The Tale of Desperaux

This past Saturday, the Vancouver Siggraph chapter hosted a charity film showing of The Tale of Desperaux, with all proceeds going to local food banks. Kyenta and I had both read Kate DiCamillo's book when it came out and were eager to see how it had been translated to film.

Luckily, most of the book's charm makes it through. The animation and look (by the folks at Framestore) are both suitably captivating, with a standout pseudo-2D style employed for Desperaux Tilling's flights of fancy.

The film stumbles on occasion. There are a few notable continuity problems where it feels like they had too much material and decided to drop important scenes. Also, I'm no book purist -- changes do need to be made when translating from one medium to another -- but a few of the alterations were rather jarring and unnecessary.

Overall, though, The Tale of Desperaux does entertain. It's a worthwhile fairytale film to watch this Christmas season.

The Death of the (Film) Theatre

A friend and I went to see The Bank Job last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Apart from a resolution that strayed into action-movie territory, I thought it was a great heist movie, presenting everything from build-up to aftermath. Recommended.

Unfortunately, my curse with theatre experiences has come back. I had a relatively long run of seven or eight nights where I enjoyed watching movies with no annoying whispers, chit-chat, interruptions. However, last night we had:

• Two or three separate groups of talkers
• Annoying laughter guy braying at the back of the theatre
• Clapping and "Yeah!"s at certain characters getting their comeuppance

I know I'm a film snob. I know that preferring to watch films without audience participation is a predilection that's fast moving me into the minority (if I haven't already). I know that many of my friends have made the switch to home theatre as their primary venue for seeing movies rather than the cinema.

And I know that I'll follow pretty soon.

This lack of cinema etiquette is but one voice in the chorus that is sounding the death knell of the theatre. The others (digital downloads, home theatre improvements, HDTV, etc.) all factor in too. The combination will, I believe, relegate theatre-going to watch films into as much of a niche pastime as theatre-going to watch live shows.

It's just a question of time. My prediction is 5 years.

Breaking Down 300

On Wednesday, May 16, I went to a presentation by Lindsay Adams put on by the Vancouver Siggraph Chapter. Lindsay is the Senior Compositor at Animal Logic. He gave an excellent presentation on the compositing work they did for 300.



Interesting takeaways:

• There were very few real sets used. Occasionally, there would be a bit of rock wall (that eventually was heavily enhanced with CG/matte work). The rest was all digital/comp work.
  
  
• A concept artist on set did quick comps to get initial production approval, which were then used by the team as a guide for their work.
  
  
• They did a first-pass comp of all their assigned shots in about 5 weeks. It let them get production approval much quicker and reduced wasted effort.
  
  
• The skies were all matte paintings / photos that were warped, morphed, and transformed to give the appearance of motion.
  
  
• The skies had a neat coffee-stain plate overlaid onto them that production really liked – they felt it gave the film more of a graphic novel feel.
  
  
• They filmed live plates for a number of elements because they just looked way better than CG: smoke, dust, some water.
  
  
• The process to achieve the desaturated/palettized look of the film was called "The Crush" – Animal Logic (and the other vendors) delivered shots that were "Half Crush", and a final production studio took it the rest of the way. This was to achieve a consistent look for the whole movie.
  
  
• The on-set lighting was very diffuse and flat. All of the shots were "re-lit" in compositing using comp tricks.
  
  
• For shots with variable timing, they’d always work over-length and on the slowest timing, and adjust to the final timing variations as the last step. This gave them the most flexibility to changing production demands.
  
  
• To multiply the Persian army in the close-up shots, they took the plate, isolated various actors, and duplicated them using flopping, re-timing, etc. Because they were mostly hidden by the "hero" close-ups, it worked.
  
  
• Lots and lots of hand roto work to get the CG spears and swords matched up to the actors’ props.
  
  
• Their most complicated shot was the "Crazy Horse" – in the final film, this shot was the first one which had Leonidas breaking away from the main Spartan group, attacking multiple enemies and launching a spear. They shot this on stage with 3 cameras mounted on the same head, shooting fast (i.e., slo-mo) at different zooms and focal lengths. In comp, they managed to blend all of these together into a single shot, using warping to merge the different camera shots together, and retiming to get the slo/fast/slo effect. Plus all the usual crazy layering.
  

A very detailed look at what goes on behind-the-scenes. It was also neat to see the full extent of what can be accomplished using compositing.