Slashdot Mirror
Talk to a Movie Digital SFX Expert
Thad Beier has been working with computer graphics and film since the late 70s. In 1995 he and three partners founded Hammerhead Productions, a company that specializes in computer-generated special effects. Thad received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people, not the MPAA) in 1998 for one of his many technical innovations. He's worked on Terminator 2, Angels in the Outfield, The Fast and The Furious,
and the upcoming Blue Crush, among other films. He wrote this 1992 Siggraph paper, and now writes all of Hammerhead's software tools and manages the company's mixed bag of SGI and Linux equipment. So ask Thad anything you want about computer-generated special effects. We'll send him 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers when we get them back.
At one point, as a film student, I was interested in computer animation as a way for a single person or small group to produce a film, without the expense of locations, casting, cameras, etc. I thought that soon, as hardware and software improved, it would be possible for me to create a film on my own computer at home.
But my experience in animation in college taught me that increasing hardware capacity doesn't reduce the time it takes to produce a film or demo reel; it simply increases the quality of the final output. I imagine that the modelling, animation, and rendering of the scenes in Tron took as much human time as comparable scenes in Fellowship of the Ring. It's possible to render Tron-quality CG in realtime on a modern PC, but nobody wants to watch it.
My question is this: do you think it will ever be possible to produce a full-length CG film in about a man-year or less, with effects which are reasonbly "modern" for the time? Will the technology curve eventually flatten out, once we get to a certain point where the human eye can't really tell the difference? Or is it implausible to think that a single person or small group could provide all of the artistic input (scriptwriting, directing, modelling, animation, acting, etc) to produce a full film, even ignoring all technological constraints?
How do you feel CG is effecting films? These days many films opt for fake sets and sequences while the stunt men who worked so very hard in the 80's go begging for work. I always find it very easy to spot the CG textures and colors (can't you guys pick a color palette that actually occurrs in the real world?), and find myself increasingly disappointed by CG even as it "advances" every year. Do directors and producers give you the opportunity to offer input about the overall quality of a CG scene -- whether or not it will be convincing?