‘Speed Racer’ Comes Into Focus

Posted by Ty Nelson (roner34@sbcglobal.net) on August 27, 2007

Remember how cool it was to watch Speed Racer? How the Mach 5 was the coolest damn car in the whole world because of all the cool technology that was on it? Well The Wachowski Brothers remember that also. So how fitting that the tech savvy siblings are going to use a revolutionary new film system to tell Speed’s story?

Our friends at FirstShowing.net are reporting the live action adaptation will be filmed with Full Focus cameras. This new system will record the films in layers. Allowing both the foreground and background to be in focus at the same time. Just like the Speed Racer cartoon.

What is even more unusual about this story is the source: Actress Susan Sarandon.

They’re using some high def thing that comes with guards and it’s beyond anything I’ve ever…. I saw 10 minutes before I left, they did a special thing for me cause they’re just wrapping and having a party tonight, they were still working after I left. They’re doing something where they’re layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they’re also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So it’s every color that wasn’t in The Matrix is seriously in this film.

Speed Racer is scheduled to open May 9, 2008.

On The Side: Speed Racer isn’t the first cartoon Susan Sarandon, who plays Mom Racer, has helped bring to the big screen. She also voiced Coco in The Rugrats go to Paris.

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