'Thriller 3D' will resurrect Michael Jackson this summer

[soulmum]

'Thriller 3D' will resurrect Michael Jackson this summer

NY Daily News

Michael Jackson will be scaring fans from beyond the grave later this summer with a reworked release of his iconic music video “Thriller” in 3D.

Director John Landis, who shot "Thriller" in 1982 with “The King of Pop,” will oversee the project according to industry sources.

We’re told that for three years, Landis has been secretly re-working the iconic 14 minute music video, which was a groundbreaking piece of music history.

Sources say that Michael's son Prince and daughter Paris have been involved in the project, but details are being kept under wraps.

“Thriller is coming out again in movie form this summer and it will be something very special,” we're told. “John took the original footage, cleaned it up and has made it into something very unique.”

Our insider says that if *****, who died in 2009 and would’ve turned 59 in August, would have likey been pleased with this project.

“Michael’s vision before his death was to bring ‘Thriller’ to movie theaters and use IMAX and 3D technology to make fans feel they are in the video with him,” we're told. “There is a marketing plan in place to launch the new version with a huge PR drive with (Jackson’s children) Prince and Paris involved.”

We also hear that Prince, a filmmaking enthusiast, has expressed particular interest in this project. Our sources also say that fans are in for a double-feature.

“As part of the celebration relaunch, a new documentary exploring the incredible story behind the movie’s creation will be released,” we're told.

Landis joined the project after actually being caught up in a bitter legal war over the original “Thriller” after Michael’s passing in 2009. That beef has apparently been buried.

The movie release marks the 35th anniversary of the “Thriller” album launch.

Shortly after Jackson died, the “Thriller” video was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library Of Congress. No other music video had been given that honor.

With James Desborough

[soulmum]

[soulmum]

The Estate of MJ announces that tickets have been set aside for fans to watch the 3D Thriller show at the Venice Film Festival.

These places are limited, so it is necessary to arrive early to the cinema in order to have a chance to get one.

Following the screening, a reception will be organized by the Estate and Sony Music to which the fans are invited.

Fans who will be disguised as a "Thriller" zombie will have a chance to win tickets for the projection and reception.

There will also be derivatives (souvenirs??) available on-site so fans can keep a memory of this projection.

3D Thriller : Sala Grande - Palazzo del Cinema, September 4th. The projection starts at 22:15 with a red carpet just before.

http://mjstreet.fr/2017/08/19/thrill...-a-y-assister/


And here is a link to the Estate statement in English:

http://**************/index.php/2017...tival-tickets/

[soulmum]

While there's been a lot of hubbub about THRILLER 3D's world premiere at Venice, I've seen very little about the fact that the North American premiere will be at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Both Thriller 3D and the Making Of Thriller will be screened.

http://www.tiff.net/tiff/film.html?v...ns-thriller-3d
http://www.tiff.net/tiff/film.html?v...ksons-thriller

[soulmum]

From WhiteSocks user on MJHO -

Hi to all!

Yesterday i have attended the premiere in Venice of Thriller 3D.

The quality is stunning: the video is in 4K, Landis did an amazing job!
There are scenes in 3D that are better then the original version of the video: the dance part with the zombies is incredible, Michael is really in front of us dancing!!!
Special applause to the quality of the sound! The building was near to explode! Amazing!

This really should be released in cinemas all around the world!!!

I hope you guys will be able to watch it in a cinema: it really is a different experience!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNXqtb-zVPE

[soulmum]

Michael Jackson
‎@michaeljackson

“Thriller 3D” makes its North American debut tonight at TIFF! Keep following for more news of other opportunities to watch the 3D short film


From the Estate:


If you are in Toronto and want to attend the North American Premiere of "Thriller 3D" at the Toronto International Film Fest, Look out for folks in the shirt attached (Black 'Scream' shirt, like the one for venice, but says 'Toronto) starting at 4 p.m. Sept 12)!

