Beowulf

dvpixl

dvpixl

Veteran
saw it on the news for the first time... and some mention of a CG Angelina Jolie... and i'm thinking why??...

then I saw this trailer...

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/beowulf/

for the first few seconds, I was thinking... CG Jolie... but thought that the LIVE ACTION movie had a weird look to it...

then I realized.

my God. This freakin rocks.

...but only cuz I fooled myself at first...

Can't say it doesn't look amazing though...
 
Doesn't look any better than Final Fantasy 7 Advent Children or even Spirits Within. If this is photo-realistic come on, not for a second did it look real to me. Real people are flawed they don't look like video game characters. Not saying I won't see this, just saying I was expecting something... I don't know, more realistic looking????
 
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I think your 100% right about this movie stunts. I'm not impressed at all. If that is hollywoods idea of photorealistic then wtf.....I'm disappointed.

Avatar better be a million times better than this.
 
have to agree with you both after realizing that i was only blown away from my own foolishness. They do look video-game-ish. But it's probably something to do with lighting.
with that said, I dont think any game out there looks this good.
 
Haha. That kind of looks like Mark Harris

markharrisbeowolfzp4.jpg


Looks cheesy, but the geek in me is curious.
 
Reminds me of Diablo II's cinematic sequences. Looks like it still needed some polishing as far as realism goes.

In any case, I love a good fantasy movie so I'll definitely see it.

Oh, BTW, that poster picture is a total rip-off of the "300" scene with King Leonidas kicking the messengers into the pit.
 
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Isaac_Brody said:
Haha. That kind of looks like Mark Harris

markharrisbeowolfzp4.jpg


Looks cheesy, but the geek in me is curious.
Click to expand...

Please, my hair is like ten times sexier than THAT.

But Beowulf? Are they ****ing serious? When I was in high school, I was in this "gifted" program, and had a teacher who used to make us learn Beowulf in old-****ing-English. There is no way I can sit through this without painful flashbacks.

If the trailer is any indication, this movie proves one thing: Someone seriously needs to take digital efx away from Hollywood for about 5 years.
 
This looks like somewhat of a disaster. I'm asking the same question as everybody else. Why motion-capture? Why not live actors? Apparently the answer lies somwhere within the fact that these guys age 90 years in the film. Still, this is what all the hoopla was about? There wasn't a single shot in that trailer that wowed me. And you're supposed to be able to do anything since it's animation. Bad bad zemeckis.
 
Quite apart from the "live action/animation" look which I don't like much, I can't believe that they are taking this beautiful, ancient story, and completely changing it like that. I didn't see one shot in that trailer that could have gone in the real story. It drives me crazy when Hollywood takes these wonderful classics and ruins them.
 
The motion capture director is a friend of mine. He worked with Zemeckis on Polar Express. They have worked out a full process of performance capture that allows them to call up any take of each characters capture data for any scene and splice in elements of any take in real time. The DP has a capture device made of some pvc pipe that represents a camera and its axis. So they can capture and record camera movements by the DP moving the pvc proxy camera around in a capture space calibrated to the shot and not an artist at a workstation in post.
 
c.g._eads said:
Arson, how does that make the film better? Or, how do they think that it makes the film better?
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I don't know if it's meant to make a movie better, but if you've ever seriously animated something you'll understand why this is technically better in an aeschetic way. You pick up nuances that are a nightmare to keyframe, randomness that no computer can match.

Either way, people like Zemeckis and Cameron and the rest are doing this to push technology, no different than filmmakers during the turn of the century. It may not look great, but you can't avoid forward change forever, it's ignorant to think so. Also, for anyone familiar with the Hollywood system, so to speak, most VFX shots in movie trailers are early, unfinished, unpolished, etc...I see bad keys, bad roto, poorly done 3d in trailers all the time, just the nature of the beast.

I wouldn't knock the visuals until you see it, and personally I think it looks much better than any other attempts at digital humans, but I guess there will always be naysayers regardless of how "real" fake is.
 
i think it is probably the best realism animation I've seen yet. They still might look a little waxy but that's a given. in the future, i'd really like for them to do something that no live action can do. It's not taking advantage of the limitless possibilities of a fake world.
 
I recall the same thing being asked about the Final Fantasy movie--why not just use live action with CG effects? For me, the answer was: because CG effects added into live action usually look like CG effects added into live action. Even Lucas's megabudget CGI Yoda and Jar-Jar still had that look, and technology has clearly not advanced much beyond that, if the "10,000 BC" trailer is anything to go on. With a fully-CG film, once I "settle in" to the look of the world, everything looks consistent, and so there's nothing to jar me out of it. But that's just me. :)
 
Well, if you've seen Transformers, that's about one of most seemless blends of live action and CG to date (of that scale). Who knows what Zemeckis will do with that added flexibility.
 
IMHO Movies like this are moving filmmaking (and humanity) in the wrong direction.

There is NO benefit in making CG "human" characters look real. Aliens, robots, dinosaurs, etc. Ok! But Angelina Jolie or a tree? No. People should be outside filming REAL people in REAL locations, not inside at a computer making CG people and CG trees look more REAL. Besides, no matter how REAL "it" looks, it's still FAKE. And we all know how much better things are when it's real then when someone is faking it. lol

I think we all agree that when Jackie Chan or Tony Jaa do their own stunts, with no wires, it's so MUCH better than a completely CG stunt with a CG actor. We feel excitement and danger because Jackie really is in danger. He's pushing his body to the limit and, because there are limits (gravity, death, etc.), that makes it meaningful. With CG there are no limits so that makes all of it meaningless.

Now that Angelina has been turned into a bunch of 1's and 0's, imagine if every actor could be simulated in a computer. "Who do you want in your film? Charlie Chaplin? Peter Sellers? Jim Carrey?" They will eventually be able to do it. But just because they can, doesn't mean they should.

I won't see Beowulf, but there is a great CG film coming out next summer by Pixar. It's called WALL-E. It is set 700 years in the future when the world is uninhabitable and all humans are fat, living in space, and never leave their floating reclining chairs. Robots like WALL-E are required to do everything. That's exactly how I see us evolving (or devolving) too. And with computers doing more and more of the work for us, it's only a matter of time before that vision of the future becomes a reality. D'oh!

But enough of my yapping!

Hey, doesn't that CG guy in Beowulf look JUST LIKE Patrick Swayze?!?!

roadhouse1.jpg
 
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