Pushing the Technology
Jenson and Adamson's main goal was to make Shrek as funny as possible. But the duo, along with a team of roughly 275, also set a mandate to push the art of computer animation to new heights. As amazing as such CG predecessors as Toy Story, Antz and A Bug's Life were, they were still limited when it came to animating certain items in the computer. At a 'work-in-progress' sneak preview last March, DreamWorks' co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg stated that there are three 'Holy Grails' of computer animation -- hair, liquid and fire. Shrek brilliantly tackles each. But this is only a small part of the lavish storybook world the movie brings to life.

This is the first CG cast to include humans as protagonists, and therefore, created a host of new challenges for PDI/DreamWorks.

"This is the first time you really see humans appear in principal roles in a CG film," adds Jenson. "Nobody really knows what an ogre's supposed to look like or how a donkey talks, but everybody knows how humans move and speak. These characters needed more believability. We ended up building models with anatomy and muscles that the animators pulled to make an arm move or to shape a mouth."

The animators discovered the best way to heighten the realism of the princess, and Lord Farquaad, and his subjects, was to concentrate on the subtleties of the human form. "We built translucent layers of skin so they wouldn't look like plastic," Jenson says. "You really see that in Fiona in her close-ups. Light could actually pass through to create a luminosity. We painted freckles or warm tones a couple of layers down and light would pass through the skin to them. It just looked a lot more believable."

Chris Koseluk has written for many entertainment publications such as The Hollywood Reporter and is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist