September
12
ILM brings its own magic to animation
[Posted by David S. Cohen]
Industrial Light & Magic is letting out only a few details of its first foray into feature animation, Rango, which it will be animating for Paramount and director Gore Verbinski. ILM president Chrissie England told us it would be "a hybrid, a mix between photorealistic CG visual effects and animation," adding "With Rango we are in the unique position to take advantage of this convergence and do something truly groundbreaking."
Here's a little more on what that means:
1) Rango will not be a performance-capture film in the mold of Beowulf. It will be hand-animated using keyframe animation. However,
2) ILM will be using a new, proprietary process for capturing the details of actors' performances, including star Johnny Depp. They are not disclosing the technical details but say their new approach does not use the now-familiar mo-cap suits with balls on them or an array of dozens of cameras. It is derived from the Imocap system that was used on the Pirates of the Caribbean II and III. Imocap is for mixing performance capture with live-action. This system, like Imocap, uses very few cameras -- in this new case, maybe even a single camera.
3) The world and characters of Rango will be stylized, in line with the sensibility of helmer Gore Verbinski.
4) That world will be rendered photo-realistically, in keeping with ILM's background in creating photo-realistic CG visual effects.
They hope to start production "soon." No word yet on whether the movie will be in 3-D. Regardless, they are promising this will be like nothing ever seen before, not even Happy Feet, which was also made by a visual effects house with photo-realistic techniques. It should be very, very interesting to see exactly what they're up to.
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