CGI About to Boom In Hollywood

FortKnox writes "Because of the success of "Monsters Inc" and "Shrek", many major hollywood studios are scrambling getting on the CGI bandwagon. Looks like we're about to get smothered by CGI movies left and right. For those that like to tinker with CG, it might be a good time to go jobhunting..." Several upcoming movies mentioned. Some ven look like they might have potential ;)

Comments

Hey Hollywood...

[Spackler]

Don't forget that Shrek (and both Toy Story movies for that matter) was a great movie because it had a good script! If you just put out the same crap (*cough* FF *cough*), it will not be successful.

1. Write a good script

2. Make it with good actors (LOTR) or CGI.

3. Make money.

It is really pretty simple.

Re:Hey Hollywood...

[stew77]

Definately true. Shrek would even have been a great success if it wasn't high quality CGI but bad cartoons like the Tracy Ullman Simpsons. At least, I went to see Shreck because of the graphics, but I ended up laughing my ass off and couldn't pay any attention to the rendering at all.

Re:Hey Hollywood...

[DeadVulcan]

Unfortunately, there's a principle in movies called MOTSS ("more of the same stuff"... or for the cynical, "more of the same sh*t").

And even more unfortunately, sometimes that principle actually works, really REALLY well.

*sigh*

Re:Hey Hollywood...

[rgmoore]

2. Make it with good actors (LOTR) or CGI.

Any real animation fan will tell you that using CGI (or conventional cell animation) doesn't eliminate the need for good actors. The quality of the voice acting in an animated feature can make a huge difference in its overall quality.

To take a particularly strong negative example, consider JarJar Binks. His antics in Phantom Menace were certainly distracting, but it was the awful voice acting that made him so utterly annoying. On the positive side, look at your examples of Shrek and Toy Story. Both movies had top name actors providing the voices for key characters. In Japan, the best seiyuu (voice actors) in anime can be nationally famous just for their vocal talents.

Re:Hey Hollywood...

[MtViewGuy]

On the positive side, look at your examples of Shrek and Toy Story. Both movies had top name actors providing the voices for key characters.

Indeed. Much of the success of the two Toy Story movies was due the fact they very effectively used voice talent--they got famous actors whose voice really made the movie go.

A Japanese seiyuu can become extremely famous if they do a large number of very good anime series. A good example is Hayashibara Megumi: she voiced Lina Inverse in three Slayers TV series, Ayanami Rei in Shin Seiki Evangelion, and Lime in two Saber Marionette TV series (among many other voice acting credits). She also has two radio shows in Japan and is a frequent guest on many Japanese entertainment shows. Even though most of use don't understand Japanese, you can understand why she's so famous in Japan--her voice acting skills range from very subdued to over-the-top hyperkenetic, and she pulls it off extremely effectively.

Hmm....

[DeadVulcan]

I just hope they realize that the success of "Shrek" had nothing to do with the fact that it was CGI, and that merely using CGI will not necessarily guarantee them the success of "Shrek."

Molly Star Racer

[Bonker]

Is an Anime-style cartoon from Sav! The World productions, which is french. (So anime-inspired that it's even got a JPop soundtrack) It's entirely CG, although it's flat-shaded so that it looks like traditional cel animation, albeit with spectacular eeffects and attention to detail. It looks neat, but will cost about $300,000 per episode to produce.

You can see an Mpeg format trailer here:

http://www.savtheworld.com/

Re:Molly Star Racer

[talonyx]

For $300k per episode you'd think they could at least spell "save".

animation trends in general

[nanojath]

Not to ignore the tech aspect, but I think that this speaks just as much to a steadily increasing profile for animation in general. From the Simpsons, MTV's experiments with Liquid Television and series like Aeon Flux, the increasing profile of anime (major full lengths now debut with national albeit limited distribution in a place like the States): I think it's safe to say that the ability of animation to drawq a broad crowd with diversity of gender and age has been proven - certainly just as important as developments in CGI and the sucess of CGI projects.

