SHREKING

It's been relatively quiet on the free screening front out here lately, but tonight ASIFA HOLLYWOOD treated us to SHREK FOREVER AFTER before it even hits the theatres on May 21st! And as always, they had a Q&A afterwards, this time with the film's director Mike Mitchell and head of story/voice of Rumplestiltskin, Walt Dohrn! And here they-


GAH! The Samsung Instinct has the WORSTEST worst camera in the universe!

Anyway...

Wanna hear what they said?

Yeah ya do!

*warning* Tiny tiny tiny possible spoilers below! *warning*

• So how did Walt Dohrn end up grabbing the role of Rumplestiltskin, who has the most lines (aside from Shrek) instead of a big name actor? Well, first you've got to realize that the story artists are the ones who do the voices in the first place. While they're fleshing out the story they're performing their storyboards in front of the crew and recording their voice for animatics and such. And very often, their voices really BECOME the character. Sure, they still audition tons of big names, but in some cases it ends up that the story artist is the one that works best. Don't believe me? Here are some examples?

Lou Romano = Linguini in Ratatouille
Brad Bird = Edna Mode in The Incredibles
Tom McGrath = Skipper in Madagascar

And those are just a couple off the top of my head...

• In the first movie Shrek's face had around 400 points of articulation. In Shrek 4 it had 1085. Mr. Mitchell claimed that since it was much more of an emotional movie, they needed to do more with his face. It worked for me... I teared up at the end. But then again, I'm easy like that.

• The crew actually met with marriage counselors to research how to properly deal with Shrek and Fiona's problems in the movie.

• The Pied Piper has a role in the movie and they really wanted him to play a Beastie Boys song... and then they found our that William Steig, the creator of the original Shrek picture book, has a son, Jeremy, that played flute on a Beastie Boys song. Guess who got hired?


• Puss In Boots was one of the funniest characters in the movie... and there's a Puss-In-Boots movie in the works that takes place before he even met Shrek!

And that's about all I can remember being as I forgot my notebook. I'm sure more will come to me later. But anyway, let's do some math...

free parking
+
free popcorn and soda
+
free movie before it's in theatres
+
free Q&A with the filmmakers
____________________________

awesome x million

Thanks ASIFA-HOLLYWOOD!