beowulf

The next rentalage was beowulf.

It was okay.

According to the time counter it was the best part of two hours long, and it didn't really feel like that, and that's always a good sign. I think this was mainly a reflection of the story, which was quite interesting.

I've heard of Beowulf before as a kind of ancient heroic epic. From what I understood (and I can't even be arsed to go and google) it's written big-arse poem style and is Nordic in origin.

Which is why I found it odd that some of the characters were speaking with Welsh accents. Strangely it was only some of them though - as if they'd that it was a good idea and then half way through decided not to keep it up.

I've no idea how close the film was to original story then, but I guess my point is that it wasn't delivered in verse and it didn't seem to have a Nordic bone in its body. But for all that it was entertaining enough.

However, the main thing of note about Beowulf is that it was CG animation. Yes, yes, loads of stuff is CG animation, but this is CG animation of the type attempting to be as realistic as it can be. It's not toys or monsters (well, there are monsters, but not of the cute, simplified style) it's actual humans represented with proper proportions and realistic movement.

Well, that's its aspiration anyway. Unfortunately it kinda fell a long way short.

Don't get me wrong - it wasn't unwatachably bad - but it was a long way short of the point where you'd think "these are real people".

As a player of video games, to me, it resembled an extended cut-scene. A very high-end cut-scene where they've spent a big chunk of the budget, but a cut-scene nonetheless.

The problem really is that it's still incredibly difficult to capture the tiny subtleties of human movement and keep the process practical. Well, and affordable - it works way better if you're talking about short special effects sequences in a traditional film. An entire movie done like that has to take some shortcuts or it'll cost, like, five times as much as any other film ever.

To me it actually looked like they were using motion capture (with the white balls and people in green suits).

One of the weird things about motion capture is that most of the time it looks like what it is - a slightly simplified version of actually people moving about. However, occasionally, it'll capture some subtlety that cons you into thinking it's real. And that's its downside - these hits emphasise the more prevalent fails.

In a way it's where traditional animation excels. There's something about the way introducing a human brain into the process that captures the nuisances. Even though, ironically, they'll often actually be exaggerations.

Anyway, the point is Beowulf both shows how far this sort of animation has come, but also shows there's still a long way to go.