Bob the Builder slapped with CGI rendering Fans of traditional stop-motion animation and whose kids have been raised on Bob the Builder may wish to lament the forthcoming Heavy Duty Diggers outing for Bob, delivered in "full-power CGI". According to Home Media Magazine, the DVD features "five episodes of the new, computer-generated Bob and friends... following them …
Postman Pat's not CGI. Only the characters' mouths and the big sweeping views are; the rest is proper, real stop-motion. It's also still really good.
You're otherwise completely correct. Thomas hasn't been any good since they turned it into an overly preachy thing around 8 years ago; the CGI faces and people now are an abomination on top.
Who, for the love of crisps, is Diesel Ten, and how is he (i assume "he") enough of a recurring character for my littlest cousin to be spouting whole storylines about him to me?
Whatever happened to the original bad old Diesel who was sent packing after one or two episodes?
"Fireman Sam (which, in fairness, was shit to start with)"
NO IT WASN'T!!!
*Stamps foot and starts wailing*
But in all fairness, they have turned him into 'Generic Safety Man™', with no character. In the old series, he used to have robots cooking fried eggs, now he is just a big-chinned moron.
When Wallace and Gromit go this way, I'll vote for Gordon Brown's next term... (or, have they already? Last film was a bit good..too good?)
KAAAAKK!!! It's happening!!!!
"In all, Aardman employs around 200 talented people at their two main studios, both located in Bristol, UK. On the northern outskirts of the city, model-shops, set building facilites, art studios and camera and lighting departments all feed their world leading stop-motion studio. In the heart of Bristol’s dockland, Aardman are expanding their feature CGI studio alongside a brand new headquarters."
http://www.aardman.com/features/
Aardman has been involved in CGI work for years - its first CGI work as Owzat, a short film of ghosts and skeletons playing cricket in a graveyard, which was made in 1997. It's a nice little piece that's featured on the Aardman showcase DVD and at the time was quite experimental.
It's also worth remembering that Aardman will utilise CGI with stop motion - a good example is in Chicken Run. Just about all the animation was stop motion but the flames in the pie-making machine were done using CGI because there was no decent way of achieving this type of effect using traditonal stop-motion.
Although Flushed Away was its first feature to use CGI, Aardman chiefly uses CGI on commercial work like adverts.
Crivens! I used to have one of those too ...... I wonder where it went.
Never mind so much though. Still got my ORIGINAL, "Guild" VHS of Thomas in it's purple plastic case sitting in the cupboard at home, carefully tended. It still works, on the annual occasion I dust it off and marvel at how short each of the episodes that used to keep me and my brother captivated now seem.
I've kept the flame alive by borrowing a twin deck VHS/DVD recorder and transferring the lot onto shinydisc for a post-millenial cousin (about 4-5 now?) who is/was (?) mad for everything Sodor-related. Got to let him know there was a time before the Lite Americana "Thomas and Friends" wand was waved over it - a happier, macrovision-free time with occasional tracking difficulties, when the controller was fat, Thomas was allowed to get into crashes and say things like "Bother!", and the narrator was Scouse. Death to homogeneity.
I wonder how few years that DVDR will last before becoming totally unreadable. I might yet have to copy that tape one more time, if the rust-coated celluloid itself hasn't finally melted.
Be whistling the theme later I bet :p
Apparently a lot of kids stuff these days is stop motion processed to look like CGI. The reasoning for this allegedly being that it's cheaper to do this than to do real CGI, but kids expect stuff to look CGI. If that's really true then it's funny that labour intensive stop motion is cheaper than CGI.
CGI animation used to about pushing the boundaries and creating animated works thought to be impossible with more traditional methods. Now it's little more than a cost-saving exercise in many cases.
You need only watch Coraline to see some of the amazing things that are possible with modern stop-motion animation. Much of the modelling and SFX were computer-assisted, but the animation is pure stop-motion, and the result is one of the most visually stunning films of the last decade.
It will be a real shame if we lose this artform altogether.
The iPlayer and its ilk means that in bored moments I'm able to catch up on the current state of kids' telly without having to be home at 3.30pm, or wait half an hour for the next show if it proves to be dire - can just quit and move on ..... there's some fantastic stuff and some awful glurge as there always was, but the latter seems to be winning because it's just so goddamn cheap to throw together any old tat in <insert favourite cut price rendering package here> over the course of an afternoon, largely relying on the default models (kiddies won't know any different) and nicking your storylines off bad internet fanfics, just changing the names and stripping out the pron.
It's a funny thing that a lot of the stuff that seems to still have a bit of heart, humour and talent about it is largely traditional media, or where CGI is involved, 2D. There's a couple exceptions (Tronji is an entertaining, if inexplicable acid trip of a near-fully CG show, but it does still have live action elements, and there are plenty of crap 2D animations and live action shows in the world) but it seems to be the theme. Just hold up something like Chuggington or Animalia (oh god, my eyes and ears will never recover - they make Hanna Barbara's smaller-time shows look like exercises in careful, expensive production) to Timmy Time/Shaun the Sheep, Avatar (no, no! the OTHER one!), Little Howard's Big Question (or heck... Ooglies ;) and let's play Spot Where The Time And Money Went.
They couldn't even be bothered to make the characters' feet move at the right speed to stop them from "gliding" or keep them at the right height to avoid clipping in Animalia (or do the right standards conversion from NTSC, with Chuggington), and everyone looks like a Poser model or a 50% morph between two of them. At least when Scooby Doo et al had the whirling legs and repetitive backgrounds spinning by at a mismatched speed, they had a genuine need to save on workload and reuse cels, plus the show was cheesy and very "cartoony" on purpose. In this case it's a matter of taking a couple of minutes to plug the right numbers into the motion algorithm so they traverse the floor plain at the right speed and without either floating or sinking, most of the hard work coming up with and "drawing" a walk cycle having already been done for you... still couldn't be arsed. Painful.
BTW, don't even TOUCH Waybuloo. You'll need counselling.
Mine's got a dvd compilation of Bertha, Family Ness, Count Duckula, 90s X-Men, Trapdoor, Last Airbender, Morph, Dangermouse, Defenders of the Earth, Transformers G1 and you'dbetterbelievesomeCitiesOfGold in the pocket. Look for the bulge.
Who done this renderin' for yer? Buncha cowboys, I reckon, see they ain't even done specular highlighin' cos it means they can save on the resource drains and I'm sure that gamma ain't safe. Tell you what I'll do, me and the lads'll stick a z-buffer under it - should hold until we can get back with a ram. And if you can pay cache...
CGI nothing, the first few shows were released here in Canada with the original soundtrack, then it hit the US market and was "deaccented" and stripped of all those weird Britishisms, those porcupines looks suspiciously like hedgehogs to me. My now nine year old was a big fan and I really wanted to hear Richard Breirs as Bob's dad.....
There are some things that work in CGI and some things best left alone, comes down to what works best for the story. As long as there is a story....
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