Sony Imageworks found that 3D buildings were harder to make than Spider-Man’s movements. © 2002 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. All rights reserved.

Sarnoff contended that the combination of technical advances and freedom of artistic expression for computer animators are responsible for the current breakthroughs in vfx. “We’re now at a point where it’s not a question of whether you can create it but how do you really want it to look. And for Imageworks, we have now moved past the can we do it to what do you want to do? We’re doing that across the board, not just on Spider-Man types of films but also on Polar Express, which is a full CG film, but utilizing the actions of the actors themselves, so much so that it’s going to feel different from most animated-style films. And that’s for Warner Bros.

“Where it is called upon for CG characters to be seamless with real people, I believe it will become now just a budgetary and or a structural function. Where the characters are supposed to actually stand out — and that does happen too — they may actually not be seamless on purpose. So, you know, we can do what is necessary either way. We are usually called upon to make the character seamless and often are gratified in a weird way when films are complimented because they don’t have any effects in them. And it’s sort of our nice line to say thank you for not noticing. It is a little disheartening when you spend a year on a project and people are saying, finally, a film where you don’t have any visual effects. To that end, you take solace in the fact that it would have been worse if they had said, gee, we like the effects, so I’ll take the ability that people didn’t notice vigorously as a compliment.

“We did a test where we brought up a number of shots on Spider-Man where 50% of the time people couldn’t tell whether it was digital or whether it was real. That speaks volumes. That’s when you’re successful They know there’s supposed to be a digital shot somewhere, but they’re not exactly sure which one it was. And then when they’re saying, gee, that was clearly a digital character, but it was a real character with a digital background, they say, oh, I didn’t know that.”

Children’s classics get the animated treatment: Imageworks’ all-CGI movie of The Polar Express for Warner Bros. is already generating considerable buzz. Sony Animation is developing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

With The Polar Express online teaser trailer already creating lots of industry buzz — both positive and negative — Imageworks may be on the cusp of something truly groundbreaking. “Every pixel is made here. So there really isn’t anything out there that we shot from. There’s just the imagination of director Bob Zemeckis and his gang of geniuses. You know, when a lot of people decide they want to do it in the computer, rue the day, but he clearly is getting into the control you have when you know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. Because, like Hitchcock, he clearly he pushes the boundaries of what the camera can do and tells the story with the camera.”

When asked if there is a trend in all CG works toward stylization over photoreal, Sarnoff responded that the only trend is to use animation to enhance the story. “And if, in fact, the story should be stylized, you shouldn’t try to go photoreal. We are not attempting to go photoreal on Polar Express; it wouldn’t be the appropriate thing. You know, if you’re going to use photoreal, then use real people. That’s not our goal, but the motion is going to look very realistic on these people. So it’s going to be a little of a synthesis of what is different about this. And certainly on Spider-Man we don’t want to have it so stylized that people don’t believe that it’s really Tobey flying through the city. So, yeah, we’re going to be shooting as real as you can be so people are never brought out of the film. So that they feel like they’ve actually watching something that they too can do.”