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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."
Adapted from Chris Van Allsburg's slim but richly illustrated children's book of the same name, The Polar Express was 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.
I am appalled at how this article trivializes the wonder that the original book The Polar Express creates. I just want to say that calling the book "slim" might be true of the physical thickness of the book but the story and pictures contained within are fantastic. As a child I was riveted by this story and at one time seriously believed that this magic train could whisk me away to see the inner workings of all the Christmas fairytales you hear as a child.
My mother has passed the tradition of reading this book down to my youngest cousin (1st grader) and they are planning on taking my cousin to see this movie soon after it comes out.
I am really looking forward to seeing the movie myself and seeing how closely Zemeckis mimics my own mind's interpretation and expansion of the story and pictures. It *is* possible to recreate a story on the big screen from a novel and have it hold the same feeling that it did in print. I am crossing my fingers that the special effects and large budget don't take away from the real story that sits behind all the new-aged fanciness.
I really hope it doesn't ruin a great story.
Right date, wrong year... Opening November 4th, 2005.
If the trailers are any indication, then this "performance capture" technology has a long way to go. The background animation is fantastic, but the characters look wooden, stiff, and completely lacking emotion. I find the animation style they've created to be very uninvolving and distracting (if those two things can coexist).
Great idea. Lousy execution.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I've seen the Polar Express trailer in theaters a couple times, now. Every time I see it I think one thing: Uncanny Valley.
In the book, Santa shoots first. Revisionist bastards!
And on bittorrent November 5th.
I was under the impression that Pixar had fulfilled their contract for a set number of movies with Disney with the completion of "The Incredibles" could someone clarify?
First, I can't think of a more mundane and generic title. Continung this trend, the next Pixar film should be called Shoes - or maybe Toothbrushes. It's a moving story about a friendship between a floss dispenser and a tube of whitening toothpaste, and it also promotes dental hygiene!
Second - this is going to be hard - I love Pixar, and find their films to be great entertainment. But their schtick is starting to wear a little thin. We've done bugs, toys, monsters, and fish, and they've talked about doing robots. Now we're moving into consumer products. I'm curious how much longer this trend can continue, and whether or not they'll start slipping into that most humdrum of habits - the serial. Is it time for Toy Story 3 yet?
Pixar is brimming with incredible talent. That's why it will be such a shame if the public tires of seeing it applied to rather cliche genres. This is fantasy - we need new fantasy environments. Really alternate-reality stuff that veers between comic and wondrous. In the end, that's the highest calling of uber-powerful CGI art: to allow us to envision a previously unimaginable world. I think Pixar is, oddly enough, missing the boat in that regard.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I know that the Disney-Pixar deal lasts through the Incredibles (also Cars?) but unless there's some 11th hour deal to bring Pixar and Disney back together, one has to wonder what Disney is doing. Pixar is beating them to the punch with good characters and stories, and Polar Express looks pretty cool from a technology point of view (I can't comment on the story as I never read the book).
... "
My guess is that Disney is either in deep denial, and will let Pixar slip away and then truly be SOL, they'll resolve their differences (at which point Disney is happy that they don't have to put out their own stuff to counter-act Pixar, which would probably put some unfinished and poorly thought out stuff (think Treasure Planet), or they're really honestly working on something very cool that will come out of left field a la Toy Story, and everyone will say that "Disney has found the magic again", and "Who needs Pixar when you've got Disney's
Disney had a pretty long dry period until they hit it with Little Mermaid. Seeing how they were progressing (albiet slowly) from the ballroom scene in B&tB to the rather cool herd technology of Lion King (years before RotK), I'm actually pretty shocked that they've been unable to link good technology to a good story, being content to let Pixar do both jobs for them. My guess is that the Pixar-Disney deal never mentioned sharing source code, so Disney presumably will have to figure it all out for themselves.
OTOH, maybe they're abandoning animation altogether so they can put out more "Old Yellar" movies. In a few years, they may not have much choice.
The Polar Express was made almost exclusively with a method called performance capture, which drops digitized human actors into a computer-animated world.
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Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Really all that is necessary is a good story. $150 million worth of special effects WILL NOT guarantee a success, as much as Hollywood wants entertainment to be a widget factory and as much as all other entertainment (except publishing) wants to be Hollywood.
