Consumer broadband seems to be in trouble worldwide. Carriers are cutting back with speed and download caps because (as I see it) demand is starting to exceed available infrastructure. Things will get tight for a few years but with the demand as high as it is backbone and provider capacities will be increased and the cost will eventually come down enough to up everyone's speeds (I hope anyway). For now we have to tighten our belts and accept lower speeds - if 1.5mbits can be called that anyway:-)
Here in Sydney Australia I just went from 3 years of 512kb down 128kb up capped cable to 28.8 dialup thanks to my old apartment being sold from under us. Months of phone calls to Telstra to try to get them to take my phone line off the damn multiplexer so I can get DSL have finally paid off so I will soon be leaving the land of dialup again for speeds similar to the ones I had on cable.
But my time back in dialup hell has been enlightening - the one thing I have noticed is that for normal web-browsing, it's fine - it's by no means acceptable long term as it affects my ability to make a living; I have to transfer work-in-progress MPEGS to my clients almost daily - but general browing is surprisingly ok, especially since I setup my hosts file to kill off most advertising. I think for regular browsing there is a sweet spot after which more speed doesn't really make much of a difference - we have a 100mbit fibre link at my day-job and as I said my cable link was only 512kb down but I noticed very little difference in page loading speeds between them (downloading linux ISOs though - then I noticed!). Barring World War III ( I reckon we have a 40% chance of avoiding it) broadband WILL get cheap again, and this time it will be for good - I'm already planning in a few years to put a machine room into the first house we buy and intend to move all my personal and client websites there... not to mention running a few game servers - Counterstrike 2 and Tribes 3 anyone?
As Seth points out in the interview, an alien civilization may be using spread spectrum radio broadcasts instead of the relatively easier to detect narrowband transmissions, they may well be using non-radio EM or even a kind of communication outside of our current knowledge of physics - an Einstein-Rosen bridge or something even more exotic.
But as he says, we can't wait for some new kind of physics. What we have NOW for picking up signals from other starsystems is a bunch of radio telescopes and as far as we know the most likely kind of signal to look for is either a deliberate "here we are" kind of message or "leaked" stuff like our TV broadcasts that have strong carrier signals. Sure that leaves out a hell of a lot of potential signals to look for but SETI has a very limited budget - Colgate probably spends more a week marketing toothbrushes than SETI uses in a year - so they have to look for the most likely candidate with the resources they have.
As new tech become available to then such as the 1hT array in a few years they can widen the search from hundreds of stars to millions. If there is only one civilization in that search group that was broadcasting back when the light we see left their sun then there's a good chance we'll hear them.
What gets me though is that given the lifespan of the galaxy there's time enough for millions of technological civilizations to arise - but *not all at the same time*. It could be that there's only ever one or two radio capable species alive in the whole galaxy at any given time. Even if there are hundreds or thousands of civizations active right now each is trapped at the bottom of a relativistic-well: there could be a bunch of guys with tentacles a hundred lightyears away sending us a "hullloooo? HELLoooooo??" message *right now* but it'll be a hundred years before we get it. Shit, Alpha Centuri could have been beaming out "pings" for fifty years but gave up 4.35 years and one day before Marconi built the first radio. But coinidences do happen, and they are more likely when playing the odds so I am still caustiously optimistic.
Given all of this, as is pointed out in the interview, maybe what we should be looking for is not something transient like a radio broadcast or a laser pulse - but examples of stellar engineering that would be evident for millions or billions of years, Dyson Spheres or something. Though to my mind any civilization that can build a Dyson Sphere has probably discovered an energy source a lot better than solar - zero point energy or something, so there may not be a hell of a lot of Dyson Spehere out there.
One of the big headaches in visual effects is integrating CGI objects into a plate with live actors. The only two ways really used are blue/green screening to get a matte, or if a blue/green screen wasn't available or practical (or if the onset crew just *fucked up* - they either light it wrong or they put it in the wrong place and the onset VFX supervisor is at the catering table eating doughnuts when they shoot that scene or any number of other blunders)... and rotoscoping which is a fancy word for tracing around an actor or part of set - frame by damn frame. Extra fun when you have to roto around an actor with wispy hair...