Of course, as ususal many studios will slap together formulaic, crummy projects driven by the idea that CGI means a movie on the cheap (no locations! no actors!). They'll tank, and some burned studios will think twice before the next one. And even if the product is decent - I watched "Osmosis Jones" on video this weekend and enjoyed it quite a bit - it may pan because there are no sure things in entertainment.

You know, it's not just CG-only stuff

[mystery_bowler]

Movies like Shrek and Final Fantasy (especially Final Fantasy) have done a lot to show what total CG movies can be, but movies like Lord of the Rings and (to a lesser extent, IMHO) Star Wars: Episode One have shown how the effective use of CG can not only compliment human acting, it can bring the immersion and suspension of disbelief to another level.

I don't think anyone is going to dispute that the scenery and cinematography in Lord of the Rings was fantastic. Granted, the perspective (swooping high above in many cases) allows for loss of detail in such a way that you fool the eyes of the audience in a lot of cases, but the close-up scenes have become finely detailed as well, showing that the possibilities for effectively integrating CG in a live action scene are greater than in previous years.

I agree that a bumper crop of CG movies are coming, but here's another trend to watch out for: actors that do especially well with blue-screens and acting with things/people that aren't really there.

Oh, and just a side note...I think all this effective CG stuff is going to really hurt the traditional latex/foam rubber movie monster special effects industry. In years past, things like the cave troll in LotR would have been done with a guy in a suit, or hydraulics or such. But, it probably wouldn't have seemed as fluid or expressive, so, eh no loss, right? :)

Re:You know, it's not just CG-only stuff

[Graymalkin]

A good example of what you point out as the twilight of the latex/foam rubber monster special effects would be the Jurasic Park series. In the first movie there was a scale T-Rex built that fully interacted with the characters. It LOOKED real which was the important thing. In JP2 there was the scene with the raptors fighting and rolling around whilst the actors tried to avoid them. That was also fairly impressive because the raptors made dust fly and moved objects the real actors interacted with. Two different mathods of making dinosaurs with pretty much the same effect on film. On the otherhand look at the difference between the technology used between SW:ANH and SW:TPM. Specifically in the last fight scene between in both movies. In ANH they used some blue screens overlayed with glass matte paintings in post production. It gave the same sense of scope that the same technique using computers did 20 years later. The goal is realism by whatever means, I don't think all filmmakers are going to abandon their old style of making realistic images just because of new wizbang technology.

Will Astroboy still be a lying bastard?

[ian stevens]

Sony also is getting into the act by developing its first all-CGI feature, "AstroBoy," a tale about a robot boy who uses his powers to protect Earth from an alien invasion.

Will the end of the movie feature Astroboy lying to the computer as he files his report just so he can have some fun with the audience? Or will this be fleshed out to reveal a deeper mistrust between superior, smarter AI entities and their more mundane, inferior counterparts in the information sector?

ian.

Re:Will Astroboy still be a lying bastard?

[JMZero]

I wish I had some mod points for you.

I'm afraid I never had the requisite attention span to catch AB's little faux pas - most of us 7 year olds were mainly watching to see if he'd use his butt laser again.

.

Re:Bloopers

[Alsee]

Good! The best part about CGI are the bloopers and outtakes. Funny!

Oh, that's sarcasm btw.

I guess you haven't heard about the Toy Story scene where Mr. Potatohead pulls his eyes off and sticks them under Bo-Peep's dress!

I *REALLY* want to get my hands on that!

AFAIK it hasn't escaped from Pixar's private insider collection.

-

If you must render,

[dada21]

Please make Ender.

Ender's game that is.

Probably one of the FEW novels that really NEED CGI in order to get it done (try finding a few hundred kids, who can act, and stay young enough for the sequels).

Too bad OSC allowed the screenplay to get ruined.

CGI killing traditional animation?

[Bonker]

"I think CGI is starting to phase out traditional animation," Swallow said. "But I think that is very much because of a generational divide. For a generation that is used to seeing these kind of digital images in video games, this is what they start to expect."

