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When vision meets technology

With the release of 300 this week, I thought it was as good a time as any to take a look at the ways technology has changed Hollywood over the years.

With the release of 300 this week, I thought it was as good a time as any to take a look at the ways technology has changed Hollywood over the years.

300 is a film adaptation of a graphic novel by Frank Miller of Sin City fame, which retells the legendary Battle of Thermopylae in 191 B.C. It’s basically the Greek equivalent of the Alamo, where 300 Spartan warriors held back hundreds of thousands of Persians for three full days before finally being betrayed, becoming a rallying cry for their fellow Greeks to unite against the invaders.

I’ve only seen the previews at this point, and I can tell you that this movie looks good. Though it was filmed entirely in front of a green screen in Montreal, with animators and digital artists adding backgrounds, blood and coloration in the studio during editing, it provides another breathtaking example of how computer graphic technology can be used to capture a vision.

Technology is what allowed Peter Jackson to bring the Lord of the Rings to life, and will allow Michael Bay to bring The Transformers to life this summer.

But 300 also serves as a reminder that often the best animation is the subtle stuff that you won’t always notice. It was never the point of the story, just the means to tell it better — like the digitized fog effects in The Others , the bronzed skies in O Brother Where Art Thou , or the cloud shapes in Amélie .

There are too many movies where technology is abused, or wielded in a clumsy way. Take the first few Harry Potter movies, for example — it’s almost embarrassing when the characters gaze in wonderment at special effects that every person in the audience has seen too many times before, without ever presenting something we could call unique. Those Quidditch scenes are the worst.

Creating animated characters is even more difficult. The rubber puppet Yoda was far more believable and likable than the digitized version in the latter triology, and the animated Jar-Jar Binks was universally despised. George Lucas, who’s Industrial Light and Magic studio has helped revolutionize the special effects industry, also proved in the trilogy that special effects will never be more important than a good story, good script, good characters and good acting.

Peter Jackson did animated characters right with Gollum in the Lord of the Rings , but a lot of credit still has to go to the acting of Andy Serkis, over which the Gollum was superimposed. My own ability to enjoy Transformers will not just depend on how good the animation is, but whether I can get past the pixels and see the characters.

Take a sci-fi movie like Starship Troopers — I still can’t decide how serious this movie was, but when the alien bugs started to look more real than the human characters I bought into the illusion a lot more easily.

That much should be obvious to directors. Even Jim Henson knew how to make people forget that there was a human hand inside the mouth of each of his Muppets.

But it’s not easy. It can take three or more years of school to get a computer graphics degree, and years more to finally become proficient in rendering and animating graphics. I’ve played with some of the most basic, user-friendly 3D programs out there, and can say it’s still a steep learning curve. Still, if you have some time on your hands to play around, there are a few free or cheap graphics programs out there you can play around with — nothing to matching the software and hardware used by the pros, but enough to create the next South Park.

The place to start is C/net’s download site, www.download.com . Click on the Design Tools software tab, and look for the following programs:

Google SketchUp — create 3D buildings, features on Google Earth.

Blender — an open source 3D render and animation program.

Alibre Design Xpress — more advanced 3D modeling without animation.

3D Canvas 7 — a simple, progressional way to model in 3D.

Bryce 5 — realistic 3D landscapes and animations.

Most programs will come with step-by-step tutorials to familiarize you with the process. While you’re there, you might want to check out FontCreator — a neat little program that could allow you to type messages in your own handwriting. Most cartoonists do it.

 

Website of the Week

I’ve always been a huge fan of do-it-yourself websites like HowStuffWorks ( www.howstuffworks.com ), and eHow ( www.ehow.com ), and I turn to them all the time for practical advice on just about every home project. Recently I’ve added another new site to my list of research links called Wikihow.com, which is like Wikipedia for do-it-yourselfers. Because it’s open source, anybody can add or change an entry with the idea that with enough input and iterations this should become the premier do-it-yourself resource out there. The content is a bit scant at this point, but should fill out over time.