Poof! Movie Magic

After its positive reception at MIX, Caouette's $218 movie became a bit more expensive. He had to edit the film down from two-and-a-half hours to 88 minutes before Sundance, and for this, he got some last-minute help from a co-editor who used a more expensive Avid digital-editing system. The Cannes Film Festival is likely next, followed by a limited theatrical release. That's probably another $50,000 to make a celluloid print of the film, and $200,000 or more to secure the rights to the music Caouette used. "Getting from here to a limited theatrical run may end up costing half a million dollars," Caouette says, incredulously.

At Sundance, other filmmakers wanted to know how he got there on less than $250. "There's nothing mysterious about it," he says. "IMovie is very easy. Of course, you have to have a sense of what you want to achieve."

That's Life >>

In Shrek, the ogre (voiced by Mike Myers) married the princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). But if the animators and developers at PDI/DreamWorks, the special effects shop behind the 2001 animated hit, wanted to live happily ever after, they only had eight months between the completion of Shrek and the start of Shrek 2 to surpass the original.

"We wanted to increase the complexity, make the characters look even more real, and create richer backgrounds," says Andy Hendrickson, head of animation technology at PDI/DreamWorks. (PDI, founded in 1980 as Pacific Data Images, is now the Silicon Valley-based computer-animation arm of the DreamWorks SKG studio.) "We wanted to improve the way we did skin, hair, clothing, and lighting," adds Ken Bielenberg, visual-effects supervisor.

The 40 programmers at the PDI/DreamWorks group in Redwood City, California, developed new software that allows the 200 animators and artists to give characters more realistic facial movements, Adam's apples where before there had been none, and neck muscles that appear and disappear when a character's head turns. Human characters such as Prince Charming will now have more lifelike hair, and animals such as Puss in Boots, a feline assassin voiced by Antonio Banderas (with Shrek, below), will feature better-looking fur. It would've taken too long for PDI's computers to "render," or draw, such complex characters for the first Shrek.

The impact of these advances, though, was that "it takes longer to animate a scene," says Lucia Modesto, a char-acter technical director supervisor. "So we had to develop ways of making things go faster." Developers tried to create shortcuts for animators, with prebuilt male and female forms that they could use as templates to create specific characters. They also programmed features such as character hair to behave simply as real hair would without requiring additional instructions or commands.

Shrek 2 centers around Shrek and Fiona's honeymoon, but of course, there's no honeymoon for PDI/DreamWorks. It's already working on Shrek 3. "Computer-generated animation is still not good enough," Hendrickson says. "And that's what keeps us going."