was impressed. In fact, he continues to use it today.

Read the full profile

“PIX, the only addiction I have left.”
— David Fincher

PIX System

Paramount Pulls The Plug On David Fincher’s ‘World War Z’ Sequel

Rodrigo Perez
February 6, 2019
The Playlist

“Movement is life,” Brad Pitt‘s Gerry Lane famously said, advising survivors in Paramount‘s 2013 zombie/outbreak movie “World War Z.” Momentum is everything in Hollywood, and perhaps a lack of it hurt “World War Z”‘s chances for a sequel, because it’s now curtains for the followup film. Sources close to the project for years tell us that Paramount Pictures pulled the plug on director David Fincher‘s film last night.

The film’s budget was definitely an issue but only to a degree. Fincher and his team were proposing something less than the budget of the original ($190 million according to Box Office Mojo, before the costly reshoots). However, Paramount’s known about this figure since at least last year and had hemmed and hawed about the project for months. One might think it not entirely coincidental that Paramount, which makes far fewer films than the average studio, just designated a lot of money for two significant blockbusters: “Mission Impossible 7” & ‘8‘ which will arrive in the summer of 2021 and 2022, according to their official release dates.

Paramount simply dragged their heels, at one point eyeing a 2018 or 2019 summer release, but never feeling bold enough to put it back on the schedule. Pitt, who has worked with Fincher several times, began to court Fincher for the job back in August of 2016 and a few months later the director agreed and started to look for writers to develop a new script. Dennis Kelly, the creator and writer of the original U.K. “Utopia” series—which Fincher almost adapted himself for HBO— was hired to rewrite the script from Steven Knight.

The officially untitled “World War Z 2” was roughly aiming for a summer shoot—Fincher is currently still busy editing “Mindhunter” season two for Netflix—but the writing might have been on the wall given how tentative Paramount was with the project.

Read the full article

Paramount Scraps David Fincher’s ‘World War Z 2’ over Budget Concerns

Adam Chitwood
February 6, 2019
Collider

“Love, Death & Robots”: Tim Miller and David Fincher’s Animated Anthology Series for Netflix

Sentient dairy products, werewolf soldiers, robots gone wild, garbage monsters, cyborg bounty hunters, alien spiders and blood-thirsty demons from hell converge in an 185-minute genre orgy of NSFM (not suitable for mainstream) shorts.

January 7, 2019
Netflix

Netflix announces Love, Death & Robots, an animated anthology series presented by Tim Miller (Deadpool, upcoming untitled Terminator sequel) and David Fincher (MINDHUNTER, Gone Girl, House of Cards).

Love, Death & Robots is a collection of animated short stories that span the science fiction, fantasy, horror and comedy genres. With a bold approach to each story’s narrative, episodes are intended to be easy to watch and hard to forget.

The series draws inspiration from the eclectic and provocative genre material that influenced both Miller’s and Fincher’s formative interests in storytelling. Miller says, “Love, Death & Robots is my dream project, it combines my love of animation and amazing stories. Midnight movies, comics, books and magazines of fantastic fiction have inspired me for decades, but they were relegated to the fringe culture of geeks and nerds of which I was a part. I’m so fucking excited that the creative landscape has finally changed enough for adult-themed animation to become part of a larger cultural conversation.”

The production of Love, Death & Robots united a global animation community, calling on the talents and unique perspectives of innovative animation studios, directors and artists from around the world. Eighteen stories in all, each film is painstakingly crafted, charged with a mix of energy, action and unapologetic dark humor.

Executive produced by David Fincher, Tim Miller, Jennifer Miller and Josh Donen, the series brings together world-class animation creators and captivating stories for the first anthology of short animated stories guaranteed to deliver a unique and visceral viewing experience.

Each episode in the series:

Is a succinct 5 to 15 minutes in length.
Has a unique animation style, from traditional 2D to photo-real 3D CGI.
Is created by a different team of filmmakers from around the world.
Is aimed at an adult audience.

About Blur Studio

Blur Studio is an award-winning animation production company that creates content for games, films, and television. Founded and led by “Deadpool” director Tim Miller, Blur has roots in making high-end trailers and cinematics for the game industry, visual effects for blockbuster features, and recently led the production of the Netflix animated anthology series “Love, Death & Robots.”

About Netflix

Netflix is the world’s leading internet entertainment service with 130 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.

Netflix: “Love, Death & Robots”

Love, Death & Robots, will have its world premiere at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival (March 8–17, 2019. Austin, TX)

Click for a full screen view:

The Curious Development History of ‘Benjamin Button’

Adam Chitwood
January 3, 2019
Collider

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, at first glance, a unique entry in director David Fincher’s filmography. It’s an epic romance of sorts; a sweeping love story told through the ages, one which would appear to be at odds with what many view as a cold and cynical worldview that permeates Fincher’s other films like Se7en, Fight Club, or Zodiac. But upon further inspection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button fits right in with the rest of Fincher’s darker films, as it’s really the story of a man whose entire life is surrounded by the reminder of death.

Benjamin Button hit theaters on December 25, 2008—almost exactly a decade ago—and was the biggest hit of Fincher’s career until Gone Girl, grossing over $330 million worldwide. It received mostly positive reviews and was nominated for 13 Oscars, winning three for Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects. It almost certainly paved the way for Fincher to next make The Social Network, another successful Oscar-winning film, but actually creating The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was arduous, and the road to getting the film off the ground in the first place was a decades-long journey.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button itself is based on a short story in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book published in 1922, and the central premise caught Hollywood’s attention in the late 1980s: the story of a man born old who ages backwards and dies young.

The first director attached to the project was Frank Oz, with Martin Short attached to star. But after working on the script for a few months for Universal Pictures, Oz left the project. He couldn’t quite crack how to turn this short story into a compelling drama, as the central premise lacked significant conflict.

So Universal’s president of production at the time, Casey Silver, next turned to screenwriter Robin Swicord, asking her to attempt an adaptation. She turned in a first draft in January 1990 and her contribution was so substantial that on the finished iteration of the film directed by Fincher, Swicord received a “Story by” co-credit.

Read the full article

Mindhunter Season 2 has Wrapped

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I cannot think of a professional experience in my life more significant than #Mindhunter Season 2. It’s been wonderful to collaborate with 3 incredible directors, a beautiful cast, and the strongest crew of my career. In particular, @alex_w_scott @daveedsall @_willdearborn_ @brianosmond @thedannygonzalez and @camgrip, you guys are #titans. Thank you @reddigitalcinema @instajarred @keslowcamera @robertkeslow @cinelease @arri @djiglobal @rtmotion @leitzcine for your support.

A post shared by Erik Messerschmidt (@emesserschmidt) on Dec 7, 2018 at 8:52pm PST