Below is a Google Maps link to where fans go to collect screening passes and wristbands for the party. It is Clarence Square Park at 25 Clarence Square in downtown Toronto.
· Because of the open bar at the party, only fans who are 19+ years of age will get wristbands for the party.
· Quantity is limited and will be on a first come, first serve basis.
· The people in the t-shirts will be there starting at 4:00 PM and when everything has been distributed, they will leave.

https://www.google.ca/…/data=!4m5!3m...ccb90d:… ****Note: seems to be unavailable.
See you tomorrow

[soulmum]

https://www.izotope.com/en/community/bl ... nessi.html
3D Thriller: Mixing Michael Jackson with 8X GRAMMY-nominated Engineer Martin Nessi

by Jon Simmons, iZotope

September 15, 2017
When Michael Jackson’s fourteen-minute music video for Thriller debuted at the Avco Theatre in Los Angeles in 1983, it sold out for three weeks straight. Now, thirty-five years later, it debuted at the 2017 Venice Film Festival with the audio mixed in Dolby Atmos surround sound.

The audio engineer on the job? Eight-time GRAMMY-nominee Martin Nessi (Nessi has worked with artists like Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Josh Groban, and Ariana Grande). We spoke with Nessi about mixing audio in 3D and using RX to restore audio the original Thriller audio.

"There were so many speakers when mixing Thriller in Dolby Atmos, and many audio elements stood on their own. That means if there was a bad edit or non-musical artifact, someone was going to hear it. I had to make sure every track was 100 percent perfect, because everything was more exposed. That was the biggest challenge from the forensic point of view, and it would have been impossible to do without RX." —Martin Nessi, 8X GRAMMY-nominated audio engineer
How did you get the opportunity to engineer and mix Thriller in 3D?

Michael Jackson’s estate got in touch with a senior executive from Sony and asked them who they thought would be the right person to put together the music for remixing Thriller for a modern delivery, which was 3D for the visual, Dolby Atmos for the audio. The senior executive recommended producer and engineer Humberto Gatica.

Back in the day, he was one of the engineers on Thriller along with Bruce Swedien. They recommended him, and he called me to work with him.

What’s an easy way of explaining what mixing in Atmos is and how it differs from other types of surround sound?

In surround sound you have 5.1, which is center, left, right, and then two surround speakers plus a sub. Then you have 7.1, which is a left, center, right, left surround, right surround, back left surround, and right back surround.

Then there’s Dolby Atmos. Dolby Atmos is basic atmospheric audio—3D sound. They want to make you feel like you're inside the sound.

The main audio comes from a 7.1 array, which is the one I just explained. They also have audio objects, which come from other speakers that are placed on the ceiling and walls. Basically, you need to have a minimum of four speakers to be considered Dolby Atmos, but if you go to the Dolby Cinema in Hollywood, I think they have around 120 speakers or more.

For those objects, there's a Dolby Atmos plugin in Pro Tools that’s it's like a 3D panner. You can basically move the panner to where you want the objects to go in the 3D space.
Mixing Thriller in Atmos, what were you able to convey to the listener that you might not have been able to in other listening environments like 5.1 or 7.1?

There's a lot that you didn't “hear” in the stereo version of the song. You were actually feeling them, rather than being able to hear them 100 percent clearly. Now in 7.1, you can hear every component completely separated in the soundstage.

Then you have to add all the other stuff that's happening in the video, like the sound effects and zombies. They also did a lot of work on the video itself. It's Thriller on steroids.

What were some of the biggest audio restoration challenges on this project?

The people from Sony sent us what they thought was the digital multitrack of Thriller from many years ago. They basically had grabbed all the tapes (master and slaves), and printed them to Pro Tools. Most of the sessions from all these artists back in the day are already in Pro Tools sessions for archival purposes.

They sent us a session, which is what they thought was the master session that was used for mixing Thriller. When I opened the session, I noticed that there were elements that didn't make sense to be summed together. For example, all the drums in one stereo track, etc. I knew it wasn’t the master tapes used for the final mix.

Rest assured, I confirmed with Humberto, who worked on the original project. I showed him the Pro Tools session, and he confirmed that it wasn’t the multitrack master that was used for the mix.

I suddenly remembered that many years ago I read a magazine where Mick Guzauski said he had mixed the Thriller album in 5.1, back when Michael was still alive. I suggested to get in touch with him to see if he knew where to get it. The next day we got it from Sony.

It’s important to tell you that the multitrack was for the song, not the video. [The video is 14 minutes long—the song is five and a half minutes]. I knew I had to create a multitrack of the video, because if we mixed the song as is, then when we were done, I would have to start editing all the stems to fit the length of the video. It had to sync with the visual. The problem is that since you're automating to a visual, you have to be able to automate the stuff while you're looking at the picture, so I decided to create a multitrack of the video using the multitrack of the song.

