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diversions:
Shrek poised to
become next classic
By Alex Roman
Online Forty-Niner
Animation has gotten
difficult in the new millennium. With the use of computers
and various types of technology these days, animation seemingly
has no more constraints.
DreamWorks' new
animated flick, "Shrek," opening Friday, features
the voices of Cameron Diaz as Princess Fiona, Eddie Murphy
as a talking donkey, Mike Myers as a green ogre and John Lithgow
as the vertically challenged Lord Farquaad.
The film is based
on the children's book written by William Steig and breaks
new ground in many ways. This is the first computer generated
film to use people instead of relying solely on animals. In
addition to the regular cut of the film, "Shrek"
will also be shown in some theaters digitally, making it one
of the first animated films to be shown directly from the
original computer files instead of first being transferred
to film.
The debut of "Shrek"
at the Cannes Film Festival in France was the first animation
film to be part of the festival in 48 years.
"We just really
took it as a tremendous honor," co-director Vicky Jenson
said about the slot at Cannes. "It's not being looked
at as an animated film, but it's being acknowledged by such
a prestigious festival and event as a film with a good story
that needs to be looked at, not in any particular category,
but in it's own right."
As for the creation
of the life-like human characters, "Shrek" is the
first of its kind to test the boundaries that exist in computer
animation.
"I like to
say there was a reason that the first four movies were about
toys and bugs because the medium wasn't really ready for human
characters at that point in time," Ken Beilenberg said,
the film's visual-effects supervisor. "When we started
this film, we didn't put any constraints on what the directors
wanted and the story they wanted to tell and we kind of had
to take it faith that we would figure it out."
Each character
was built beginning with a skeleton and from there layers
of fat, muscle, skin, clothing and hair were added, giving
the characters a very complex human look.
The makers of the
film developed a program they dubbed a "shaper"
to give their characters a more realistic feel, such as deformations
of the skin when they spoke, moved or reacted.
"One of the
biggest challenges, of course, was Fiona," co-director
Andrew Adamson said. "We had a stylized world, but we
had a person -- a human that had to be believable and beautiful
within that world."
The intricate process
took more than five years, 275 animation artists, two directors
and a litany of other talented people to complete.
"We wanted
to create the storybook world come to life," Adamson
said. "We didn't want to create the reality we see on
an everyday basis, but we wanted to create a reality that
was as rich and as believable as the reality we experience
everyday."
The film was created
at PDI/DreamWorks in Palo Alto, where each animation artist
worked on one second of animation per day. On average, that
attention to detail amounted to about 24 to 27 seconds of
finished film per day, not including the always necessary
changes.
The process began
so long ago that Lithgow, who voices Lord Farquaad, said he
forgot what he did, as capturing the characters' voices are
one of the first steps of the animation process.
"It's the
very first thing they do," he said. "They had designed
the characters and written the script and everything, but
the animation doesn't start in earnest until they have the
voice."
Lithgow said he
was quite pleased with the way the film turned out.
"It seems
very revolutionary to me," he said. "Imagine what
it was like to see "Snow White" back in the 1930s.
People must have thought, 'My god, something entirely new.
I've never seen anything like this.' That's how everybody's
talking about this film."
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