Toon Zone Talkback - WSJ on "Despicable Me" and Its Lessons for Moviemakers

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Naomie

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This is the talkback thread for WSJ on "Despicable Me" and Its Lessons for Moviemakers.

It's been my theory for a while now that computer animation will get as pretty and fancy as it can possibly get, and then corners will start to be cut.....and cut further, and then further still, until eventually your average CGI film will look as rough as a 70's animated movie.

This may be the beginning.
 
We are, of course, seeing much lower budgeted films already: Delgo, Fly me to the moon, Jimmy Neutron, and several others. However, I don't think things will degrade quite *that* far, but I can see some studios(or new, lower funded entrants into this genre) cutting corners to get things done.

At the same time, the lovely thing about computers is they always get faster and better at the only thing they're really designed to do: math. Even freeware 3d programs like blender are starting to see major improvements in their rendering abilities via modern graphics cards(See this article for the first fruits of these coding labors: http://www.blendernation.com/luxrender-real-time-integration-with-blender-2-5/ ) Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping and other new technologies will make things like fur, fire, and fluids less and less computationally expensive as time goes by, hopefully allowing things to even out somewhat.

Besides, I've never felt the money was the thing. It's the story, the art, the heart and soul that goes into it. Everything else is details.
 
It makes sense. Why waste millions rendering things most people won't even notice? Besides, Despicable Me isn't exactly Tiny Cars. It's not cheap, it's just frugal in places where the Pixar stuff is incredibly lavish.

I just don't think it will get as bad as that, though, Martianinvader, because the way computer technology improves and gets cheaper you can continually do more for less. Take Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That took special cutting edge equipment and $137 million in 2001, but one of the low budget studios could do something comparable or even nicer today. In a lot of ways the cheap Resident Evil: Degeneration movie from 2008 looked nicer.
 
Frnakly i'm still trying to figure out how the studio operates...
It works differently in that in doesn't have an in house staff but it's unclear what that means exactly... I mean, do they employ hundreds of freelancers who use their own equipment (which sounds like it would be horribly inefficient)? do they hire small studios to work on the film? Details of seem to be pretty scarce
 
Sometimes I wonder if they use young writers too, oh wait, do they even use writers that often anymore? Seems like "arena thinking" is the usual way to make stuff.

These lessons sound more like minor yet very effective cost cuts but should they spread I too fear that the quality of most CGI works will decline, you can't just hap hazardly copy stuff like Asylum studios. If they really want to save money I suggest going hand drawn and cheaper voice actors but that'd be too obvious.



Agreed, I could film 900 Rolls Royces blowing up but that wouldn't be much of a film, despite all the money in todays animated films I've yet to see stuff like story or art, that kinda stuffs free too, just takes time which you're short on when you have to get realistic hair down.
 
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