Slashdot Mirror
3D Computer Generated Movie From France
An anonymous reader submits a link to this Computer Graphics World article on a French-made film to be released in June. "A film by Xilam, Kaena is a full length feature film, entirely made from Off the shelf software. The previews looks amazing."
Although new to the 3D feature film scene, Xilam Animation in Paris opted for the road less traveled for Kaena: The Prophecy by choosing a mature style for the characters, environments, and story line. All images ©2003 Xilam Films, StudioCanal, and TVA International IV.
Some things are worth waiting for. And, from the looks of it, the 3D feature film Kaena: The Prophecy is one of them.
Five years in the making, the 90-minute adventure from Xilam Animation in Paris boldly departs from the tried-and-true cartoon-like look of such US blockbusters as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Ice Age, and introduces a unique painterly style to evolve its sophisticated character-driven story. Also impressive is the fact that the digital artists created this feature entirely with commercial software, which forced them to overcome technical challenges by creatively applying the tools at hand, rather than developing specialized code.
Even Kaena's story line deviates significantly from those of its US film cousins. Rather than presenting a humorous children's tale, the movie explores a serious theme directed at teen and adult audiences, although occasionally two worm-like characters offer a dose of comic relief. Kaena unfolds within the fantasy world of a giant tree, known as the Axis, which is inhabited by a tribe of people whose main focus is harvesting the tree's sap, which they then offer to the gods. When the sap begins to dry up, a young woman called Kaena (voiced by Kirsten Dunst) leaves her village to find the root of the problem and a solution. A courageous dreamer, Kaena travels to the forbidden region beneath the clouds. There, she encounters a host of unusual and sometimes hostile creatures, including the Selenites, a race that is also trying to save the tree from impending doom, albeit through the enslavement of others.
"The story is also about the unlikely heroine's journey from childhood to adulthood as she defies authority, traditions, and beliefs in pursuit of her own truths and personal identity--a topic that transcends cultural borders," explains director Chris Delaporte.
In addition to Dunst, a number of other well-known American actors and actresses--including Angelica Houston as queen of the Selenites and Richard Harris as the 600-year-old extraterrestrial Opaz--are likewise lending their voices to the Kaena cast. Because the film is intended for worldwide release, it has been produced in English and will be dubbed in local languages. The production is scheduled to open next month in France, followed by worldwide release this fall. (Xilam was still negotiating a deal for US distribution at press time.)
At first glance, Kaena's overall look and feel is reminiscent of computer games, with its fantastic settings and goal-oriented characters. "The style of the environments will be more familiar to computer game players than moviegoers," contends Delaporte. In fact, he and writer-partner Patrick Daher conceived the project as a game in 1997, pitching it to the newly formed Chaman Productions (Paris), which was focused on producing digital content for games and television.
Impressed by the rich, unusual environments, Chaman's founder chose to expand the project to include a feature film, formerly called Axis, that would be released alongside the game (Computer Graphics World, March 2000, pg. 33). Alas, the ambitious goal of creating a full-length CG film proved too lofty for the start-up. Despite having approximately half the film and game completed, Chaman relinquished control to Xilam, a traditional animation company with expertise in 3D, having developed several computer games and 2D/3D television series. Xilam has since completed the Kaena film and game, with Delaporte still serving as director.
Cinema Roots
"Telling a story for 90 minutes for a film is far more difficult than telling one in a half-hour for television," says Marc Du Pontavice, chairman and CEO of Xilam. "When it comes to cinema, the story alone cannot carry a project like it can in br
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
WHORING, for the plugin impaired.
On linux distros xine plays THIS quite nicely. Just a direct link to the trailer.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
...but still impressive nonetheless.
:-)
Nice to see creativity from France. This is a nice addition to this upcoming French anime series ("Molly Star Racer").
Check out the trailer, it very neat.
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Well, pretty much all animation/sfx is founded in "off the shelf software".
Maya, Softimage/XSI, Lightwave...I'm sure all of these packages are on a shelf SOME where...
Of course, when you read about movies that use such software, the fx houses always add "combination of Maya and XSI...with special software written by us". This usually is tacked on because they don't want ordinary people thinking they could do the same thing. They want to keep the apperance of wizardry like the old days.
But the custom software is usually written in Maya script language and such...which is very powerful btw.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
toolbox
Modeling/Animation
character studio, 3ds max Discreet
www.discreet.com
Texturing
Painter Procreate www.procreate.com
Photoshop Adobe Systems www.adobe.com
Lip synchronization
FatLips 3D Yulsoft www.yulsoft.com
compositing
Shake Apple Computer www.apple.com
flame Discreet www.discreet.com
hair
shag:hair Digimation www.digimation.com
ClothReyes Reyes Infografica www.reyes-infografica.net/company.php
fluids
RealFlow NextLimit www.nextlimit.com
rendering
3ds max, flame Discreet www.discreet.com
data management
alienbrain VFX NXN Software www.nxn-software.com
You are seriously comparing Kaena to Final Fantasy and Spider-Man?! Yes, the animation in Kaena looks, as you put it, "very ghetto" in relation. But I think you need to consider the following.
Spider-Man budget: $139 million
Final Fantasy budget: $137 million
Kaena budget: $27 million
Kaena is also (supposedly) the first European CGI feature. You really shouldn't expect animation perfection in a first release like this.
And, to be honest, a lot of the animation in "Spidey" wasn't that good either...
Finally; why won't the story be the draw? What about Toy Story or Monsters, Inc.? I found the stories for those CGI features (among others) to be quite well done and entertaining. Just because a film is 100% CGI does not mean that it has no story. I'm not saying there will be a great story in Kaena; just that the two factors are unrelated.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did anyone else notice that the evil overlords had British accents, whilst the heroine had an American accent?
Normally I couldn't give a toss, except for the fact that this seems to have become an annoying stereotype. I shit you not, when watching Minority Report I picked the bad guy right from the beginning because of his British accent (the actor was Swedish I know).
In the old days evil characters had Russian accents, now it's British accents.
Why do they do this?
It is the voice of Keith David. You can read more about the production stats of the movie on IMDB
Very old numbers I'd say. I've used Max and Renderman professionally for four years. While prman's motion blur is very nice, it takes significantly longer to render than Max's image motion blur, which is one of the fastest around. It is less accurate but for the majority of shots I've worked on over the years it's not noticable.
Oh, and also "only" a render hit time of 50%? Film-res images can take hours to render a single frame (especially if you are using renderman). Add another 50% to that and you are in deep trouble. The "render hit" as you put it for Max's post image blur is only a few seconds per frame, even if those frames took an hour to render.
You've got it backwards there. Final Fantasy augmented their motion capture with hand animation. Motion capture takes days or weeks of hand cleanup to make useable, and most animators prefer not to use it. Makes sense seeing as they all got into the industry to animate not clean up jittery popping motion capture all day.
Here's the direct link to the trailer in the largest size in Quicktime format.
It played fine on my Gentoo box under both Xine and Mplayer.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
Am I the only one getting a Dark Crystal vibe from this? (I consider that a good thing, by the way.)