Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
Disney's Animated Response
By Rick Aristotle Munarriz
Now that Pixar is in the Disney bloodstream, it seems that a few of Disney's in-house animators are being shown the door. Several reports over the weekend had the family entertainment giant letting go of as much as 20% of its 800-strong workforce. Pixar's headcount, supposedly, won't be chopped.
After a string of mostly lackluster productions, Disney has whittled away at its ink-and-paint staff in the past. This move appears tame by comparison. It's also not a very surprising decision. The company had already indicated that it was hacking away at the number of live-action features it would be producing, so it's only natural to see it follow suit in non-Pixar animation.
In the past, cynics would have considered a move like this to be retreat. It just doesn't feel that way these days. Under CEO Bob Iger's leadership, terms like "addition through subtraction" and an emphasis on quality over quantity aren't likely to draw snickers. Disney really does feel like it's coming together as a quality family entertainment powerhouse, even if it had to acquire some of the key parts -- like Pixar -- to get there.
Steve Hulett, an Animation Guild representative that Reuters cited in its story on the matter, claims that Disney is lengthening its production timeline on new releases from a year to 18 months. That doesn't sound like the move of a company trying to skimp on costs. It sounds like a commitment to quality. Pixar and DreamWorks Animation have come to rule the computer animation space, in part because of their longer development cycles. Better stories and crisper animation have helped set their efforts apart from many of their rivals, as well as from some of Disney's rushed theatrical and direct-to-video offerings.
Yes, you can produce rendered magic in a hurry and on a shoestring budget, but it's not worth the near-term cost savings. Disney fell into that trap during the latter half of Michael Eisner's tenure, and it began to pay for it dearly in brand-sapping duds and a $7.4 billion bailout in the form of a Pixar purchase.
As long as it leans on the Pixar gray matter, which has done nothing but serve up classy epic after classy epic, Disney's future will be brighter than its bleaker recent past in in-house animation.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Animation goes wild with talking critters
The recent onslaught of computer-generated 'toons is expected to stir interest in stories over technique.
By David Germain
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - Prancing penguins. Rascally rodents. Sociable squirrels. Saber-toothed tigers. The Hollywood hills were alive with talking critters in 2006, possibly the biggest year ever for movie animation.
With the barrage of ads for flicks about cute, fuzzy wildlife and other cartoon creations, are audiences having trouble telling one from the other, and, more important, are they getting overloaded by animation?
"There's definitely an overload, and I think everyone recognizes that," said George Miller, director of the latest animated adventure, the Warner Bros. penguin romp Happy Feet, which opened Friday and was No. 1 at the box office for the weekend.
In the decade since Disney and Pixar's Toy Story revolutionized the industry with computer-generated images instead of hand-drawn cartoons, first DreamWorks with Shrek and then other major studios leaped into the animation business.
As with the initial novelty of talking pictures nearly 80 years ago, computer animation's early appeal resulted partly from its fresh look. Now, CGI films have become the standard, so commonplace that the story - not the style - is more crucial than ever in a movie's success or failure.
"What's happened is, no longer will people go see CG animation simply because it's CG-animated, as they did when they first saw Toy Story. Everything will have to work on its own merits," Miller said. "Sure, when The Jazz Singer came out, people turned up to see sound pictures. In a handful of years, people no longer turned up to hear movies. They just turned up to see a movie they thought was good. The same thing is happening with animation."
For Disney, Something Old (and Short) Is New Again
MOVIEGOERS who have become inured to pre-show car ads and trivia quizzes may soon get something old enough to seem new: cartoon shorts.
After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years — “Destino,” “Lorenzo” and “The Little Match Girl” — but those were more artistic exercise than commercial endeavor. The new cartoons, by contrast, are an effort by a new leadership team from Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the Burbank company back at the forefront of animation with a form it once pioneered.
“The impetus comes from John Lasseter, who takes the idea from Walt Disney and 100 years of film history,” said Don Hahn, producer of “The Lion King” and “The Little Match Girl,” in a recent interview at his studio office. “Shorts have always been a wellspring of techniques, ideas and young talent. It’s exactly what Walt did, because it’s a new studio now, with new talent coming up — as it should. I think the shorts program can really grow this studio as it grew Pixar, as it grew Walt’s studio.”
Although audiences today are more familiar with his feature films, Walt Disney’s reputation was originally built on shorts. In the 1930s “A Mickey Mouse Cartoon” appeared on theater marquees with the titles of the features, and Disney won 10 Oscars for cartoon shorts between 1932 and 1942. He used the “Silly Symphonies” to train his artists as they geared up to create “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” But after World War II Disney phased out short cartoons because of rising production costs and the minimal amount theater owners would pay for them.
Mr. Hahn said the new shorts would be screened in theaters along with Disney films. “You pay your 10 bucks to see a movie,” he said, “and you get a surprise you hadn’t counted on.” The new shorts will be done in traditional 2-D animation, computer graphics or a combination of the two media, depending on the story and the visual style.
This is not the first attempt at such a revival. Warner Brothers, for example, tried to bring back the classic Looney Tunes characters in new shorts in 2003, but they proved unsuccessful and most of them were never screened theatrically.
View full story.Disney to cut 160 workers in animation
December 2, 2006
Walt Disney Co. said Friday that it would dismiss about 160 of the 800 employees in its feature animation unit as the company slowed production at what once was its crown jewel.
The 20% cutback comes nearly a year after Disney purchased Pixar Animation Studios, maker of such computer-animated hits as "Cars" and "The Incredibles." Pixar executives including creative guru John Lasseter took control of the Disney group, aiming to revive an operation that was a crucial profit center before it lost ground to other studios.
