Let it be known that I am very unimpressed with the Beowulf trailer. Even if Gaiman feels its 2D presentation doesn’t do it justice, that hardly makes up for the dodgy facial animation, PS2-quality ocean and weird stilted horses.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very very well done, even the ‘dodgy animation’, but it is instantly recognizable as sub-reality, and thus lands itself square in uncanny valley.
I just don’t believe we have the technology to do this properly. Not yet.
And while I have a lot of faith in Zemeckis, he is one of my favorite directors in fact, this stab at the new 3D cinema that’s on the rise (thanks to Cameron, Lucas and Jackson I suppose), is so far not getting much hype in the Heilemann/Andersen household.
PS: Not to mention the horrible compression on, at least, the 720p trailer!
PPS: My opinion is more important than yours, since Beowulf takes place partly in Denmark, so there!
PPPS: I would love to see the Beowulf opera Elliot Goldenthal composed the music for; alas I only have a horrible bootleg of just the music, and I doubt it will be touring to Denmark any time soon; and if it does, I doubt I’ll be able to get tickets. Oh voe.
PPPPS: Crispin Glover being in this must mean the Back to the Future II rift has mellowed over the years… Glover is an odd fish…
Good to know I’m not the only one who had a problem with the compression. I’ve always been disappointed with bad H.264 compression on non-photo elements (logos, text, cartoons, etc.) but that was just pitiful.
I’m reserving judgement until I see more especially because there are so many changes that could take place between now and the film’s completion. My only thought though is if they are making the 3d actors look like the real actors – why bother? Far too gimmicky for my tastes.
[quote post=“2638”]I just don’t believe we have the technology to do this properly. Not yet.[/quote]
So we shouldn’t try until we do?
;)
Why not try this technology and perfect it with shorts? Why spend all that money for a feature length movie that features, as Michael says, ‘dodgy animation’? I watched the trailer this morning and Michael put into words exactly what I was thinking. We look back at Jurassic Park and see that the CGI isn’t perfect. But at the time, it really looked impressive and convincing. If you can’t convince your audience when they watch it for the first time, why would they want to submit themselves to it ever again? I think he’s really brought the technology ahead, but I just don’t think it’s ready for this yet (as Michael said).
Oh God that’s painful to watch. It’s not quite as bad as Polar Express, but in a way the faces are so photorealistic that the dodgy animation is even worse.
I do believe the technology is absolutely ready — it’s just that most people aren’t able to make decent stuff with it. I also think, very frankly and very seriously, that some animators (if not Zemeckis himself) got to have mild levels of autism to produce stuff like this and consider themselves done.
Sure, go ahead, but I predict that the response will be something along the lines of:
Crispin Glover is more than an odd fish. ;) He’s the oddest.
I actually watched Jurassic Park yesterday and it still really holds up, CGI-wise. Maybe because there really were so little of it? The blend between CGI, animatronic and man-in-suit is still the way to go.
I remember Tron setting computer animation in movies back several years because noone believed in the technology after that movie. Maybe that’s what Beowulf is doing to full mocap movies?
Got to watch Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within again, and see how it holds up. :)
Reserving my judgement..
A good quality high-resolution screen is not what the film will be designed to be seen on and the dynamics of a huge 20 foot high by however many hundreds of feet wide screen are vastly different to a smaller high-resolution LCD display.
Just an observation – ever watched LOTR on a high-res LCD? The animation is very obviously CGI. Yet we love it still, because it capture the essence of the story and pulls us in. We forgive the occasional MASSIVE glitches, the odd look to the cave troll and so on because the film, itself, rocks.
As long as Angelina tries (hard) to not steal every scene, it might not be too bad.
CGI is at a level now where blending real with CGI would be virtually impossible to distinguish, the problems are two fold, cost and time. Both restrict what can be done, not the technology.
There’s a very good discussion about this trailer and its technology on CHUD’s message board.
http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103101
[quote comment=“143866”]Just an observation – ever watched LOTR on a high-res LCD? The animation is very obviously CGI. Yet we love it still, because it capture the essence of the story and pulls us in. We forgive the occasional MASSIVE glitches, the odd look to the cave troll and so on because the film, itself, rocks.[/quote]
There are vast differences between LotR and Beowulf though. First of all, the vast majority of the characters in LotR are real humans, and they’re the ones we connect with. And it’s partially because of them that we allow for the sometimes fudged effect shot (the flooding of Isengard for instance).
Likewise, Gollum is just enough non-human for his (though very good) from time to time slightly stiff animation to work, because we can see that he isn’t 100% human. It’s the same reason Yoda worked…
Slightly OT: But since I live in Denmark, does that mean that my opinion is as important as yours, Michael? ;)
Of course not. Tsk tsk.
[quote post=“2638”]I just don’t believe we have the technology to do this properly. Not yet.[/quote]
You know what? I think we actualy HAVE the technology to do this kind of movie but filmmakers don’t use it properly. I mean, the tools are there, its only a question of time and skills to use them right.
As for Beowulf, I don’t understand why they animated real actors instead of using them for “real”…
I agree with the last person… why not just use real actors? :/
[quote comment=“144062”]You know what? I think we actualy HAVE the technology to do this kind of movie but filmmakers don’t use it properly. I mean, the tools are there, its only a question of time and skills to use them right.[/quote]
Back it up with an example, and you have yourself an argument :) — That ‘the technology exists, but no one can use it properly’ argument is self-destructive really.
As someone who does quite some research in the ‘area’ of computer graphics, simulation and animation, I beg to differ that we have this kind of technology. I believe that we are still far off being able to get completely realistic ‘animated content’ on the screen. If by ‘properly’ you mean that filmmakers should just spend more time and effort painstakingly hand-animating 3D models frame by frame, yes that sounds attractive. But it turns out that if they would do that, it would take 30+ years to develop a movie that even comes close to reality. And there would still be glitches, small errors that nobody had noticed before, just because it is not real footage. It is generated content, so errors are possible (it is not produced by the laws of physics in the real world).
Film makers always run the risk that, whenever one notices a technical glitch, an error that doesn’t correspond to what our eyes and brain expect in the physical world around us, it completely invalidates whatever sense of reality you would’ve built up until that point in the movie. That is why I think computer animation/simulation should always be used to either augment live footage and/or to create a story that is clearly not part of reality as we know it, successfully done in the past in movies such as LOTR, Sin City, The Incredibles, …
I do believe the technology is absolutely ready — it’s just that most people aren’t able to make decent stuff with it.
All we need is one example of that being true. Just one human being, a few seconds and no doubt that he is real, except he isn’t… (or she, doesn’t matter).
I follow the world of effects fairly close, and I haven’t seen anything like that.
Yes, the effects in Pirates come close, but they’re creatures, not people…