Word: cg
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Thanks to Lucas and his brilliant team, special effects became the prettiest new tool in the movie paint box. "Star Wars convinced filmmakers that you can do anything bigger and better to enhance the shot," says Jason Barlow, lead CG animator for the effects company RIOT. "Now, with digital technology, real magic can happen." The movie even changed the way films are financed. Notes cultural critic John Seabrook: "Because of its huge box office, it interested Wall Street people who had previously seen Hollywood as small potatoes. The Star Wars numbers brought a new variety of investor and financial manager...
...bought tickets to Ice Age at the cineplex in order to sneak into the new R-rated horror flick Resident Evil. But the vast majority were like Pond--from a computer-literate generation that responds viscerally to the look of Ice Age's computer-generated (also referred to as CG or 3-D) animation. The proof is in the ticket sales. While traditional (or 2-D) animation has been waning at the box office, last year saw two CG blockbusters: DreamWorks/PDI's Shrek, which made $268 million domestically, and Disney/Pixar's Monsters, Inc., which has pulled in $253 million...
Apart from featuring high-tech design, these hits have also primed audiences to assume that "there's stuff in [CG animation] for teens and adults," says Fox marketing executive Jeffrey Godsick, "and that's why you see a willingness in them to go to these movies on their own." Shrek, with its bathroom humor (you don't put Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers in a movie and get a Sunday school lesson) and inside jokes about rival studio Disney, made the genre seem cool to teens. Ice Age, directed by Chris Wedge and produced through Fox's digital arm, Blue...
That's no small proposition. Lifelike skin and hair are notoriously tough to manage on computers; even Spielberg once said he'd never attempt to create CG humans. Now about 200 animators and artists, some of whom have been at it for more than two years, are laboring in near secrecy under creator and director Hironobu Sakaguchi. Veterans of Titanic and The Matrix have been drafted alongside video-game gurus from Japan...
...result of all this jiggery-pokery? It's not quite indistinguishable from reality--as with the dinosaurs and toys, there's a little too much artful puppetry in the actors' facial movements. And as the animators admit, CG lighting is still too harsh, too unnatural to reflect properly in eyes and on skin. But these are nitpicks. Fantasy isn't that far off the real thing. It's close enough to make you believe that in a couple more decades, our screens will be stuffed with synthetic thespians...