Beowulf

Beowulf is probably the first mainstream CGI film made solely for adults. They use the R rating to include copious amounts of gore and nudity. I'm not really sure what I think of the movie. I'm certain it isn't a great movie, but it is a stepping stone for others, and should be looked at carefully.

I'm fairly certain that the intention of the filmmakers was to recreate human figures in computer graphics to the highest degree possible, except of course they were held back by technological and financial limitation. This film showed a wide variety of quality levels, all depending on different factors.

Most objects in the people that were made of metal looked extremely realistic: crowns, spears, swords. Except of course some of them looked too perfect, and again did not fit in.

The character models for the most part looked pretty good. The old king in the movie was especially good, with great facial details. Some of the woman however certainly did not look very good. They lacked a feminine quality which I suspect was the result of trying to build a woman from a male model that had already been built. There are certain details which I suspect were overlooked, such as the fact that womans joints generally can hyper extend more than men's based on the formation of the bones.

In terms of facial animation, most of it was very stiff, which is most likely caused by the insensitivity of the motion capture system that was used. These systems have become much more powerful even in the last few years, so this issue may soon be a thing of the past. The only way they may have overcome this would have been through the work of skilled animators, but skilled animators are expensive.

The other sore point of animation was the hands. The biggest culprit was the hands of many of the background characters, they often would have completely stiff hands that wouldn't move throughout a scene. This lack of quality creeped into the main characters as well in certain scenes.

Another technical limitation was the clothing simulations that were used. While they did look like cloth, they didn't have the necessary resolution in the simulations to form any realistic looking wrinkles. This resulted in very boring looking clothing that was completely unrealistic.

The most successful character in the film was probably Grendel. I really cannot imagine a more horrible creature ever created for film. There were so many layers to his grotesque anatomy. I could barely even comprehend how the modelers would go about creating such a character.

The camera in the film was a little bit weird. Because they have complete freedom of the camera movement, they often used it to it's fullest, but in doing so made many scenes in the film appear more fake. Some particularly fast camera pans made me flinch with how awkward they seemed.

One less noticeable failure of the movie was the foley. Foley is the practice of making sound effects for a movie. It simply was not well done in this film. It was not convincing.

I guess the main point that I can draw from this film is the importance of consistency. Some parts of this movie were extremely well done, other parts pulled those down into the realm of lame 3d animation. I am however excited that such a film can open doors for more films to come. I'm enrolled in 3d animation course this year, so I hopefully have my own work to show.

Kyler