Hmmm... Apparently these guys are talking about Dizney and Dizney alone. The animation houses in Japan have done a great deal to convert over to digital CG production without sacrificing the look of traditional animation.

Take a good, close look at 'Love Hina', 'Excel Saga', or any newer anime and notice that the cels have all been 'painted' in Photoshop. On some of the closeup shots, you can make out typical Photoshop resizing residue and common filter effects.

CG may be killing the fatiguing process of 'pencil-paint-photograph', but not traditional animation.

CG Movies "all of a sudden" have an impact. Not!

[Thagg]

What the article fails to mention is that PDI and Pixar both have been working toward these CG animated films for 20 years; the article makes it sound like Dreamworks was able to make their first animated film very quickly and easily -- it could only do so because they bought Pacific Data Images who had been laying the foundations for these films beginning in 1980 (disclaimer -- I was at PDI from 1983 'til 1995).

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, has been trying to make animated films since the mid-70's, starting at the University of Utah, then going to the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab, then to Lucasfilm; whose computer division was spun off to become Pixar.

The film that did seem to happen amazingly fast was Jimmy Neutron; Boy Genius. While Pixar and PDI have used proprietary, in-house systems to do their animation; DNA used pretty much off-the-shelf software (although today's commercial software is very customizable, so the line is blurrier than you might think at first glance). DNA was able to make the jump from hand-drawn 2D animation to a 3D feature very quickly indeed. And while the characters are goofy and the rendering is not (even attempting to be) photoreal -- it is still amazing to me that a small group of people actually can pull off an animated film in a reasonable amount of time.

Jimmy Neutron will not be the box-office smash that Shrek or Monsters are; but it is the more revolutionary film.

thad

Re:This is what the Market Wants!!

[BluedemonX]

Well, let's look at it this way. The general public does NOT want clever characters, insightful plots, witty writing, etc.

It wants jiggling breasts, special effects, fight scenes, puerile humor, big explosions, men with almost no bodyfat, and a plot simpler than the rules to a tractor pull.

The guy that brought up Hidden Tiger Crouching Dragon or whatever the hell it is - please remember that it's basically fight scenes, lovemaking, people waving swords around, special effects, etc. as well as a plot you can summarize in one sentence.

RULE ONE - if you can't tell me what the movie's about in one sentence, forget it.

RULE TWO - if there's no T&A, forget it.

RULE THREE - if there's no violence, forget it. Unless it's a French film, in which case double up on rule two, but realise noone outside France will ever watch it.

Arrgh! Get it fscking right!

[gblues]

CGI: (n) Common Gateway Interface. Used primarily as a means of getting and responding to user input via a Web interface.

CG graphics: (n) Computer Generated images. Typically used to describe animations created completely through computers, as opposed to images created through photography or traditional cel animation.

SGI graphics: (n) Refers specifically to those CG graphics created on SGI workstations.

Pick the right term and use it. Thanks!

Nathan

Re:Cave Troll @ Lord of the Rings

[MtViewGuy]

However, you forgot one thing that director Peter Jackson said about the Cave Troll: it was designed specifically as an homage to Ray Harryhausen, perhaps the greatest stop-motion special effects artist ever. That's why the motion of the Cave Troll is not completely smooth--it copied Harryhausen's style.

If Jackson had wanted more smooth action from the Cave Troll his CGI team at WETA Digital would have copied the movement style of the go motion figures that was first heavily used by Industrial Light and Magic for the movie Dragonslayer.

Re:This is what the Market Wants!!

