Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Some cool little odds and ends here, and, yes, we’re finally running the links to the amazing new Wallace & Gromit short films that are online.
Hi Harry,
I thought I’d drop you a note on a few interesting things I found out last week, while walking the floor of the London Effects and Animation Festival. There were a number of speakers and it was an excellent line up of luminaries from the special effects world. I was lucky enough to get to speak with most them in person and there were a number of interesting things I found out...
Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers
Managed to have a great chat with the Creature Technical Supervisor – Jason Schleifer whose was one of the animators of Gollum and all round nice guy. They had just handed over their final piece of work on the film (5th October) and it was now going into final editing where Peter Jackson will decide how to cut the end of the film.
One thing to note about Gollum is that his animation is about 70% hand animated and the rest motion capture. Andy Serkis was brought on to provide the performance for Gollum with motion capture but most of it was redone using keyframe animation in order for Gollum to be able to do the things that Mr Jackson wanted. There was a team of twelve animators working on Gollum each taking different shots.
I also enquired about Shelob since I hadn’t seen to much in the news about her and wondered how it was shaping up. The answer was that the model had been done but the animation hadn’t been started yet since the sequence is going into the next film.
Spiderman 2 & 3?
Had a great Keynote from Anthony LaMolinara where he was talking about the future of digital film, as far as Sony are concerned Digital is the future and we could expect Spiderman 3 to be shot digitally.
He also talked about the future of computer graphics and mentioned that they were looking at using a technique called sub-surface scattering for the rendering of Spiderman 2 – this is where a surface rendered based on the material’s properties so that items with translucent qualities to them (like skin, leaves, liquid) can be rendered properly there’s a nice description with pretty pictures in this article.
I also asked Spencer Cook - Lead Animator of Spiderman what he had learned from doing the first film and how it would affect his work on the next film. His answer was a little cagey but the gist of it was that the first film Peter Parker was meant to be learning and by the second film he is much more confident. So he will be much closer in movement style to the Spidey we all know and love. So expect to see him striking a few more of the classic comic book poses next time he’s swinging around.
Wallace and Gromit
Managed to have a short chat with one of the directors at Aardman who is mostly involved with CG there and I was able to find out what the state of their current film projects were. The Hare and the Tortoise is currently being rewritten, another project (which he didn’t know the title of) is in pre-production (I think) and finaly, their greatest creations have at last stepped under the lights again as the Wallace and Gromit feature film has begun filming. I had originally asked about the Great Vegetable Plot but he didn’t think it was called that anymore.
In the meantime to keep you sated - Aardman have begun releasing 10 new animations, only available online, called Wallace and Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions.
You can get the first one "Soccermatic" in glorious Quicktime at The Official Wallace and Gromit site.
Or download it directly RIGHT HERE!!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Preston.
P.S. Oh yeah forgot to mention that Arlene Rapkin of Industrial Light and Magic was demonstrating the digital animated cloth technology for the Hulk. Unfortunately, while she couldn't show the big green guy bursting out of his clothes she did have a small green one. Yoda naked is not a pretty sight!
On the LORD OF THE RINGS: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING EXTENDED EDITION disc, there’s a great documentary about WETA Digital, and there’s quite a bit of footage of the nude Cave Troll, complete with hanging dingus. It’s quite funny, but I don’t know if I want the same sort of image of Yoda, who I like so much, bouncing around my head...
"Moriarty" out.
