Sweet: How Tintin got real | via Stuff.co.nz

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Excerpt:

"The boy reporter's journey from cartoon panel to big screen is complete. Adam Dudding goes behind the scenes at Weta Workshop to find out how they did it.

The moment when Chris Guise learnt how Belgians get dog poo off their shoes was a thrilling one.

Guise, an artist with Wellington's Weta Workshop, was in Antwerp on a fact-finding tour for Steven Spielberg's new Tintin movie, filling his camera and brain with the streets and flea markets and docks and castles that populated Herge's cartoon tales of the indomitable spiky-haired boy reporter.

"I saw these little metal plates in doors, at the bottom," says Guise. "And I thought, 'What the hell is this?"'

A Belgian colleague explained: "That's for scraping dog poop off your shoes." Aha! It was precisely the kind of detail Guise had come to discover. He made a note, took a photo and kept moving.

Guise's seven-day European adventure was just one symptom of the mania that gripped hundreds of artists, animators, designers and computer operators for years as they created the motion-capture blockbuster, which is released later this month in Europe and will reach New Zealand and American cinemas around Christmas..."