I started putting together the multitrack, but if you remember, the video is not verse, verse, chorus, verse. It's actually three verses, and there's an interlude, and then there's the James Earl Jones, "The Thriller ..." and then it's the chorus a couple of times repeated.

What I found out when I started putting that together is that the speed of the multitrack was different than the speed of the song on the video. That could've been because of two reasons. Reason number one is that the song was sped up during mastering. When they would do a production and then the producer was already done with the production, he would be like, "Wow, this could be a little bit faster." Instead of redoing everything, they would finish the production, and in mastering they would speed it up the final mix, so nobody would know, but the multitrack was at a different, usually slower, speed.

The other option was that it was sped up for the video. To me, it didn't make sense just to speed it up for the video because if people saw the video and then they heard the song on the radio, they would be like, "What? It's not the same beat." I think they sped it up in mastering. When I saw that, I was like, "Wow, this is going to be interesting," because I have to sync the multitrack to a video that has a faster version of Thriller.

I had to basically tempo-map the multitrack beat per beat per beat from beginning to end, and then I tempo-mapped the video. After I tempo-mapped the whole video, I started creating a multitrack.

The moment I started moving the stuff into the tempo map of the video, whatever speed was off, it would adjust automatically to the tempo map. That was the first forensic difficulty.

When you start looking at the tracks, there was hiss because of tape. Edits were not as precise in some aspects, because you would have to punch in, or you would have to literally cut the tape. There was no “undo” function back in the day.

You could sometimes notice that there was a part got cut on the tape, so I started cleaning up all that stuff, and then there was a lot of different tracks that had headphone bleed, so that's when iZotope RX came into the picture.

I started using it extensively to fix almost everything that was a problem, because I knew that down the line, when we got to Dolby Atmos, since there are so many speakers, there were going to be many opportunities for noises and other non-musical artifacts to be heard. I had to make sure that every track was 100 percent perfect, because when you start making it bigger in the soundstage and every track is more exposed, every element in those tracks is going to exposed, like seeing it with a magnifying glass, and that includes noises and non-musical artifacts. That was the biggest challenge from the forensic point of view. Fortunately, it was possible to deal with all of this with RX.

You mentioned hiss and tape dropouts. Were there modules from RX that came in particularly handy when dealing with these issues?

I used most of the modules, to be honest. Spectral Repair a lot as well as De-Noise and De-Click. It depends on what needs to be addressed, but I usually found a solution with RX.

Anything else you want to mention about repairing audio or mixing on Thriller 3D?

We first mixed in stereo because we were not going to show up to a Dolby Atmos studio to get sounds of stuff (like EQ, compression, reverbs, delays, etc). We did the Atmos mix over at Dennis Sands'. He's a score mixer. He works with Danny Elfman, has been nominated for Oscars, and owns a private Dolby Atmos studio in Santa Barbara.

We first mixed in stereo using an analog console, as well as analog gear and a bunch of different plugins. I used Nectar as one of the reverbs on the vocals. One of the reverbs was a modified patch preset of Nectar. I tried using reproductions of the same reverbs that Bruce Swedien might have used, but I couldn’t get them to sound the same. I started digging into Nectar, which I've known since the beginning, because I tried Nectar when you were developing it. I started messing with a patch, and suddenly it clicked that it was the right sound for Michael and Thriller.

When we finished mixing in stereo, I printed stems of every component. For some tracks, I printed more than one stem. For example, for the lead vocal, it was not only one stem. It was the lead vocal dry and other stems of reverbs. Maybe I split the reverbs up into two or more stems, just to have more control. The delays were another stem on its own. When we went to the Dolby Atmos stage with Dennis, we could have control where to place each element of the mix and also change the levels of the effects, because that's important. When you mix in stereo, the reverb and delays get hidden behind all the other elements in the mix, but when you put it up in Dolby Atmos, and all of a sudden your soundstage is “ten times” bigger, then everything is more open and exposed, including the effects.

The mix didn’t change that much from stereo to Dolby Atmos, but you need to have that flexibility, because if not, you're going to end up with a mix that is not a true representation of the original vision you had. Also, this allows you to take your vision even further, without worrying about getting “sounds” and basic balances. You’re just being creative with the placement of the different musical components of the song, and when necessary, adding some more high end or low end, and automating in the 3D field, which includes the audio objects I mentioned earlier.

