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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."
Beyond that little insight, judging by the available clips, this movie is looking damn good (albeit remaniscant of old cut scenes from Play Station 1 games like "Legacy of Kain" - just cleaner). While it's premise doesn't appear to be completely original, it is certainly going to be a great piece of fantasy in of itself. It's style of art is also a rather refreshing departure from the main stream stock of CG films, which tend to be rather "cartoony" (not that this is a bad thing, but it is nice to see something new).
It certainly looks cool. The French outshine themselves again. I just hope the fact that it's French doesn't put people off.
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
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.
Using just off-the-shelf stuff, that's really amazing. I wish I could be that good with Bryce =/. It looks like the storyline could be equally amazing, but I'm wondering if there will also be an english release around the same time. It looks that way from the site, but I hope to see this in a theater near me.
- Sherman
I think the term is "Freedom film."
Take THAT, France-bashers. :) This looks really cool.
You are not the customer.
"Le Tron"?
The coolest voice ever.
...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
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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.
Their server is withstanding the initial onslaught, attack, attack!
The limitation is talent. Few people can drive these tools competently.
I've done software for high-end animation. I can run the tools myself, but I can't get the results that the people with real talent can. Watching a good artist running an animation system is striking. They work quite differently from amateurs running these programs. They draw far more than they edit. They're fast. They have a clear picture in their mind of what they want to see on the screen.
There aren't many people like that, which is why most amateur 3D animation sucks.
...a l'Effect Slashdot, mes amis.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
I'm surprised that no one posted the imdb link yet. And as someone stated, the voices did sound familiar, both in french and english: Kirsten Dunst, Richard Harris, Anjelica Huston...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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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?
So what happens next? Does the girl meet up with an bunch of itenerant "circus bugs"? Do they build a giant mechanical bird to try to frighten the villians away? Inquiring minds want to know!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The first European fully CGI feature was made in Spain and called The Living Forest.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I just watched the fourth movie clip they made available on the site -- there's a creature that's helping her who has a very warm rich voice... with a slight British accent. Listen to the "if you had the chance, would you leave Axis?" to hear it clearly.
...Whoah, I just looked up his bio to make sure he is, indeed American (confirmed; grew up in NJ and Florida), and it seems his father (a bar-owner) was murdered in '68. His sister was murdered in '75, and 2 half brothers died while scuba-diving in '80. Ouch.
It could be that they're working off the stereotype that the elite (evil or not) speak with British accents. Think also of what's called the "mid-Atlantic" accent (the accent spoken partway between the US and Britain...) taught so carefully to Julliard drama students -- you know how "Frasier Crane" talks? Yup, Kelsey Grammer is a Julliard grad. He's got it down pat.
He also spoke the role of the villainous but brilliant Sideshow Bob on the Simpsons.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I looked at the trailer, and, like a few other people have mentioned here, it's okay but not great. The animation lags behind Pixar and the other big boys, and the plot is pretty generic (and bears an unfortunate similarity to A Bug's Life). But what gets me is that, for what seems to be the umpteenth time, a movie (or t.v. show or book or video or whatever) is anonymously submitted to /., almost certainly by someone involved in the production. If you think about it, considering the zillions of page views daily and the profile of the site (heck, google news uses /. as a source), /. has to be an easy source of free marketing for anyone selling any kind of SF. "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" indeed.
Why would people who have played in Maya be able to tell that they're metaballs? Maya has no metaball features whatsoever. Anyways, they didn't use metaballs (and they don't look like metaballs to me at least)- they used RealFlow, a full blown fluids simulation solution.
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.
PDI, BlueSky and Pixar's films are every bit as formulaic. Buddy banter, rescue subplots and a heart-wrenching song in the middle. The same is true of most of Disney's cel-animated features. What exactly bothers you about the idea that a forthcoming 3D animated feature may also follow the traditional Quest storyline? So what if Kaena's just a poor sap farmer's daughter, bound by destiny to fulfil some prophecy or another... Who isn't? It doesn't do your arguments any good to alternate between criticising technical aspects of Xilam's first feature film and praising Pixar's early shorts in spite of their primitive technology. The simple fact of the matter is that Xilam (and Chaman) have done a very cool thing: they've completed a film that looks to be what FF:TSW should have been, on a fraction of the budget.
With off-the-shelf software, on Windows PCs, no less.