Movies and television shows often fail miserably because stories are "written" by formula. Tired setting + predictable characters + smartass pop-culture insults = crap and it will always be crap.
Yet, just like the game industry, when something does succeed (Pixar) everybody comes running, checkbooks in hand and starts throwing money all over the place (Disney) in an attempt to duplicate the financial success without taking the time to understand the reason for the success. People like a good story. It doesn't matter if its a book, a comic book, a television show or a movie. Only the story matters.
And note, for all their money, and all their former excellence, Disney is so busy trying to avoid paying royalties to Marvel and the Winnie the Pooh licensors (and firing their animators) that they are completely unable to compete in the animation industry. Oh sure, their name is on "The Incredibles," but buying a ticket to a concert doesn't make someone an orchestra conductor.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
You have a cartoon that basically looks just like Tom Hanks, sounding like Tom Hanks, but isn't Tom Hanks... so why not just draw him totally synthetically, rather than attempting some live-action morph effect?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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...
Yeah, but I know a lot of video games that won't touch the shit with a 40ft pole. Animators hate the thought of being reduced to the equivalent of highway-side trash collectors, trying to pretty the mocap solely by removing the trash.
Plus it prevents them from adding their own stylistic personality to characters. Look at Naughty Dog's games -- there's no way you could get that kind of genuine expression, both facially and with body language, from a perf-cap.
Of course, I have no idea how good the tech has gotten lately, I guess we'll see. Still there's just no way to replace a talented animator. All you can hope for is a more efficient way to generate gobs of average-looking content.
No, not at all. Sky Captain was filmed in black-and-white in front of a blue screen, the backgrounds were added in, then colorized. But all the characters you see are the actual filmed characters, in their actual costumes. The Polar Express is completely digital, based on advanced motion capture. Nobody wears costumes, and nothing you see came from film.
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.
What might ruin that great story for you, aside from special effects and profit-maximizing changes, is the nature of books themselves... your experience is unique. Translating one person's experience or interpretation of a book into a film is a dangerous act; you run the risk of alienating fans that didn't have the same experience. You also influence the experience of future readers by giving them a glimpse into your own vision of the story.
When I read Stephen King's The Stand a few years ago, there was a foreword where he said that he wasn't sure he'd ever make a movie version of the story. He cited "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as evidence of the damage a movie can do to a book. As fantastic as the movie is, it isn't the same (and does not hold the same kind of value) as the original text. If you see the movie and then read the book (as I did) you will never be able to get Jack Nicholson's performance out of your head as you read the character. Unfortunately for me, I also saw the movie adaptation of The Stand before reading the book.
I felt this way about LOTR, but was happy to see that it matched up with my expectations pretty well. Plus, it depicted what I had failed to visualize - Ents. I just couldn't figure out what they would look like.
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.
Taxi Driver isn't a very exciting title either, is it?
You think that's bad? What about The Godfather? Come on, a movie about some old guy you barely know that sends you bizarre Christmas presents? Please. At least Showgirls sounds exciting.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
"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).
Gollum was completely different. They did use motion capture to get him, but not exclusively. Sometimes the motion capture was only tweaked minimally by the animators, other times it was thrown away and used only as a guide, other times it wasn't even captured at all (like when Gollum is climbing down near the beggining of Two Towers) and he was completely hand animated. His face wasn't captured at all either, it was completely hand animated based on Serkiss's filmed performance. In Polar Express they seem to be using straigh untweaked motion capture for the body and faces of the characters, and at least from what I've seen in the trailers the results are the same I saw on the Final Fantasy movie, characters that just seem like moving mannequins, lacking the (in Disney's words) illusion of life. I guess it's the same that Disney found out when they were making Snow White, they were using some rotoscoping (filming an actor and then trace on top of it), and found that when they stayed too close to the filmed performance, the resulting animation was boring and lifeless.
Not only did they try adapting the graphical style, they recreated each picture from the book exactly in various frames throughout the movie. I am sure someone extremely attached to the original book may be able to pick this up. If they don't, I suspect they will find it an extremely drawing movie without really knowing why. The director said this was done out of respect for Van Allsburg original work. So yeah, damn straight they just adapted the graphical style. That was the whole point.