[BluedemonX]

Hollywood's ideal movie:

Just-turned-18 year old Justinia wakes up, and slinks completely unclothed into a shower, where there's a very long, extended shower scene interspersed with the credits and the extremely violent murder of her cute brother by stereotypical Muslim/arab/mafia/other ethnic people. She finds out her brother has been killed, and they want to kill her next, because she somehow wound up through some unlikely but trivial twist of fate to have the map to something very valuable. She meets up with Mack Dolan, an incredibly muscled tough guy who rides a Harley. He also beats nine colors of heck out of more ethnics who show up just to be beaten up. They drive away, and along the way pick up a wisecracking skinny black guy sidekick played by a flavor-of-the-month filth-mouthed comedian. Along the way someone (not the leads) breaks wind, falls into a vat of manure, or otherwise has something vile happen. They then head to the desert/warehouse/safe house where they pick up lots of guns (shown just as pornographically as scene one) and after a requisite 30 second "character development" scene (she cries, he admits he's not been the same since those same people killed his puppy and standing up, grits his jaw) which leads to the two having steamy sex. They then suit up a la A-team for the glorious final scrumdown with lots of explosions, bullets, corpses, etc. and finally it turns out that Justinia can kick ass too. She dispatches the head/most stereotypically ethnic person and they grab the valuables, riding off into the sunset, sidekick in tow, who makes one last vulgar joke as the credits roll- cue hiphop song over the credits. ("Yo dat ma brotha Dolan, we be rollin...." BOOM chicka-pap chicka BOOM chicka-pap) Fake out-takes from the film in between credits optional. The script must be 90 pages EXACTLY, film to about 83 minutes total, and feature

a hot heroine

a hot hero

a slinky Asian/California babe evil chick

a overacting character actor or ethnic bad guy

A father figure, who dispenses some kind of Zen-like wisdom at a critical point

A dumbass, skinny black guy, or "mook" for comic relief

Clever Use of CGI: Amelie

[ackthpt]

In a french film, Amelie, there's probably the most subtle, yet effective CGI I've seen in years. Too often, IMHO, CGI is gaudy or simply overused to generate eye-candy. In a few years people will be so accustomed to CGI that, like the introductions of Sound and Color, it'll have to survive on more than just novelty or eye-candy appeal. If you get a chance, see Amelie and note how effective a little CGI can be, particularly the bed table creatures. ;)

If you think today's CGI movies are cool...

[PCM2]

...wait until they start using servlets!

Re:laura croft

[SuiteSisterMary]

Executive: How's the "Tomb Raider: The Silicone Within" work coming?
Animator: We need to custom build a physics engine.
Executive: What? Why? It's all off-the-shelf now-a-days.
Animator: That's the problem; the physics engines are too realistic.
Executive: What do you mean?
Animator: Watch this test reel.
*Animator turns on a monitor, and runs an animation clip.*
Animation: *Lara Croft, in all her ray-traced glory, is standing as still as a statue on a flat plane. Suddenly she animates; her eyes start looking around, she starts breathing, her body is shifting ever so slightly on her feet, a breeze is playing with her hair. She stretches, arching her back.*
Animation: *as Lara arches her back, she gets a surprised look on her face*
Lara's Back: *SNAP*
Animation: *Lara's back snaps as gravity pulls her titanic brests downwards. She collapses in a hideously bent backward heap*
Lara: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
Animation: Gravity pulls Lara down, bending the flat plane she's standing on into a cone, looking like those graphical renditions of black holes you always see.*
Animator: See what we mean? Sure, we could reduce the size of her breasts to normal human proportions, but...
Executive: Hell no! We want to make some money on this!

Re:CG Movies "all of a sudden" have an impact. Not

[donglekey]

What Thagg didn't mention (yet I am positive he/she knows) is that not only was Jimmy Neutron made with an off the shelf package, it was made with a very inexpensive ($2500) one called Lightwave 3D. That, and an $800 plugin called Messiah were the backbone of the entire movie. It was bound to happen eventually and proves that if a large group of people got together who were talented enough, and had enough money to live off of for a year or two, the first "basement" movie could be produced. I see this as a step closer to that dream.

I guess I should mention that Final Fantasy was made mostly with Maya and Photorealistic renderman, (two programs that can be purchased) but it really isn't in the same league as Jimmy Neutron.

P.S.
All hail Edwin Catmull!