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Teaser Trailer for 'Cars'; Info on 'Polar Express'
Michael Wyszomierski writes "The teaser trailer for the final Disney/Pixar film, Cars, is now available on Apple's Movie Trailers page. The film will open in theaters on November 4, 2005." And reader BoredStiff writes "The movie Polar Express will open Wednesday and could create a film genre somewhere between animation and live action. Made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world. The technique has been used in some video games and, to a limited extent, in earlier movies. Warner Bros. says The Polar Express is the first feature made solely with the process."
Right date, wrong year... Opening November 4th, 2005.
I haven't decided whether or not it's really lame or cool yet, mostly because I haven't watched any movies that use the technique. Also, the only movies I know of using this technique look sorta lame.
Hi there
Sure. The original Toy Story was under a different deal. Then came Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and now The Incredibles and Cars to finish off a 5-picture deal signed after Toy Story. Through some contractual madness, Disney discovered that they didn't have to count Toy Story 2 towards the count, since apparently some clause said that in effect sequels don't count.
Polar Express has also been created as a 3D IMAX Movie. Now I expect that will be worth seeing. I just wish that Pixar had done that with the Incredibles.
Wrong! Nov 10th, 2004
Ah, the last peanut -- overflowing with the oil and salt of its departed brothers. -Homer
Look, this has been rediscovered again and again, every time someone's tried to do photorealistic CGI. It's hard. Producing humans that look and move correctly is really, really difficult, and unless it's spot on it just looks really dreadful.
Polar Express probably does it as well as I've ever seen it done; the result is that it;s just good enough to make it blindingly obvious how bad it is. There are figures on the screen that look at first glance like humans, but my hindbrain just screams when it sees them. They don't move right. Their expressions don't work right. They look creepy.
Pixar and Dreamworks got this right; the state of the art is just not up to this. Notice that all their characters are cartoonish? By deliberately not trying to make their characters realistic, they managed to avoid the entire problem, because my hindbrain doesn't expect them to look like real people. But Warner Bros. for Polar Express have jumped in with both feet...
I was the soundman/video engineer on an GSTA (giant screen theatre of america) event about 1-2 month ago where they were presenting, to giant screen theatre owners from around the world, various work in devellopement and work in progress. Several flick caught my attention (the 70mm IMAX version of Ghost In The Shell: Innocence being one! :) ) and Polar Express was part of those.
Polar Express is not only the first to be entirely made with digitized actors it is also the first feature lenght IMAX animation movie, the first feature lenght movie in IMAX 3D and the first movie funded by Tom Hanks himself. Tom Hanks was described as an avid Imax 3D supporter, he wants to push the technology and was actually the one who suggested Polar Express as a project, he was deeply involved in the process. The result does not look like a tech showdown at all, it looks like an incredibly good animation that plays with and use the 3D technology to enhance messages, emotion and aprehensions, not to showcase it. Nowhere in the extract they showed to the crowd did I had the impression they were just showing tech, actually as soon as the extract started I kinda forgot I was watching 3D, it just felt natural.
I'm really looking forward to the full release.
I have to say that the trailer to polar express has some of the creepiest looking animation I have ever seen. Please, if you are thinking about seeing this with your kids, make sure they see the trailer and ask them if they want to see it first. I know I would have been scared as hell seeing that when I was a kid.
I just saw a Sneak Preview of the actual film, and there were tons of kids in the theater. I didn't hear any of the kids get creeped out. Actually, for as many kids were there, I heard very little out of them period.
A phenomenal movie. See it.
The "creepiness" of the animation disappears after the first 5-10 seconds of watching. The stuff in the trailer just isn't long enough. Periodically, I would notice something that reminded me it wasn't live-action, but mostly I was sucked in. The non-actor CG effects were phenomenal as well. The movie has a lot more action than the book, so don't expect the same feeling a reading of The Polar Express before bed might evoke. But the movie is as true to the book as a movie could be, I think, while keeping the kiddies interested.
And no, I do not work for WB, though I am married to someone working with WB on a partnership.
The difference is that with performance capture, you also capture facial expressions. Most motion capture only takes into account large body movements of the torso, arms and legs. Performance capture tries to get more of the actual actor's acting into the capture as well, with all it's subtle nuances.
Unfortunately, the current technique doesn't capture eye movements, so you end up getting great facial movements but lifeless eyes, making the characters look like the walking dead, which is why this movie will be difficult and boring to watch for many.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
"performance capture" is just a euphemism for "motion capture" which has gotten a pretty bad rap among animators.
The term I heard when I was involved in classical animation (not involving computers at all) was "rotoscoping". And yes, it did and still does get a bad rap from animators from the "old school" when it is misused. The rotoscoped characters stick out like a sore thumb becasue of the inconsistencies--the characters MOVE like real life but LOOK like cartoons when rotoscoped, so they always look out of place.
Using computers to do rotoscoping in 3-D hasn't helped the situation. Computers capture real motion TOO faithfully, but are "not quite" there in generating realistic humans yet--so digital humans that look a bit "creepy" might even look creepier when rotoscoping is used.
I think that maybe one day computers will be able to visually re-create humans convincingly enough to make rotoscoping work (so a black man could convincingly perform as a white woman without it being a gag like it was in White Chicks for example). Perhaps it worked on Jar Jar or Gollum because there was little to no facial capture (just body movements) and the characters were far drifferent from humans.
In the mean time, it probably would've been better to use digital compositing to put human characters into the fanciful virtual world of the Polar Express. It has worked well enough in the past and at least the characters themselves would be consistent.
Animators exagerate and slightly alter movement for dramatic effect and visual appeal, and so the "spirit" of the movement matches the visual representation of the charater (which is very seldom photo-realistic).
Rotoscoping is a fine techniquein some cases (those being when the entire sceme is rotoscoped--background, characters and all, so the entire scene is "consistently inconsistent"). It is a bit much to ask an animator to paint a figure on movement she does not control and expect it to look better than when the visual appearance and movement of a character are under one person's control (be it actor or animator).