The other big headache is tracking a camera move. You basically feed the footage into a camera tracking program and define tracking points in the image; features in the frame which the computer follows as they move - the software uses a lot of maths to work out where in 3D space these 2D points are and creates a CG camera in your 3D app to match the move, you usually then have to build a rough proxy version of the set in 3D to go with it (unless the production has the bucks to spend and they get a LIDAR scan of the set). THEN you get to finally start putting in your 3D elements, that is if you haven't shat yourself and run out of the building screaming after a week or so of staring at the same bloody footage 10-12 hours a day...
Ahem... anyway - where this new system could come in useful is using depth perception to generate a z-buffer, which would allow the computer to isolate foreground and background objects - no need to blue screen you can just point and click an actor to get a matte. Tracking would be made easy(er, anyway) as you have an actual 3D plate to work with, feed it to one of those programs that can auto-model 3D geometry from photos and you get your proxy set for free too...
Big blue screen shoots are tough on actors, just ask anyone that worked on one of the new star wars movies. They have to spend hours waiting for the screens to be set-up and lit, and the choreography of shooting a scene with a digital character is painful to learn, not to mention the hassles and expense of shooting with a motion control camera. Not only would a system like this speed up production but presumably with a real-time z-buffer being generated the cast and crew could interact with lo-res versions of the CG characters in real-time on monitors to get a better feel of what they are doing.
In fact as a wider application, once we all have depth-percieving videophones you could matte in any image behind yourself you want - great for phoning in sick from the beach:)
Sadly there aren't any PVR units available for sale here in Australia yet so I decided to build my own.
I bought a Hauppauge WIN-TV PVR (PCI) card for video capture. It has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder with many settings for quality from 2mb/sec to the ridiculously high 12mb/sec with the option of constant or variable bitrate. After testing I settled on 4mbit/sec VBR which looks great - sometimes it's easy to forget I'm not watching a live broadcast. Importantly it also has a "pause" feature just like a commercial PVR which is great for dealing with the amount of calls I get from clients at all hours. Output to the TV is via S-VHS from an old GeForce 1 card that has TV-out built in. initially I wanted to use the MPEG decoder card from my DVD kit for output but after testing, the output from the geforce is so close in quality I just use it, plus then I get to use the PC even while it's recording (the hardware encoder means no dropped frames ever). The box is just a celeron 900 with a half gig of ram running win2k - there is a linux driver available for the Hauppauge on sourceforge but the PC is part of my render farm (I'm a 3D animator by trade) and 3dsmax only runs on windows (for now).
The software that ships with the Hauppauge is, well, shitty. It works fine but the interface sucks, especially when you've used showshifter (www.showshifter.com) though from reading showshifter's forums apparently it will soon support the WintTV PVR board. In the meantime I have simply "frontended" the Hauppage software using scripting in Automate from Unisyn. I've bound all the major features to the cute rubber buttons on the internet keyboard on my coffee table and I've even been able to do things like have the scroll-lock light flash when recording (for when we're not watching TV via the PC). For scheduling I go to the Aussie TV guide at sofcom.com.au to pick out my weeks viewing - the lounge box has winvnc on it so I can program it from my office or even start recording if I see something good and don't have time to run out to the lounge. I use PowerDVD for mpeg playback, mainly cause you can fast forward and rewind using the scroll wheel on the mouse - trez chic
For the future I just ordered a Redrat2 IR controller from www.redrat.co.uk to give the box control over my satellite decoder, and I plan to add functionality like being able to email the box to program it etc. I also use the box as our stereo to play MP3's and I've recently begun ripping (my own!!) most watched DVDs to my server's 160 gb logical drive using smartripper to prevent my favourite DVDs getting scratched from constant use. I don't re-encode, just copy the VOB files and re-name them as.mpgs. It takes up a bit of space but that's cheap these days.
"So what you're telling us is that the Thai people basically sit around conspiring to steal random white children."
No, members of the criminal undreground in Thailand do the conspiring. And it's any children not just white (incidentally my Uncle's wife is a pacific islander from Naru, so my cousin isn't white)
"Ah. He has stories. I'll buy that. But is there any reason to believe any of them?"
Of course one should be sceptical when hearing anecdotes of this kind, here are some links regarding the practice:
A few years back my uncle was living and working in Bangkok with his family. One day he was at a supermarket checkout, he turned his back for a second, when he turned back he saw the checkout operators passing his 1 year old son to one another down towards the front doors where a guy waited on a motorbike. Mike managed to get to him before he'd gone more than a couple of checkout girls, and within a few weeks he sent his family to live back in New Zealand.
