Friday, April 25, 2008

Movie Review: Beowulf

I finnnaaally saw the movie Beowulf!! It was cool and since it's a landmark film from ImageMovers Digital, I thought I should write up some comments.

I see this movie as being sort of a proof-of-concept for Robert Zemeckis's idea of the future of digital filmmaking. There is a lot of stuff that could have been better - sure. But the point is NOT to focus on the little errors in animation, or really intense long-zoom-out camera moves... it is important I think to look past those details and see the underlying technology itself. This is more of a proof of what CAN be done, and therefore what kind of technology can be used for future films and storytelling.

The extra features were AWESOME - really showed some crazy stuff about how they motion captured the characters. I can't believe they motion captured like 30 horses in their studio, that's INSANE! Anyway great concept, and script was pretty good, but this feels more like a "holy crap I can't believe they can do that" movie. It definitely shows major technical improvements over Polar Express from 5 years ago.

Extrapolating forwards by 5 years, I can imagine the future of the IM Digital work is going to be pretty phenomenal. This is really some of the hardest stuff to get "right" in CG - and pretty cool that they are tackling this problem head-on. I think it has a long way to go. But this certainly was a good "stab" at it, as it were. :)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey man, Do you prefer motion capture or no motion capture, because the Pixar's work is better than other studios. What is the "magic"? How you were TD of Pixar what do you have to say?