digg

Way to spoil the movie in the first paragraph.

Seriously, please put a spoiler tag on this.

Anything that spoils the movie in the first paragraph without any kind of warning isn't worth my time.

That sucks bawls... Not that i will remember a year from now, but does suck,

i don't know if that's a spoiler. all it does is give a person and a place. it's not like we know the context.

i just saw the trailer for this movie, it looks pretty bad ass.

http://www.thestorageben.com/videos/scanner.wmv

all it does is give the absolute last scene of a movie with no context whatsoever, no plot, nothing. i have no idea what you all are whining about. thats like saying "the camera pans away from Main Character as he looks longingly out over the ocean as the sun sets, encompassing the emotional trauma felt in his heart" is a spoiler to the movie. no.

Anything is possible with animation.

It's just as of right now, we arent technically capable of doing everything with animation. Now, if we go down the road like 10-20 years from now, we'll probably be able to completely animate movies to look completely realistic without the need of filming actors.

Plus his team wasn't even comprised of professional animators. So it may even be possible to do what they were trying to do, if they had more talent.

False statement = no digg

ha ha, see I didn't get that was the last part of the movie, but in your defense of the movie not being a spoiler you spoiled it. I think knowing what the last scene of the movie is actually does screw it up. Now I am going to poop on your shoe.

They didn't say it was at the end of the movie, they said it was the climax. The climax usually isn't at the end.

Annnnd now I am pooping on your shoe....

I have plenty left, poop anybody?

I am kidding of course, getting upset over a K.Reeves movie ain't happening in this lifetime.

Matrix doesn't count because I still think he was digitally replaced in all shots that were cool.

Changing the depth of field on your lens wouldn't produce the effect described. It could be accomplished by changing the focal length of the lens, or possibly by doing something funny like moving the backplane. Also, as for the spoiler claims.. is it really possible to 'spoiler' a movie which is adapted from a well-known novel by a popular science-fiction author?

ruining the plot of an adapted movie by reading the book it's based on ... hmm.

somehow, i dont see how that ties into revealing that the navy dophin helps cracks the code .. .oh wait, different movie adaptation of a book that has different subtexts and plots to the original book.

Isn't this exactly what they did in Waking Life?
http://imdb.com/title/tt0243017/

"Bruce Willis is a ghost..."

You mean HE WAS the Dead People? Oh man. I never saw that coming.

Actually that and revelation of "Keyser Soze" in Usual Suspects were two of my favorite plot twists of all time. And as an ex film student, this subject can never be brought up without 'Rosebud'.

Spoilers suck! I found a leaked copy of the book version of this movie at Borders last weekend. Some people have no respect for movie goers, I swear.


Yes dvgraphics, this is what they did in Waking Life, it's the same director. Good job reading the article, or even the imdb entry you linked to, admiral obvious. The trailer for this has it looking about ten times better than Waking Life though, which would have been interesting if not for the really lame college pothead philosiphizing.

This is a fine example of what not to do with CG. They state that this would be an easy and cheap shot to do with just good old real life filming equipment. These animators are morons, the first thing that any computer animator should learn is that you don't do CG just to do CG. It has a role to play in film making, and story telling. Using it any other way is the only kind of bad CG.

With that said, they're using some obscure rendering package. Maybe that's why they're having problems with panning out in this scene.

And for the record... This movie looks ABSOLUTELY AWESOME.

I shouldn't be surprised though. It's based on a Phlip K Dick novel. The same brilliant author of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which was made into "Bladerunner".

My only concern is having Keanu Reeves in here again. Does every cool cyber-thriller have to include Ted Theodore Logan? Maybe having a digital version can breathe more life into his acting. Other than that, I like the rest of the cast (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., Wynona Ryder). This is definately a movie I'm going to see.

It seems that the myth that anything is possible in animation is finally busted

*****. If you bother to read past the first paragaph of the article, you'll see that the problems this production is facing are to do with bad planning, poor management and communication, and lack of experience. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any fundamental limit to what technology and animation can accomplish.

Trailer in Quicktime
http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wip/us/med/scanner_darkly/scanner_darkly_a_tlr2_qt_500.mov

This movie is going to rock. But it's taking such a long time to come out! I remember seeing the trailer over a year ago!

Perhaps they can photohsop in some Acting skills also.

It says at the bottom of this site that July is set for a release date.

http://thestorageben.com/?p=135

"I found a leaked copy of the book version of this movie at Borders last weekend. Some people have no respect for movie goers, I swear."

The book came out in 1977... DUMBASS.

"They didn't say it was at the end of the movie, they said it was the climax. The climax usually isn't at the end." -daRoach

depends on the type of movie heh

Dugg, just because Philip K Dick is a GOD

"These animators are morons, the first thing that any computer animator should learn is that you don't do CG just to do CG."

Have you seen the trailer, or do you have any idea what they are doing? This is an ANIMATED movie. That's like saying that something like Snow White, Shrek, or even The Simpsons was a dumb idea, because they should have just filmed it. In a sense, they're just using video the way that motion capture is usually used.

And the software is a rotoscoping program that the director created and a lot of people have been salivating over.

http://www.flatblackfilms.com/

I looked at the trailer and I don't like what I see.