He's got a few stories about ex-pats over there who were not so lucky with their children. Provided they were SAFE I would have one of these implanted in my children in a second, and once they are old enough have it removed.
However, having had a scare a couple of years back with a guy who was stalking my girlfriend, maybe it'd be better to leave it in.
Here's hoping that the one shaping up between China and the US gets us a permanant foothold out there beyond earth orbit. (Without killing us all in the process)
However, NZ is an interesting political study. They have a near-fascist government run by some near-socialist politicians. (Hmmm, it makes one think about socialist/fascist congruences, does it not?) But it's a low-density backwater, after all. (NZ flamers, don't even bother, that is reality of your actual irrelevance.)
Y'know being from New Zealand I really should flame back with some hackneyed
Yank bashing; but it's just that sitting here in Sydney savoring a glass of
Maker's Mark bourbon and Coca-Cola, wearing a pair of Calvin Klein underwear
under a pair of Levis jeans, typing this on my Compaq SP700 with a Buzz Lightyear sitting on it, and watching a
zone-1 copy of Titan A.E, getting ready to go to bed so I can get up early
to go to work in an industry created by Americans (3D CGI), working on an
American project at an American studio (Fox) - I don't know, it'd just feel
hypocritical somehow....
> Whatever happened to the right to remain silent?
Read our constitution - that's right, we don't have one.... basically, we're screwed. Pretty much why I left. (have you seen the value of our dollar lately?? )
I'm a Kiwi living in Australia. In the last few years I have seen the Aussies pass a similar law allowing their police and intelligence services similar, if not identical powers, and there's a bunch of data-warehousing jerks somewhere here that have been given the go-ahead to build profiles of everyone in the country, for god knows what uses. If this was a concern to me, then the fact the my bloody homeland is following suit certainly is. I thought with the whole anti-nuke thing and the Kiwis being one of the first to blow the whistle on Echelon (from hazy memory) we were showing a bit of backbone.
1. I didn't know that, thanks. But which mission would get more publicity? Which really in the long run may even work out to be a good thing. As tacky and awful sounding as that scenario would be (Mission To Mir(tm))it would certainly put the idea of manned spaceflight into the minds of the greater public. Commercialisation of space is likely to be the best hope for our race expanding out there - it would just suck if I had to take a ride on the USS Taco Bell for my first spaceflight (not that I would refuse to go)
2. Why not de-orbit it? It's outlived it's use-by date and has been a great sucess. But now it's starting to grow fungus and dissolve. The ISS will be operational soon to take it's place. I have no idea what state Mir is in, but if it can be safely refurbished, great. Otherwise to continue using it is probably a bit risky.
In an age where manned exploration of space seems to have taken a slug to the guts since the Apollo days, there is something quite sad about seeing an actual spacecraft, the product of a once proud space program being sold off as "a nice playhouse for kids".
The Russians used to have a fearsome space program, one that very nearly saw them reach the moon and beyond. Now they are so strapped for cash they are selling their spacecraft for treehouses (I know, whoever buys it will most certainly not use it as such and likely treasure it, and that's good) and willing to let some smarmy TV exec use their space station as the destination for first prize in a gameshow. Frankly I hope they de-orbit it first. When my grandkids ask me "so what was the first privately funded manned space mission?" I'd hate to have to respond that it was a "reality show" putting some clueless mugging idiot in space, so some TV network could sell primo advertising space to a bunch of softdrink and tampon manufacturers.
I smell blood in the water
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 2
from the looks of the trailer, and by the way the upper lips curled up on all who viewed it here, I can see this movie going bosoms-up at the box office.
And then boys and girls, it is a sure bet that every (and there are quite a few, looking to cash in on pre-LOTR swords and sorcery mania - look at all the mar's movies made/being made recently) every fantasy picture in pre-production is going to get shit-canned by nervy executives eyeing the Hindenburg-like demise of DnD.
Further to this, come xmas 2001 when Peter Jackson's LOTR fucking blows the DOORS off theaters around the world; we will see a horde of shoddy knock off's hastily produced only to die horribly, and the cycle beings anew. I'd be surprised if there weren't a few sucesses, but for the most part they will be about as satisfying as Mission To Mars.
And just a word on the trailer - pretty-boy main characters spouting dialogue lifted from Scream?? No, no, no, no, no.
Also speaking as someone in the FX industry - film schedules are hellish, political beasts. Whoever pulled the FX off for this look like they were asked to produce a TITANIC amount of shots in probably a very short time, and almost certainly with infighting among the people driving the project (happens EVERY time). What I saw here, taking into consideration what must have been a grueling post-production peroid, was very impressive for what it is. Jurasic Park/Dragonheart quality is very expensive to produce when you consider the cost of just one Softimage seat, the SGI/Wintel box to run it, the per-CPU cost of licensing an advanced renderer like Pixar's PRMAN (you should see that bastard do lizard skin) the cost of the operator, the compositing suites, the film scanning and recording, shader development yadda yadda yadda. Not to mention the sheer volume of research, motion tests, building and testing working IK/FK rigs for each character (skeletons, basically). Frankly I'm amazed they pulled it off and if some of the CG looks, well, CG-ish, just consider the amount of work that was put into it. Frankly if I saw a job like that come across my desk it'd give me a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.
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Here in Sydney Australia I just went from 3 years of 512kb down 128kb up capped cable to 28.8 dialup thanks to my old apartment being sold from under us. Months of phone calls to Telstra to try to get them to take my phone line off the damn multiplexer so I can get DSL have finally paid off so I will soon be leaving the land of dialup again for speeds similar to the ones I had on cable.
But my time back in dialup hell has been enlightening - the one thing I have noticed is that for normal web-browsing, it's fine - it's by no means acceptable long term as it affects my ability to make a living; I have to transfer work-in-progress MPEGS to my clients almost daily - but general browing is surprisingly ok, especially since I setup my hosts file to kill off most advertising. I think for regular browsing there is a sweet spot after which more speed doesn't really make much of a difference - we have a 100mbit fibre link at my day-job and as I said my cable link was only 512kb down but I noticed very little difference in page loading speeds between them (downloading linux ISOs though - then I noticed!). Barring World War III ( I reckon we have a 40% chance of avoiding it) broadband WILL get cheap again, and this time it will be for good - I'm already planning in a few years to put a machine room into the first house we buy and intend to move all my personal and client websites there... not to mention running a few game servers - Counterstrike 2 and Tribes 3 anyone?
But as he says, we can't wait for some new kind of physics. What we have NOW for picking up signals from other starsystems is a bunch of radio telescopes and as far as we know the most likely kind of signal to look for is either a deliberate "here we are" kind of message or "leaked" stuff like our TV broadcasts that have strong carrier signals. Sure that leaves out a hell of a lot of potential signals to look for but SETI has a very limited budget - Colgate probably spends more a week marketing toothbrushes than SETI uses in a year - so they have to look for the most likely candidate with the resources they have.
As new tech become available to then such as the 1hT array in a few years they can widen the search from hundreds of stars to millions. If there is only one civilization in that search group that was broadcasting back when the light we see left their sun then there's a good chance we'll hear them.
What gets me though is that given the lifespan of the galaxy there's time enough for millions of technological civilizations to arise - but *not all at the same time*. It could be that there's only ever one or two radio capable species alive in the whole galaxy at any given time. Even if there are hundreds or thousands of civizations active right now each is trapped at the bottom of a relativistic-well: there could be a bunch of guys with tentacles a hundred lightyears away sending us a "hullloooo? HELLoooooo??" message *right now* but it'll be a hundred years before we get it. Shit, Alpha Centuri could have been beaming out "pings" for fifty years but gave up 4.35 years and one day before Marconi built the first radio. But coinidences do happen, and they are more likely when playing the odds so I am still caustiously optimistic.
Given all of this, as is pointed out in the interview, maybe what we should be looking for is not something transient like a radio broadcast or a laser pulse - but examples of stellar engineering that would be evident for millions or billions of years, Dyson Spheres or something. Though to my mind any civilization that can build a Dyson Sphere has probably discovered an energy source a lot better than solar - zero point energy or something, so there may not be a hell of a lot of Dyson Spehere out there.
The other big headache is tracking a camera move. You basically feed the footage into a camera tracking program and define tracking points in the image; features in the frame which the computer follows as they move - the software uses a lot of maths to work out where in 3D space these 2D points are and creates a CG camera in your 3D app to match the move, you usually then have to build a rough proxy version of the set in 3D to go with it (unless the production has the bucks to spend and they get a LIDAR scan of the set). THEN you get to finally start putting in your 3D elements, that is if you haven't shat yourself and run out of the building screaming after a week or so of staring at the same bloody footage 10-12 hours a day...
