WonderCon 08: Behind the Scenes of Beowulf and The Spectacular Spider-Man

2007 saw a record crowd for the three-day WonderCon (in its twenty-second year) held in San Francisco, California. Judging by Saturday’s crowd, 2008 looks to attract more than the 20,000 who attended last year’s comic book fest.

If you watched Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, you would have been amazed by the computer animation and special effects like I was. The creative VFX team from Sony Pictures Imageworks provided an 'as thorough as an hour-long presentation could be' breakdown of some of the challenges they faced with such advanced computer animation.

Even though computer animation has accelerated and evolved over the last decade, I don’t think most people realize how technical and laborious the actual work is. Most of the panel (which included animation supervisor Kenn McDonald, effects supervisor Theo Vandernoot, CG supervisor Francis Liu, and technical animation-supervisor Corey Turner) had been working on the film for well over two years, and this panel only did the 2-D animation and not the more cumbersome and detailed 3-D animation.

Each animator discussed his own involvement with the project and provided several clips as well. A few interesting tidbits (POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING):

• The two creatures each resemble in noticeable ways their respective fathers.
• Angelina Jolie loved working on Beowulf because she felt so free in just acting and not having to worry about lighting and other technical worries.
• Writer Neil Gaiman is an expert on dragons.
• The animators tried hard to differentiate Beowulf's dragon from other notable dragons like those found in Eragon and Reign Of Fire.

The Spectacular Spider-Man is another animated retelling of our favorite wallcrawler, which airs next month on WB Kids. The panel included supervising producer Greg Weisman (Gargoyles), producer/supervising director Victor Cook (Hellboy: Blood and Iron), character designer Sean “Cheeks” Galloway (Hellboy animated films), and the new voice of Peter Parker, Josh Keaton (The Young and the Restless).

Article Author: Tan The Man

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