"With John Lasseter from Pixar being put over the division, and the much brighter track record they've had, he's going to keep his guys and his projects first," said David Koenig, an author of books on Disney.
The number of artists, technologists and production managers in Burbank will be reduced. A separate TV animation unit is unaffected.
Employees said they were told that because the average production time for the Burbank company's animated films was expanding from 12 months to 18 months, fewer staffers could handle the workload.
"The management team at Walt Disney Animation has determined that each film will dictate its own appropriate production schedule," Disney Studios spokeswoman Heidi Trotta said. "The result of this necessitated a reduction of staff."
Hundreds of the division's employees are members of the local animators guild and are covered under a collective-bargaining contract. But management can choose whom to fire based on skill level instead of seniority, guild business representative Steve Hulett said. Notification of those affected is to begin the week of Dec. 11.
"Everybody's wondering who's going to be getting the ax," Hulett said.
View full story.
A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation
As the CG discipline has matured, researchers have moved from trying to discover fundamental drawing and rendering techniques, and have looked to increasing the complexity, and in some respects, the realism of synthetic images. Hardware has helped in this quest, but the algorithms that are embedded in hardware were first (usually) written and tested in software, later migrating to hardware.
One of the keys to complex realistic images is to represent the laws of nature and the physical environment in such a way that they are reasonably accurate and consistent, yet approximated in such a way as to allow reasonable computation speeds. CG researchers have often resorted to "tricks" that fool the observer into believing that the physical laws are represented ... the proof, as some maintain, is in the believability of the image, not necessarily in the accuracy of the representation.
Some of the more important attempts at realistic image synthesis are covered below. Many of the researchers are leaders in the field, and many have won awards for their contributions to the discipline.
View full entry.Saturday, December 02, 2006
Wikipedia: The Wild -- Criticism
Criticism
The Wild received some harsh responses even before the trailer premiered. Movies.com described it as "Madagascar meets Finding Nemo with The Lion King thrown in for effect."
The movie has many similarities to Madagascar including its setting in New York, similar animals as characters, and the primary plot of introducing zoo animals to the wild. The name of the film and the tag line, "Start spreading the newspaper", a play on the opening line from the "Theme from New York, New York", were both used as integral plot points in Madagascar. The koala's line "Sprechen sie koala?" mirrors Madagascar's: "You. quadraped[sic]. Sprechen sie English?" Because of this, some people believe that the movie is a possible plagiarism of Madagascar, a Jack Bauer-meets-Madagascar film. Rotten Tomatoes describes the critics' consensus on The Wild as "With a rehashed plot and unimpressive animation, there's nothing wild about The Wild". As of July 13, 2006, only 19% of reviews from critics there were positive; the negative reviews frequently compared The Wild with Madagascar.
However, there is strong evidence that The Wild was in production first. Director Steve Williams said that he received the script in 2001. His contract with Disney stated that C.O.R.E would animate, and this contract was green-lit in 2003. The Wild has reportedly been in some form of production for a decade, first being called The Big Break, then Wildlife, and finally The Wild. Animators from the film have come forward on internet communities such as IMDb and stated openly that they had been working on The Wild already when they first saw the trailer for Madagascar. Several even believe that Marty's line "I wish I could go to The Wild!" from Madagascar is a direct mocking of their own efforts. It should also be mentioned that when it came out in 2005, Madagascar was panned by critics for its underwhelming story and relatively poor animation, further suspecting many to believe that the film had been rushed into production and released. Although despite that Madagascar was better received by the public, than The Wild.
Other movies with similar plots include:
- A Bug's Life and Antz, released in 1998, both are computer animated features with individualist ants in colonies under threat.
- Flushed Away (2006) and Ratatouille (2007) are both animated (computer animated) films about rats.
- Finding Nemo (2003) and Shark Tale (2004) are both computer animated movies centered around a community of undersea animals.
From Wikipedia: Computer animation - Detailed examples and pseudocode
This excerpt explains the "magic" behind computer animation.
In 2D computer animation, moving objects are often referred to as "sprites.” A sprite is an image that has a location associated with it. The location of the sprite is changed slightly, between each displayed frame, to make the sprite appear to move. The following pseudocode makes a sprite move from left to right:
var int x := 0, y := screenHeight ÷ 2;
while x <>// draw on top of the background
x := x + 5 // move to the right Modern (2001) computer animation uses different techniques to produce animations. Most frequently, sophisticated mathematics is used to manipulate complex three dimensional polygons, apply “textures”, lighting and other effects to the polygons and finally rendering the complete image. A sophisticated graphical user interface may be used to create the animation and arrange its choreography. Another technique called constructive solid geometry defines objects by conducting boolean operations on regular shapes, and has the advantage that animations may be accurately produced at any resolution.
Let's step through the rendering of a simple image of a room with flat wood walls with a grey pyramid in the center of the room. The pyramid will have a spotlight shining on it. Each wall, the floor and the ceiling is a simple polygon, in this case, a rectangle. Each corner of the rectangles is defined by three values referred to as X, Y and Z. X is how far left and right the point is. Y is how far up and down the point is, and Z is far in and out of the screen the point is. The wall nearest us would be defined by four points: (in the order x, y, z). Below is a representaion of how the wall is defined.
(0, 10, 0) (10, 10, 0)
(0,0,0) (10, 0, 0)
The far wall would be:
(0, 10, 20) (10, 10, 20)
(0, 0, 20) (10, 0, 20)
The pyramid is made up of five polygons: the rectangular base, and four triangular sides. To draw this image the computer uses math to calculate how to project this image, defined by three dimensional data, onto a two dimensional computer screen.