Ahem... anyway - where this new system could come in useful is using depth perception to generate a z-buffer, which would allow the computer to isolate foreground and background objects - no need to blue screen you can just point and click an actor to get a matte. Tracking would be made easy(er, anyway) as you have an actual 3D plate to work with, feed it to one of those programs that can auto-model 3D geometry from photos and you get your proxy set for free too...
Big blue screen shoots are tough on actors, just ask anyone that worked on one of the new star wars movies. They have to spend hours waiting for the screens to be set-up and lit, and the choreography of shooting a scene with a digital character is painful to learn, not to mention the hassles and expense of shooting with a motion control camera. Not only would a system like this speed up production but presumably with a real-time z-buffer being generated the cast and crew could interact with lo-res versions of the CG characters in real-time on monitors to get a better feel of what they are doing.
In fact as a wider application, once we all have depth-percieving videophones you could matte in any image behind yourself you want - great for phoning in sick from the beach :)
I bought a Hauppauge WIN-TV PVR (PCI) card for video capture. It has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder with many settings for quality from 2mb/sec to the ridiculously high 12mb/sec with the option of constant or variable bitrate. After testing I settled on 4mbit/sec VBR which looks great - sometimes it's easy to forget I'm not watching a live broadcast. Importantly it also has a "pause" feature just like a commercial PVR which is great for dealing with the amount of calls I get from clients at all hours. Output to the TV is via S-VHS from an old GeForce 1 card that has TV-out built in. initially I wanted to use the MPEG decoder card from my DVD kit for output but after testing, the output from the geforce is so close in quality I just use it, plus then I get to use the PC even while it's recording (the hardware encoder means no dropped frames ever). The box is just a celeron 900 with a half gig of ram running win2k - there is a linux driver available for the Hauppauge on sourceforge but the PC is part of my render farm (I'm a 3D animator by trade) and 3dsmax only runs on windows (for now).
The software that ships with the Hauppauge is, well, shitty. It works fine but the interface sucks, especially when you've used showshifter (www.showshifter.com) though from reading showshifter's forums apparently it will soon support the WintTV PVR board. In the meantime I have simply "frontended" the Hauppage software using scripting in Automate from Unisyn. I've bound all the major features to the cute rubber buttons on the internet keyboard on my coffee table and I've even been able to do things like have the scroll-lock light flash when recording (for when we're not watching TV via the PC). For scheduling I go to the Aussie TV guide at sofcom.com.au to pick out my weeks viewing - the lounge box has winvnc on it so I can program it from my office or even start recording if I see something good and don't have time to run out to the lounge. I use PowerDVD for mpeg playback, mainly cause you can fast forward and rewind using the scroll wheel on the mouse - trez chic
For the future I just ordered a Redrat2 IR controller from www.redrat.co.uk to give the box control over my satellite decoder, and I plan to add functionality like being able to email the box to program it etc. I also use the box as our stereo to play MP3's and I've recently begun ripping (my own!!) most watched DVDs to my server's 160 gb logical drive using smartripper to prevent my favourite DVDs getting scratched from constant use. I don't re-encode, just copy the VOB files and re-name them as
No, members of the criminal undreground in Thailand do the conspiring. And it's any children not just white (incidentally my Uncle's wife is a pacific islander from Naru, so my cousin isn't white)
"Ah. He has stories. I'll buy that. But is there any reason to believe any of them?"
Of course one should be sceptical when hearing anecdotes of this kind, here are some links regarding the practice:
an article from the Bangkok Post
a report that explains the issue very well
And for further reading:
the results of a search using keywords "bangkok kidnap children" on google
He's got a few stories about ex-pats over there who were not so lucky with their children. Provided they were SAFE I would have one of these implanted in my children in a second, and once they are old enough have it removed.
However, having had a scare a couple of years back with a guy who was stalking my girlfriend, maybe it'd be better to leave it in.
Here's hoping that the one shaping up between China and the US gets us a permanant foothold out there beyond earth orbit. (Without killing us all in the process)
Loony, as Brits/Aussies/Kiwis/Monty Python fans know, is slang for nutcase...