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)
Why is it that only the (anonymous) cowards make statements like this?
Am I the only one getting a Dark Crystal vibe from this? (I consider that a good thing, by the way.)
The artwork of this movie is fantastic, imo, and the general dark tone and characters seem to borrow from many areas of modern science fiction and popular figures.
The Marauder figure and the organic structures and the overall dark scenery borrow heavily from Giger's work, as the producer notes in the biography section of the site.
The story is in an extremely similar vein to a still rendered series done by an Italian guy in the middle 90's on a Mac with Strata Studio and Photoshop and Deck and sold as a multimedia CD which were still popular back then. Sadly, I can't remember the title.
Other influences seem to be taken from Larry Niven's Integral Tree (the tree in the film), a classic comic series about a world of creatures living in the clouds (the Sharken), and I notice that the one detailed shot of the heroine with hair (the wallpaper section) looks very similar to Virgine Ledoyen who starred in the Beach with Di Caprio.
This film will probably not be that much of a hit, as I think it is very difficult to excite mainstream audiences with fantasy SF, but I think it'll be a pointer to things to come, when bigger film houses with bigger budgets start to produce films in a similar vein.
I'm from The Netherlands and although our government was on the side of the US, 95% of our population wasn't. You Americans talk about freedom, but boycot French ware for their OPINION, that is so hypocrit. Land of the free, home of the brave... Come on, the freedom you enjoy has merely become a blur of what it used to be. The US used to be the flagship of freedom in the world, yes Europeans recognize that. But we also recognize that this is no longer the case. Your intelligence agencies monitor everything, NSA, CIA and whatnot scan your e-mails, phonecalls and mobile phone coordinates, you people get visits from FBI when you use encryption higher than 512 bits to safe-guard your privacy. Now that kind of info you don't see on your biased news networks now do you? How dare you despise France when you fail to see the truth about your own country. Your economy is weak right now and still the US uses 25% of the entire world oil production. Reluctant to invest in new technologies like hydrogyn, solar power or nuclear fusion. Your cars are low tech and suck alot of gasoline and don't come close to German car technology, still you all want to drive European cars. You guys come over so hypocrit. You want to know what most Europeans think? Like 95%? They love America, they love it's people, but they really fucking hate your extreme-right wing government. I appreciate you take stance for the Jews, i appreciate the US tries to liberate all sorts of countries. But your motives are foul, lies and deception. You went into Iraq to find nuclear and biological weapons. Now the US weapon inspectors have given up their search, because it simply wasn't there. Then suddenly you switched your motive to free the Iraqi people. That is so low. Instead of admitting your government was wrong, you just switched motives. Which shows that your government motives to attack a country is just a curtian to cloud the true motives. Your true motives? We don't know, you don't even know. Oil?World Domination?Both? Now here's the real catch. China. Your government is peeing it's pants because now they see actually that the communist system is actually showing it's fruits. China is becoming the most powerfull nation in the world and they're communist. They have the fastest growing economy in the world, largest army in the world and are technologically catching up. Auwch...that's gotta hurt, because now your government is going to lose it's nr1 spot as unofficial world leader. What other country has military bases in almost every country in the world? The US has miliatry bases fucking everywhere. Now why would a nation do that? Just for fun? No, that gives them military influence all over the world. World Domination, big guns and bombs is what the US is all about right now. With a 7 trillion dollar dept and defense as your greatest expenses, it looks like your government is growing nervous. You destroyed your own economy to wage war for undisclosed motives. You think you know the truth? You know as much as USSR citizens did back in the cold war, your goverment told you shit. From Europe it looks like your country has become a police state. Oh be so proud, the things you are all so proud already dissapeared 50 or 60 years ago. Once you had a great nation dwelling in true freedom, but what's left is just a mere shadow of itself. A military state trying to spread their ideology with military force and placing military bases all over the world, because they can't hold the pace of China's economy and technological advancement anymore which is growing like nuts. If you can't beat with your economy, you beat em military, that's the philosophy eh? Big guns, bombs, but little brain. And then you dare to talk about France? Offcourse they aren't all clean themselves. But right now, France is doing much better when it comes to true freedom/liberty and economy. Freedom fries....hmmpfff. You really think we Europeans care what you put into your 65% overweighted population? The US has become this big-footed goofy giant which crushes everything where it comes wi