Thursday, January 08, 2004
Well, time for a real post.
I just watched the first of the appendices DVDs for the Two Towers set I got this Christmas. Awesome stuff, espically the stuff on Gollum. I had not realized that they only went to using the actor for the part AFTER he had been voice cast and they were doing filming. It was an interesting process how they came to it. In the end they actually were using three animation techniques. One where the actor wears a suit with points on it that are picked up by cameras and interpreted into movement on the cgi model, one where the animators actually animate the cgi model, and one, they actually used shots that had been filmed more-or less only for reference, and then refilmed "mime," as in the gollum actor was not in them and the others just went off what the reference scene had been, they used that footage, erased the actor, and used some of his acting there for the CGI model's movement (or in some cases they totaly altered it).
Basically, when the actor would do the voice part he had to act it out too, because partly some of the facial expressions were needed to make the sounds, and partly just because he was so into it, so after a while they realized that had to be Gollum. They had even designed a totaly different model from what they used in the end, and had to alter it to look more like the actor after Peter Jackson cast him as the actuall Smeagol character that we see in the third film.
Anyway, it was really neat to see some of the shots where they would show the actor's filmed scene side-by-side with the animated scene.
And they showed two renderings from the daily renderings they would do to show the crew how things were going to illustrate how the computer sometimes would render things oddly, like one gollum's hair stood on end and one, his eyes came out of his head and did their thing, floating to the side. computers are fun!
Another nice part, which was on the first set as well, was some shots from the scouting out areas to film particular places, nice to see the place before and after and all.
Anyway, I will be seeing the other DVD soon, and may have more to report. You should find a way to see this stuff!!!
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)