After the Dolby Atmos mix was done at Dennis’ place, we went to the Universal Pictures Stage and worked with the team there. We worked with Jon Taylor in particular. I spent a couple of days in the stage making sure that the Atmos mix from Dennis’ place transferred and translated correctly. Then there was the process of making sure the balances were not lost or blurred by all the other sonic elements of the video. There is a lot of other stuff going on. The stage at Universal is even bigger, and everything is even more exposed. That meant we had to reach for RX a couple of more times during the process.

That’s how we did it, and iZotope RX and Nectar were vital to achieve the final result.

[soulmum]

Interest in the pop singer remains high. A 3-D version of Jackson’s 14-minute “Thriller” video screened at film festivals in Toronto and Venice, Italy, this year, and Branca is searching for the best way to distribute it in theaters. Another Jackson short film, the 40-minute “Ghosts,” released in 1996, could be updated for new audiences. And if the animated show is a hit, there could be more.

“You see Charlie Brown Christmas every year,” Branca said.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...m-on-halloween

[soulmum]

Some fans were saying the music sounded different so an engineer has replied.

The engineer on Thriller 3D confirmed nothing was changed. Thanks to Respect77 for gathering these tweets.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi
Replying to @neomjj
I think you are confused. There was no new recording of audio. In regards to elements missing, each theater has its own system.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 7h7 hours ago
Replying to @neomjj
I can tell you that there is no difference between the new and previous version of the video from what pertains to music.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 7h7 hours ago
Replying to @neomjj
Hi Nima, absolutely no production/instrumentation decisions where changed or made. We worked with the master tapes we received.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 28m28 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
100% confirmed the issue is in the theaters, delivery, etc. These are not the mixes we created.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 5h5 hours ago
Replying to @haydenrichards @iliamizani @neomjj
getting to the bottom of it. 2 options: theater speakers are not working properly or...

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 5h5 hours ago
Replying to @haydenrichards @iliamizani @neomjj
or person in charge didn't load correct files when loading the program into system.

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 28m28 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
there is no production on this! It's just a new audio mix in Atmos, 7.1. 5.1. Nothing was added or taken out.


Read these next ones from bottom to top!

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 5m5 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
specially not back on the 80's
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 5m5 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
...edit the mix in a different form to the video. Nobody produces a multitrack for the album and another for video.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 6m6 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
there is no "mulitrack" of the audio of the video. That's is not how videos are made. You produce a song, and, if needed..
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 7m7 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
again, that doesn't exist. The video was put probably put together with a stereo tape edited in the form in the video.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 14m14 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
we did have the original final mutitrack of the production of Thriller.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 41m41 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
it's clear your don't know the technical terminology. Raw multitrack is different than mix stems, different than a mix
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 42m42 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
the original vision of Michael, Quincy Jones, John Landis and Bruce Swedien was respected at all times.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 44m44 minutes ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
no mix stems exist. What existed was the multitrack, the album mix and the video mix. Nothing else exists.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes

Martin Nessi‏ @martinnessi 1h1 hour ago
Replying to @b__Marco @neomjj
there were no stems of the original album mix. They don't exist.







One fans opinion
Thriller 3D just had it's first UK showing at the Michael Jackson Scream event... And it was AWESOME!!

Fans were treated to a few music videos from the upcoming 'Scream' track list before viewing on the big screen, Michael Jacksons Ghost short film. The first time on the big screen since it's original debut.

Fans were then asked to put on their 3D glasses for the UK premiere of Thriller 3D!!

I'm not a very technical person but it was awesome, like it was made for 3D. Michael is literally front and centre and you can't take your eyes off of him. You can literally hear every sound and feel the effects.

[soulmum]

A fan review

Thriller 3D was showed this night in Paris. Here are my thoughts:

About the PQ: 5/5. It's just wonderful. They did an amazing job about the 4K restoration. We've never seen Michael in such a quality until now, except if you have seen him in real life. Everything is mind blowing, very detailed, the red jacket, the wet hair of Michael. WOW. This is the power of 35mm film !

About the 3D: 4/5. It was better than expected. There are some interesting effects, like the choreography and when Michael turns into a wolf. This is very enjoying for a short film that were not planned to be shot in 3D.

The bad thing: This is definitely NOT the original sound from the short film. They changed it a bit. Like the saxo parts, we hear them more than before, and they added too a funky vibe after Michael says "Thriller Night". There are other changes but i don't remember them all. Purists will not like these changes.

Except this, the project is a success.