Really interesting article, and looks to be a really cool movie, but your description on the digg was terrible. They're having some issues with their rendering software, or their hardware isn't powerful enough. I'ts not impossible to pull it off, they're just having some issues. Good article though, so I'll still give you the digg, just think through your descriptions more clearly.

""They didn't say it was at the end of the movie, they said it was the climax. The climax usually isn't at the end." -daRoach

depends on the type of movie heh"

I seem to remember that they say later that this is the end.

BTW, don't any other digg geeks subscribe to Wired magazine? I read this days ago!

"It seems that the myth that anything is possible in animation is finally busted, by something accomplished photographically by simply changing the depth of field on your camera, or even just changing the focus range."

It seems that the myth that people posting on DIGG know what they're talking about is finally busted.....

...just because a bunch of amateurs haven't figured out how to do it the right way doesn't mean it isn't possible... it just means that they haven't figured out how to do it the right way...

Given the nature of computers and software and the shortcuts programmers like to use... it sounds to me like they just don't have enough processing power/memory to get the job done right... they need to scale up their hardware and scale up their software so that it can properly handle that sort of 'rendering' at that level...

I can't help but think that if the proprietary software, Rotoshop, had been released to the public after Waking Life came out, like they had said they were going to years ago, most of these delays could have been avoided. Doing a feature film with 30 animators who have never seen the software before? Great plan.

spoilers suck!

can someone tell me what the articles about without the 'spoiler'. if the explanation needs a spoiler than forget it, but if you can alter things to make it not relevant to the movie that'd be great. kthx

"I think knowing what the last scene of the movie is actually does screw it up."

The movie is based on a story by a very popular science fiction author. Many movies have a literary origin. Do you avoid reading the stories for the sake of the movie experience? There are some movies that are so weak that it is barely possible to endure them once let alone after you know what will happen. But a good story is not that fragile.

The description of the problem they are having with animation at one specific point is an issue of economics (I read the cover story article when my subscription copy arrived a while ago). To keep the budget down they fired the guy who wrote the custom software that they are using. Now they find themselve in a tight spot and limited options to handle it. If this were a Pixar movie it would not be an issue. They would have the capability to modify the software or create something new.

Jesus Christ, if you never read the book you wouldn't know what the hell they were talking about if you read this article. Half of the people in the theatre won't know what the hell it is anyways.
It's only a spoiler if you already know the ending... otherwise you'll just think keanu loves flowers. GOD

I like the book. So sorry to hear that the epileptic suits back in LA are screwing it up with their ham-fisted management (locking the doors).

Oh well...

I think the major issue is this movie is way over the heads of most people. But people who love this kind of stuff and have known a long time about the movie before it was ever posted to digg or boingboing will probably love it.

great second article from this months wired on the main page, keep it up and i can cancel my subscription....

NO WAY
haha, the music in the trailer is m83

Excellent article.

Am looking forward to this movie very much.

dugg for the sick genius of PKD, and looking forward to this one. The trailer looks amazing to me...

I saw the film in an early screening a few weeks ago and it sucked. Keep in mind, I went into this movie really wanting to like it and loving the trailer and not reading the book so I didn't have it to compare it to, and it still was terrible.

The opening write-up is awful though. How is the failure of this film in any way, shape or form a reflections on the limitations of animation? This film was done for a fraction of the budget of a real animated film, it's not even ANIMATION - it's rotoscoping. The director was absent for most of the "animation," and they hired guys off the firggin street and were complaining that it was taking over 2 months to train them on software that one company in the world uses.

Anyway, the problem I had wasn't with the rotoscoping, which looked decent... it was with the crappy production quality of the sets - which were obviously live action sets and not digitally created as Wired said they were. The acting was mediocre, and the film was BORING. That's why it was a bad film, not because the animation sucked.

i think mr reeves is a good choice for the movie. his persona, his "style" suits it. though i think edward norton would have been a better choice. especially in animation.

The opening paragraph isn't a spoiler for anyone that's taken the time to read the book...

Yeah, it seems incorrect calling this an animated film, it's a film with a sort of "art treatment" done for look and style development. I'd say this is as much animation as the non-CG sequences in Tron, since all the stuff with the colors was basically a hand painted treatment over live action film (optical effects and compositing too).
Relating this technique to Pixar or even old disney work (which sometimes involved rotoscoping, or lots of reference for animation) seems....not terribly accurate.
Nitpicking aside, it sounds pretty cool, and the spoiler warnings at the top were helpful, I could skip the first paragraph and then read about the process and the problems, not the plot. Films with good directors based on good writings are something we need more of, at least I think so.

Whoever decided not to hire pro compositors and rotoscopers and stay in Austin should be blamed for the timeframe error... why somebody would OK this is beyond me, unless they thought they could get some interesting results from novices or people from another 'domain' of artistic discipline..

I saw Waking Life, thought the treatment was interesting, but the enthusiasm was over in 15 mins..seems like he would have some original treatment ideas like Robert Rodriguez when adapted Sin City....this movie looks like a flea market sale compared to Minority Report !!!

Waaaah Waaaahaaaah! I'm trying to be the next Quentin Tarrantino, but I can't do it! Wannnaaaaaagh!