Recently my brother told me about Golden Compass movie. Actually he has made accent on the budget of this film. I have became courious what could be done with such huge funding.
I liked special effects but overall impression of the movie was not great but satisfactory (may be i have to watch all the trilogy first?). It was different when I have watched first Matrix, every single one was really good.
Yesterday I was lucky to find an article about this film on my favourite
CGSociety web site.
As I mentioned in the early post it is very interesting to read about the workflow of the project. There is always something to highlight for your own practice.
Our tutors always make accent on the research, they want to collecty as much information as possible related to the topic, this makes our desing solutions ripe. I think it is very reasonable, it is very important part, and I can see that people in industry gives to this aspect a lot of attention.
Here is a a part of article describing how team made animals talking natural.
To learn whether it was possible for a bear to talk, and if so, how, Fink visited the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London. “My worry is that we’d end up with the real common mistake people make when they animate an animal,” he says. “They build controls for the face that are similar to those for human faces. That helps give the animals human expressiveness, but they end up looking like humans.” At the RVC, Fink learned that bears had the physical attributes – a voice box and facial muscles - necessary for speech, but the power of language was beyond their mental capacity. “They had enough tonal range and the nerve endings to make sounds that might sound like words,” Fink says. “But they’d have to want to.” Thus, rather than create humanistic animation controls, muscles and shapes, he had the modelers at Framestore CFC build realistic bear musculature. “That way, when they animated the bears talking, they would have expressions bears could make,” Fink says.“You might see a couple of expressions that are almost like smiles, but they could also be interpreted as snarls because the muscles are the same. The animation is not anthropomorphic.”
On the last moving image project we have been shown a way of constructiong a scene. Anna told us that we could build proportionally scaled model of the environment and characters and use it as a reference for later shooting.We can see how such a method was used in this project.
To design the shot, Einarsson, lead animator Pablo Grillo, Morris, Weitz, Fink, and director of photography Henry Braham met on set toward the end of principal photography, in January 2007. “We had cut an animatic from the storyboards,” says Einarsson. “Using that, we stood together and shot the sequence scene by scene using a scale model of the palace and fight arena with one-inch cardboard cutouts of the bears and a lipstick camera.”
Details, details and again details, that what makes your work looks real.
Much of the compositors’ work on the bears centered on their eyes. The eyes are all about getting the right reflection and right reflection level,” says Moran. “Sometimes we had reflection passes with contrasty pings; other times we used flat, broad reflections. We have different reflection passes for full-blown sun and more subtle ones with midtone detail when the eyes are shadowed.”
Framestore has used BodyPaint 3D in cration of the bears and many more models , details a here http://www.highend3d.com/news/Framestore-CFC-Deploys-MAXON-BodyPaint-in-The-Golden-Compass-337.html
One more program to look at :)
Some really nice links, visiting them you could get some good information about how this movie been created, what tricks were used and much more.
