Technical limitations

[Rumpelstiltskin]

We often hear that in animation, the only limitations are those made by the imagination (or lack of imagination).

I don't know if this is correct for handdrawn animation, at least it has had some time to improve (as most people are aware of, the prince in Snow White got so little screentime because he was too hard to draw), but there are still some obsticles that remains in computer animation.

The first CGI movie, Toy Story, was about toys simply because the technology at that time would have made it much harder to make a movie about real humans.

There is a reason why we didn't see any impressive panorama scenes in Chicken Little:

“We went ahead and took on some big initiatives like subdivision surfaces into our pipeline, but didn’t refine it on Chicken Little, so other shows are going through big levels of refinement. One of the things we didn’t tackle that American Dog (now renamed Bolt) is taking on in earnest is the ability to handle very large environments. We came up with a nice element flow for being able to bring elements from one department to the next and have layout set everything up, but we didn’t get there on Chicken Little. This will be essential to Rapunzel too.”

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=page ... 684&page=3


And the reason why Rapunzel (not the Barbie versjon, but the way Disney intended it) is not released before 2010, is because it has not been possible to do it before now:

"However, next up for Disney is Glago's Guest, a 3D, stereoscopic short by Chris Williams. It's about a Russian soldier guarding a Siberian outpost who has a strange encounter with an extraterrestrial. The director of the shorts program describes it as "serious, suspenseful and arty," with new texture development as its technical innovation. "On Glago, they are really pushing 3D animation," adds Chuck Williams. "There's human animation and a step toward what they're doing on Rapunzel, but also the hair and cloth were a challenge beyond what has ever been done before at Disney. Shapes are stylized and pushed, and the proportions are exaggerated, but the environments and detail are photoreal."

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=page ... o=3454&pag e=3

Today, we see solutions to these problems, and besides Disney and Pixar and others, ILM and Weta Digital are creating photorealistic CGI characters. But how much more remains to be solved? Althought CGI features has been made for over ten years now, it is still a realtively new medium, and it still has to mature.

Even if the story is the most important part, to be properly told it requires that the directors is able to show the kind of images they visualizes in their head when making the movie. And it would be nice if the directors and the rest of the crew involved had the possibility to create whatever they imagined, without having to worry about what was possible or not.

So what kind of technical limitations still remains? Because when they are no longer present, and the costs of making a movie is no longer as high thanks to more computer power for less money, then who knows what we can expect?

[KubrickFan]

I think, with enough time and especially money, almost anything can be accomplished. If they had a few more years on Snow White, the prince would've looked fantastic, but that's not realistic.
Of course, the totally photorealistic actors in completely realistic digital surroundings will take (at least) a few years to happen.