From dictionary.com:
loony adj : informal or slang terms for mentally irregular [syn: balmy, barmy, bats, batty, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crackers, daft, dotty, fruity, haywire, kooky, kookie, loco, loopy, nuts, nutty, wacky] n : someone deranged and possibly dangerous [syn: crazy, looney, weirdo]
However, NZ is an interesting political study. They have a near-fascist government run by some near-socialist politicians. (Hmmm, it makes one think about socialist/fascist congruences, does it not?) But it's a low-density backwater, after all. (NZ flamers, don't even bother, that is reality of your actual irrelevance.)
Y'know being from New Zealand I really should flame back with some hackneyed Yank bashing; but it's just that sitting here in Sydney savoring a glass of Maker's Mark bourbon and Coca-Cola, wearing a pair of Calvin Klein underwear under a pair of Levis jeans, typing this on my Compaq SP700 with a Buzz Lightyear sitting on it, and watching a zone-1 copy of Titan A.E, getting ready to go to bed so I can get up early to go to work in an industry created by Americans (3D CGI), working on an American project at an American studio (Fox) - I don't know, it'd just feel hypocritical somehow....
Read our constitution - that's right, we don't have one.... basically, we're screwed. Pretty much why I left. (have you seen the value of our dollar lately?? )
I'm a Kiwi living in Australia. In the last few years I have seen the Aussies pass a similar law allowing their police and intelligence services similar, if not identical powers, and there's a bunch of data-warehousing jerks somewhere here that have been given the go-ahead to build profiles of everyone in the country, for god knows what uses. If this was a concern to me, then the fact the my bloody homeland is following suit certainly is. I thought with the whole anti-nuke thing and the Kiwis being one of the first to blow the whistle on Echelon (from hazy memory) we were showing a bit of backbone.
2. Why not de-orbit it? It's outlived it's use-by date and has been a great sucess. But now it's starting to grow fungus and dissolve. The ISS will be operational soon to take it's place. I have no idea what state Mir is in, but if it can be safely refurbished, great. Otherwise to continue using it is probably a bit risky.
The Russians used to have a fearsome space program, one that very nearly saw them reach the moon and beyond. Now they are so strapped for cash they are selling their spacecraft for treehouses (I know, whoever buys it will most certainly not use it as such and likely treasure it, and that's good) and willing to let some smarmy TV exec use their space station as the destination for first prize in a gameshow. Frankly I hope they de-orbit it first. When my grandkids ask me "so what was the first privately funded manned space mission?" I'd hate to have to respond that it was a "reality show" putting some clueless mugging idiot in space, so some TV network could sell primo advertising space to a bunch of softdrink and tampon manufacturers.
And then boys and girls, it is a sure bet that every (and there are quite a few, looking to cash in on pre-LOTR swords and sorcery mania - look at all the mar's movies made/being made recently) every fantasy picture in pre-production is going to get shit-canned by nervy executives eyeing the Hindenburg-like demise of DnD.
Further to this, come xmas 2001 when Peter Jackson's LOTR fucking blows the DOORS off theaters around the world; we will see a horde of shoddy knock off's hastily produced only to die horribly, and the cycle beings anew. I'd be surprised if there weren't a few sucesses, but for the most part they will be about as satisfying as Mission To Mars.
And just a word on the trailer - pretty-boy main characters spouting dialogue lifted from Scream?? No, no, no, no, no.
Also speaking as someone in the FX industry - film schedules are hellish, political beasts. Whoever pulled the FX off for this look like they were asked to produce a TITANIC amount of shots in probably a very short time, and almost certainly with infighting among the people driving the project (happens EVERY time). What I saw here, taking into consideration what must have been a grueling post-production peroid, was very impressive for what it is. Jurasic Park/Dragonheart quality is very expensive to produce when you consider the cost of just one Softimage seat, the SGI/Wintel box to run it, the per-CPU cost of licensing an advanced renderer like Pixar's PRMAN (you should see that bastard do lizard skin) the cost of the operator, the compositing suites, the film scanning and recording, shader development yadda yadda yadda. Not to mention the sheer volume of research, motion tests, building and testing working IK/FK rigs for each character (skeletons, basically). Frankly I'm amazed they pulled it off and if some of the CG looks, well, CG-ish, just consider the amount of work that was put into it. Frankly if I saw a job like that come across my desk it'd give me a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies.