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"  MORE NEW ANALYSIS FROM COMIC-CON 2008 * FIRST LOOK: Tron 2, Lost &amp;amp;amp; Heroes Are Back!   SAN DIEGO -- The Dark Knight may still be king of the box office after another record-breaking weekend of superheroic proportions. But Hollywood still doesn&amp;#039;t trust comic books, Zack Snyder said this weekend at Comic-Con, where PopularMechanics.com caught up with the director of last year&amp;#039;s F/X-heavy 300 inside the Owlship, a full-scale submersible vehicle built for his upcoming adaptation of the uber-comic Watchmen.  &amp;quot;With Hollywood, their approach [to comic-based stories] is, this thing is broken, so how do you make it into a movie? The first thing you do is you take out all the pesky ideas,&amp;quot; explains Snyder, who actually took the opposite approach on Watchmen.  Instead of focusing on plot, the director zeroed in on the subtext of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons&amp;#039; seminal 1986 comic, which explores the notion of superheroes as real people cursed with the same insecurities and weaknesses as normal citizens. &amp;quot;If you look at the story of Watchmen, it&amp;#039;s not that complicated, which is also the power of it. [Moore] just hung this extremely complicated character piece on that simple story,&amp;quot; he says. In its own way, The Dark Knight reflects the same evolution, emphasizing psychology as much as plot. &amp;quot;I think that&amp;#039;s the thing that pop culture has to deal with now: Superhero movies, comic-book movies, whatever you want to call them, they don&amp;#039;t exist just as summer popcorn mindless entertainment,&amp;quot; Snyder continues. &amp;quot;Not only are they saying [that] these are serious topics, but serious filmmakers and serious actors are making these cool movies.&amp;quot; In the 30 years since Richard Donner&amp;#039;s Superman, visual-effects technology has advanced to the point that filmmakers can now twist reality like a comic book--but do it convincingly. With 300, Snyder used green-screen technology to replicate the impressionistic look of Frank Miller&amp;#039;s graphic novel. For Watchmen, he&amp;#039;s limiting that trick to select sequences, such as those set on Mars, in an effort to recreate Moore and illustrator Gibbons&amp;#039;s world using practical environments wherever possible.     RELATED STORIES * FIRST LOOK: Tron 2, Lost &amp;amp;amp; Heroes Are Back!  * COMIC-CON: First Look at Knight Rider&amp;#039;s Upgraded KITT Car  * EARLIER: Behind the Scenes of 300&amp;#039;s Special Effects  * DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD: Dark Knight Tech, New Movie F/X and More!   Director Zack Snyder will shoot scenes on Mars in front of a green screen for his adaptation of Watchmen, but he wants to emphasize comics&amp;#039; bending of reality with real backgrounds, including this custom-built Owlship. Snyder&amp;#039;s approach to Watchmen stands in stark contrast with the strategy that Miller himself is emphasizing on The Spirit, an extremely stylized adaptation of Will Eisner&amp;#039;s classic series of a masked vigilante. The project allows Miller to apply the lessons he learned collaborating with Robert Rodriguez on Sin City, once again pushing the palette nearly to black-and-white, then injecting bursts of color for effect. Miller&amp;#039;s approach results in artificial, even impossible-looking images, which may prove too avant-garde for audiences expecting to see their comic-book action grounded in some form of physical reality. To help excite Comic-Con attendees, Miller showed an underwater scene here this weekend in which he simulated Eva Mendes swimming by using an ultra-high-speed Phantom HD camera, then slowing down the footage to create the desired effect. As producer Deborah Del Prete put it, &amp;quot;When you see somebody underwater in comics, they look great, their makeup&amp;#039;s perfect--we wanted these characters to look like the drawing characters.&amp;quot;  Jaime King, who plays an angel of death named Lorelei in the new film, found working on green screen to be quite liberating on both Sin City and The Spirit: &amp;quot;Essentially you&amp;#039;re not having to stop all the time to reset the teapot in the background,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just like going back to when you were a child and making up everything inside of you.&amp;quot; Still, Miller&amp;#039;s approach privileges the visuals, just as Snyder&amp;#039;s green-screen strategy did on 300. But if you want audiences to look past the digitally-enhanced abs or equivalent eye candy, Snyder believes you have to leave room for character--the blueprints for which can also be found in the source material. &amp;quot;The cool thing about what&amp;#039;s happened with my involvement in Watchmen is 300 gave me a lot of excuses to say, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s in the graphic novel,&amp;#039; and the studio will go, &amp;#039;Oh, OK, I guess that&amp;#039;s cool.&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s just my argument: If it&amp;#039;s in the graphic novel, it should be in the movie. It worked for 300.&amp;quot;   RELATED STORIES \u2022 FIRST LOOK: Tron 2, Lost &amp;amp;amp; Heroes Are Back!  \u2022 COMIC-CON: First Look at Knight Rider&amp;#039;s Upgraded KITT Car  \u2022 EARLIER: Behind the Scenes of 300&amp;#039;s Special Effects  \u2022 DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD: Dark Knight Tech, New Movie F/X and More!   Models roamed The Spirit&amp;#039;s booth over the weekend, but Frank Miller intends to go heavy on green-screen technology in upgrading the style of Sin City. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12469/4275407/>