Re: Toy Story

[wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob Wier)]

>I just got back from a special screening of "Toy Story" at the El Capitan
>Theater.  It was SPAECTACULAR.  I am picky with movies(I did not like Lion
>King nor did I even bother to see Pocahontas), but this movie blew me away.  
>

I caught a satellite TV feed this morning talking about the business
aspects of Toy Story (and other computer animation). The general 
opinion was that IF Toy Story is successful (unlike Tron) that it will
change the animation business in a big way. The point was repeatedly made
that the actual movie receipts are not the major consideration, but 
it's the co-lateral product marketing that's important
(I always find it interesting to see which Mc Donalds/Burger King/ Arby's etc will be doing the promotional "action figure" (doll) tie-ins). 

One thing that is a major win is that if you have all of these objects
in your 3-d database, then it considerably eases the design of the 
associated products. 

There was a segment on "Reboot" (which runs disturbingly early on Saturday
morning from a programmer's viewpoint :-) - and they also emphasized the
product tie-in as a major theme.

Relevant to us, of course, is that to produce a stereoscopic version of
a movie this way, all that would be necessay would be to re-render the
scenes for the other eye with a slight "camera" displacement.

They did also point out (rather begrudginly I thought) that you probably
also need a reasonable story line to make the movie work...

I've got my graduate computer graphics class working on stereoscopic
scenes using POVRAY2 right now. If they come up with anything interesting,
I'll put em on the web/ftp site.

THANKS



======      Round Up the Usual Disclaimers!        ======
  Bob Wier, keeper of the Photo-3D, Icom radio (WB5KXH),
    Overland Trails, and Motorola HC11 mailing lists
               wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Spammus delendus est!" - with apologies to Cato the Censor



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