By Anindita Basu
Strange Company is an Edinburgh based firm that created a platform
for real-time 3D animation for film. Their platform is much cheaper
than the technology used at places like Pixar and Disney because it's
based on the technology used in games design. They compare their capabilities
to Toy Story and Jurassic Park and have set themselves up as a charity
organization with a for-profit arm called Walking Wounded. They want
to provide free support to users of their system, Machinima. The site
is complete with examples of films made on Machinima, screenshots,
documentation and tutorials. They make great promises, but their product
does not match their high claim yet.
The Machinima platform is based on games technology, and their films
have the look and feel of games. The graphics are good, but not nearly
as fluid and graceful as the animations for Toy Story. The figures
seem to have much less emotion because of this. Straight animation,
as in cartoons, is much more emotive and evocative than the Machinima
version.
Strange Company is taking an important step towards making 3D animation
technology available to a wider community, but as of now, the technology
is better suited for a play space than for film. It serves as a nice
technology with which to experiment, and the idea of applying games
technology to film is good. As the technology gets stronger and faster,
with capabilities of faster rendering and including more polygons
to figures, making them more realistic, Strange Company should have
a good product. Right now, however, they aren't ready for serious,
emotional film.