The Uncanny Valley is not so uncanny in Beowulf, thanks to advancements in performance capture techniques and 3D animation. All images © 2007 Paramount Pictures and Shangri-La Ent., LLC. All rights reserved.

When director Robert Zemeckis was in the middle of riding The Polar Express a few years back, he already knew that he would make Beowulf in the same performance capture hybrid method. Fortunately, the technology has improved enough to pull off his adult animated vision of the oldest surviving example of Anglo-Saxon heroic
poetry -- meaning a lot more realism.

Indeed, The Uncanny Valley is not quite as uncanny, thanks to advancements in performance capture techniques and 3D animation at Sony Pictures Imageworks. Just look at Beowulf (portrayed by Ray Winstone as both a young and elderly man), or King Hrothgar (played by Anthony Hopkins), or the monstrous Grendel (performed by Crispin Glover) or Grendel’s mother (captured by the one and only Angelina Jolie). The layering of detail upon detail is striking: their eyes are a bit more authentic, their skin a lot more revealing and their movements more believable. Likewise, the hyper-real environments and VFX are a result of other breakthroughs at the studio. Coupled with refinements in stereoscopic transfer, Beowulf (which opened Nov. 16 from Paramount Pictures) is the latest poster child for 3-D in all its immersive glory. And rightly so, given that the 3-D engagements in IMAX, Real-D and Dolby accounted for nearly half of the first weekend’s box office gross. No wonder there’s potential Oscar talk in both the animated feature and VFX categories.

On Jerome Chen’s second performance capture tour of duty with Robert Zemeckis, he found the mantra on Beowulf to be “details, details, details.” This really hit home after his first viewing of the film in 3-D.

“Details, details, details” seemed to be the mantra, according to Visual Effects Supervisor Jerome Chen, who also worked on The Polar Express. And Chen really didn’t appreciate the full extent of this until first viewing Beowulf in 3-D. “I have come to realize that this should be the native format that audiences should experience,” Chen suggests. “Bob’s movies are always instinctively 3-D and, like James Cameron, he understands the stereoscopic aesthetic, because he likes objects to come up to the camera and he likes to break the screen plane and come out toward the viewer. And what’s fascinating to me is that you get to look around at things and we have an incredible amount of detail in Beowulf, both geometric and textural in our models and the clothes and the faces. I had forgotten how much stuff the artists had put in there.

“In terms of stats, there are probably only 800 shots in the whole film. Bob likes to have very long ‘concept shots.’ He likes to connect the story into one long camera move and show all the different perspectives. However, it not only makes for incredibly long shots but it also complicates things as you pan from one side of an environment to another. You have to light two directions and then you have longer rendering times. And in Bob’s case, you always have some other effects element that has to be incorporated.”

Here are some other Beowulf stats:

• 297 unique characters variations
  
• 28 primary characters, each often requiring multiple costume and hair styles
  
• 15 secondary characters, also required full body hair as well high- detailed cloth models
  
• 20 large-scale environments, ranging in size from the 1,000+ prop packed Mead Hall to vast Oak tree lined Dark Forest
  
• 1,000s of modeled props and set pieces: ranging in complexity and size from your simple spoon and fork, to the standard era sword and shield and ultimately to large-scale siege weapons
  
• 250+ unique character props