Monster House
Wednesday night I went over to my families house and Ian and I watched the movie Monster House. For some reason the movie wasn’t that big a hit when it came out in theatres a little while back, but we really enjoyed it. It has a very creative, very original story, and had well developed characters (including Jon Heder). The coolest thing about it though is the breakthrough which it made in computer animation.
Up till now computer animated films have been about anything but people. Toys, bugs, cars, fish, monsters, etc. One of the big reasons for this is that facial expressions and body movements are extremely hard to draw from scratch on a computer. There are so many subtleties that we subcontiously look for in a face and in the way our bodies move. When movies came out like final fantasy or some of the others that tried to computer animate people, they felt flat and unnatural. The one exception being “The Incredibles” which is a great movie, but those people still come off looking a little unnatural, as they should, since they are superheros.
So anyway in the past there has been this problem, and in Monster house the directors overcame that by using dots. The actors in the film wore suits covered with dots, and they each had dots glued all over their faces. The actors then acted out every scene and the movements of the dots where sucked into the computers and formed a virtual actor whose movements and facial expressions perfectly matched the actors. The virtual actor was then placed in a virtual set, and virtual movie cameras filmed the movie in that virtual set. The outcome is a computer animated movie where the actors movements and facial expressions are perfectly human. On top of that, the camera movement in every scene is just like the camera movement that you see when you watch a non animated movie.
If you are feeling post halloween let down and would like just a little more, then rent Monster House. You will probably enjoy the movie, and you will definately enjoy the special features once the movie is over.