Animators went to extremes to create the new DreamWorks film, such as every hair on every animal representing a line of computer code.The ability of animators to turn an imaginary world into reality for millions of movie-goers rests solidly on the shoulders of technological advances, said Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder and CEO of the DreamWorks SKG studio.
At a recent media conference about "Madagascar," the latest animated movie from DreamWorks, which opens at theaters around the country on Friday, Katzenberg answered an eWEEK question about technological advances by saying, "If you can imagine it, then we can pretty much make it happen."
He pointed to how technology has revolutionized animated filmmaking since "Aladdin" was produced in the early 1990s, and how it now affects every aspect of the animation process.
As an example, he cited the fact that the color palette has expanded from four colors to 250 over the past 13 years, while the "Madagascar" landscape has 150,000 objects moving at once.
On the technical front, all of the technical work, production design, animation and rendering for "Madagascar" was done on a complex system of Hewlett-Packard hardware running Linux as well as its own proprietary operating system known as e-motion.
The movie has taken about four years to complete, which sounds like a long time, but when all of the stages and components are considered, it's not really long at all. Consider that every detail of every person, creature, element, plant and background has to be painstakingly coded and then stored in the huge database of the e-motion operating system.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Intricate Tech Brings 'Madagascar' to Life
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