DailyDirt: Bring Out Your Dead... With CGI

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Dec 13th 2010 5:00pm — Michael Ho

We often talk about big budget movies and how, every day, it's getting cheaper and cheaper to produce quality films. The real revolution may come when special effects don't really seem all that special. CGI is really getting impressive (by that I mean it's hard to know when it's actually being used sometimes) and here are just a few links we've come across on this topic:

Hephaestus points out this trend -- around the same time that George Lucas is denying the rumors that he's going to bring back dead actors via "computer trickery" and the purchased rights of deceased movie legend images. Sir Alec Guinness may want to roll over soon. [url]
Movie Reshape has demonstrated its cool capabilities at Siggraph. And I don't think I'll ever look at BayWatch in the same way again. [url]
Folks that make quartz countertops would not be my first guess for a sponsor putting CGI fruits in their commercial. Incidentally, this video clip looks a lot more realistic if you've ever shattered a banana with liquid nitrogen. [url]

If you've seen other cool CGI projects, tell us about them in the comments....

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Filed Under: cgi, george lucas, siggraph

8 Comments

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thublihnk (profile), 13 Dec 2010 @ 4:38pm

Well there's this delightful bit of darkness that just hit the web. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6w0r-ScEG4&feature=youtu.be
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Michael Ho (profile), 13 Dec 2010 @ 5:31pm

Re: Pretty dark...
Thublihnk,

Nice find... Yogi Bear just shouldn't go out like that. not like that. He's supposed to be smarter than the average bear.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Dec 2010 @ 5:40pm

Re:
PhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! You owe me a new keyboard.
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robin, 13 Dec 2010 @ 5:52pm

3rd & 7th
http://vimeo.com/7809605

stunning stuff.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Dec 2010 @ 9:39pm

Re:
That's just wrong!

LoL
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TechnoMage (profile), 13 Dec 2010 @ 11:57pm

Obligitory Blender works
Lets also look at what the Open Source community has been doing lately. OSS pushing closed source...etc, etc, etc
However, the results of these and the improvements from one to the other, is impressive.
Giving these tools to the world for free will definitely help work to push down the cost of CGI even further and further.

Blender's website: http://www.blender.org/

In order of creation:

http://www.elephantsdream.org/
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/
http://www.sintel.org/

I might be missing some, if so: sorry ahead of time.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Dec 2010 @ 2:38am

Re: Obligitory Blender works
Not Open Source, but: http://www.starwreck.com/

Quite interesting because a lot of the film is CGI (in a lot of the scenes within the spaceships, only the actors and a few props near them are not CGI). Be sure to read the parts of the website mentioning how they did it:

http://www.starwreck.com/tech.php
http://www.starwreck.com/tech_post.php
http://www.starwre ck.com/faq.php
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Hephaestus (profile), 14 Dec 2010 @ 9:23am

My views on the TV and movie industry are pretty simple. Technology will eventually make what they do, something that is embedded in every camera. You already see kids toys having the ability to edit pictures and movies. Soon you are going to be able to, create virtual sets, add virtual actors, share amoung groups, on your cell phone or Pad (apple, andriod, and windows 7 if it survives the next 1-2 years).

While the creepiness factor, for true life CGI people will remain for a short while, eventually it will be solved. Allowing for MaxHeadroom (bad example but the only one I could think of) style characters to be dropped and dragged into any video.

This will lead to everyone being a producer. Like today where everyone is a photographer. With much the same results, producers like photographers will become a dime a dozen. Actors will be replaceable with virtual characters, making the high salaries some actors make obsolete. With lower production costs, tons of competition (almost every single person on earth), TV shows going to singles and not containers-networks, and free distribution. It doesn't bode well for the TV networks.

Being a monopoly they are not ready to compete in a free market ... sucks for them.
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