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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 ;)
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?
My sigs always suck.
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.
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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.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
"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.
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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
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
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.