Pinewood Shepperton studios boosted by James Bond production

Start of productions including Skyfall have helped studios perform strongly over the past four months

• Mark Sweney
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 November 2011 05.28 EST

 

Skyfall will be Daniel Craig’s third outing as 007. Photograph: c.Sony Pics/Everett / Rex Featur

The start of productions including Skyfall, the 23rd outing in the James Bond franchise, have helped Pinewood Shepperton studios to "perform strongly" over the past four months.

Pinewood Shepperton said "trading and overall revenues" continued to perform strongly between 1 July and 14 November.

The company said this is a continuation of the 37% year-on-year increase in revenue reported in the six months to the end of June.

Pinewood Shepperton said revenues for the film division will be "in line" year on year for the period, as productions including Daniel Craig's third outing as 007, Working Title's Anna Karenina and Universal's Snow White and the Huntsman get underway.

Pinewood said revenues from its TV studio division is "significantly ahead" of the same period in 2010 as demand for its large-scale facilities remains "attractive to producers".

The company's studios hosted primetime shows including Sky's Don't Stop Me Now, The Rob Brydon Show and Lee Mack's All Star Cast during the reporting period.

The Guardian

The Hobbit: an unexpected journey

By Liz Shannon MillerNov. 6, 2011, 12:01am

GigaOM

In December 2012, Lord of the Rings fans will finally see the release of the long-awaited The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, part one of director Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novel. Given how beloved Jackson’s adaptation of the Rings trilogy was, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say this is one of the most anticipated movies of the next few years. But if you want some proof, all you have to do is visit Peter Jackson on Facebook.

There, for the last six months, Jackson (with presumably some help from the Hobbit production team) has been sporadically posting 10-minute video diaries from the set of the production — essentially, the sort of stuff that you find on the special edition DVDs, except they first started appearing 20 months before the first movie even comes out.

The first diary is relatively unfocused — a hodgepodge of Jackson attending production meetings and taking viewers on a tour of the sets in the lead-up to the first day of production — though it does include off-the-cuff riffing with Sir Ian McKellan, which is never a bad thing.


The three subsequent diaries are somewhat more focused: The second, posted July 8, covers what the crew will be doing during a break in production as well as Jackson and his team doing location scouting, while the third, posted July 20, features Jackson freaking out over shooting at the historic Pinewood Studios and the cast and crew’s favorite moments from the first few months of shooting.


The fourth, which came out just last week, is all about the 3-D camera technology behind the film. If you really like learning about camera rigs and frame rates, you’re in luck! You also learn that Jackson has named the 16 cameras being used to shoot the movie after family members, dogs and Beatles, though, which is quite charming.


As default host of the diaries, Peter Jackson is actually quite adorable. As many others have observed, he’s probably the closest you’ll ever come to seeing a real hobbit in the wild, and his fanboy joy at having the chance to make these films is palpable.

While using Facebook as a distribution platform means that embedding is impossible, multiple reposts of the videos have appeared on YouTube, racking up hundreds of thousands of views thanks to embedding by blogs like Io9.

But the videos are still obviously popular on Facebook; after less than a day online, Video no. 4 had accumulated over 11,000 “likes,” and past videos sport similar numbers. In short, it’s proving to be a brilliant way to keep buzz alive for a film that won’t be in theaters for another 13 months. Not every project would lend itself to this kind of treatment — I doubt anyone would care this much about the production of, say, Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist — but when the making of the film is almost as epic as the film itself, it’s quite deserved.