In Touch - Inserts

Prince of Egypt
The great Exodus from Egypt was played out in arrid surroundings. Now in order to provide an accurate account of the events that took place during that time, the story-tellers need to depict miracles, but you can't depict miracles without special effects. The 'Prince of Egypt' is breaking ground in this arena, with the introduction of pioneering technology, as well as a fresh approach to traditional animation.
Says Simon Wells, Co-Director : "There are levels of character animations that have been done on this picture that I simply haven't seen in an animated picture before, and part of this is because of the material, the things that the actors, the animators as actors, are being asked to perform. The emotions that Moses goes through, for instance, are very complex and conflicted and sophisticated and this is at a level of performance which simply hasn't been asked for in an animated picture before."
Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jefferey Katzenberg jointly formed DreamWorks, Hollywoods' newest studio, and the first independant studio to be formed since 1924. No-one is more aware than they, that the first animated feature film to be released by the Studio simply had to out-perform the rest. DreamWorks' digital studio at Glendale was still under construction during the making of Prince of Egypt, but on completion, it will prove to be the most sophisticated animation studio in the world, housing 1000 people and producing animation for Television as well as Cinema.
Steven Spielberg took responsibility for the Cinematography, skilfully adding all his experience to make this controversial project a success, while the musical score was composed by Hans Zimmer who received an academy award for his work on The Lion King.
Even though work had already begun on the animation of the opening scene to 'Prince of Egypt', progress was uncertain, as the technology required to complete the film had still not been developed!
Jeffrey Katzenberg, creator of The Little Mermaid; Aladdin; Lion King and Beauty and the Beast was fully aware of the expectations of audiences, and knew that, by tackling an Epic which features the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea, he was announcing that the technical possibilities of animation would be stretched to the limit.
Says Rob Hummel, Head of Technology : "Jeffereys' mandate was for DreamWorks that he wanted to create a digital studio for the 21st Century. He wanted to use all the state-of-the-art digital equipment that was available, but he didn't want to change the culture of animation in the process. He wanted to make sure that it was there but no artist was offput because of the technology that was going to be here, instead that they would embrace the technology and realise it would just empower them to expand their creative vision."
Simon Wells continues: "We have a number of artists who cross-trained to actually work on both systems. There are a lot of desks upstairs which have a computer on one side and a drawing table on the other, and the artists are literally working between the two, and they are doing scenes, one way or the other, depending on what is suitable for the image they are trying to make. We are not saying - this sequence will be a 3-D sequence. It has a few 3-D pieces in it, and a few drawing pieces in it and they come together to make the image."
Rob Hummel explains: "You'll see chariots that characters are riding that are actually 2-D animated characters sitting in a 3-D chariot with a 2-D background. There will be no separation quality of texture or tone. What this means, the audience will watch the movie and they'll see the story unfold and they won't be taken out of the film in any shape or form."
The most significant breakthrough was the revolutionary 'EXPOSURE TOOL', which was developed by DreamWorks in conjunction with Silicon Graphics. The exposure tool facilitates the seamless integration of 2-D and 3-D elements in a scene, opening the door to a whole new era in animation.
Rob Hummel continues : "Visual effects in feature animated films are just as valid as they are in live action films, as computer intensive, creatively intensive. The Red Sea as a sequence is using something upwards of over 300,000 hours of rendering time which is like over 32 years of technical rendering time, which is almost double the total rendering time on Titanic."
Henry La Bounta who worked on the Red Sea Effects comments: "The parting of the Red Sea is the dramatic conclusion of the film and had to be huge, had to be at an incredible scale, had to be scary, had to be magical, had to be awe inspiring. This is an act of God, this is no small thing! So we had a team of a dozen animators, some of the best people in the industry working on this for quite a while. Creating crushing waves and huge volumes of water hasn't been done in computer graphics before and the techniques just weren't there."
Says Rob Hummel : "We literally had to build tools from scratch; tools that didn't exist as recently as one and a half to two years ago."
Don Paul, Effects Supervisor, comments : "In order to really achieve huge groups of characters working at the work site in Egypt, we had to generate the characters 3-D in order to build them three dimensionally and duplicate to 80,000 characters working on the temple site. To do that traditionally would have been insane, you couldn't draw that fast enough. So we had to generate most of those three dimensionally and manipulate them in the character walking through the 2-D environment."
Says Jeffrey Katzenburg, DreamWorks Partner : "There are more special digital effects in this film than any movie ever made, the result of which is a film that is simply unlike anything anybody has ever seen before. Hopefully they'll like it."