Why no animated “Wing Commander” movie?!

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Now in hell animation is cheaper than Live Action, i can see how you think that cause of how long it takes to draw and computer animate them. Now useing Fantasia as an example is really unfair cause whats so unique about Fantasia is that they Animated around the music. Usually you craft your music to work in tune with your animation but no Disney wanted to Animate the Classical Musics which took extreme amount of talent, patients, and precision.

I'm not really sure what you mean here but consider that a very large portion of the big budget of films like King kong are because there are so many computer enhanced scenes. A lot of the scenes have computer animation in them even if it isn't apparent. This goes for the Wing Commander movie too. Scenes you might not even be aware of contain various amounts of computer generated effect. (like carrying an injured Angel off the Diligent). The point isn't whether or not CG is cheaper but that CG tends to be expensive. In some cases, certain scenes are done CGI because they would be physically impossible to film. But to get the level of realism that makes you forget it's CG takes a lot of work and effort with multiple animation houses each working on different scenes comprising sometimes hundreds of animators to get the scenes done in a reasonable amount of time.

A completely animated feature can actually cheat because they don't have to match real world objects and people (there's at least one scene in the WC movie that suffers from this a little). Still, animated features like shrek 2 still have 70+ million dollar budgets. There's no magic solution to this problem. A completely computer animated WC feature will still have a budget to match the existing live action feature if there aren't shortcuts takes in the quality and quantity of shots.

 

[Osiris]

What i am saying is, That a pure animated movie would be cheaper than a Live Actor movie. Points that you brought up as well, the special affects feature are alot more expensive for Live actor films cause they are higher quality.

 

[LeHah]

I'm not really sure what you mean here but consider that a very large portion of the big budget of films like King kong are because there are so many computer enhanced scenes. A lot of the scenes have computer animation in them even if it isn't apparent.

This doesn't make sense.

A live action movie would be more expensive because it has a lot of computer animation, as opposed to a project that would be completely animation?

Again, it comes down to scale. If you were trying to say that a WC animated movie would be cheaper than a WC live action movie - you'd be in the wrong. However, if this were for the straight to DVD scale, thats a whole 'nother story.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

This thread is crazy. The cost of a movie is not defined by whether it's animated or live action. There are massive live action movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there are small ones that cost thousands of dollars. There are massive animated movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there are cheaper ones that don't. Snow White was more expensive than Wing Commander, and Wing Commander was more expensive than some made for TV cartoon movie. Stop going back and forth and getting nowhere.

 

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This thread is crazy. The cost of a movie is not defined by whether it's animated or live action. There are massive live action movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there are small ones that cost thousands of dollars. There are massive animated movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there are cheaper ones that don't. Snow White was more expensive than Wing Commander, and Wing Commander was more expensive than some made for TV cartoon movie. Stop going back and forth and getting nowhere.

I thought that was what I was getting at, but it probably wasn't clear. New techniques mean computer animation gets cheaper every day, but the cost is still determined by two things: level of detail and render time. The more complex and photo-real the scene, the more expensive it will be, especialy the less static a scene is. But once resources are in place for a CG film a lot of elements are also reused. You don't remodel everything for every frame. Live action movies are similar. The cost goes up the more action and effects there are. Also, carefull, deliberate attention to lighting and such will increase costs as will the location of the shoot (tax incentives and labour costs).

An animated movie in the likes of WCA tv show would certainly be cheaper than A live action movie. Live action could be relatively cheap considering WC4's shoot but then it would suffer on the big screen. But an animated movie on the level of Final fantasy: spirits within would be comparatively expensive (anyone know the cost of the FFVII direct to video sequel? What did that end up costing) So I agree it's quite pointless to debate it without knowing exaclty what the goals of the film will be, Or like LeHah mentioned the scale of the project.

LeHah I wasn't trying to say anything about completely animated vs partially. Rather that movies like King Kong are expensive because of the complexity and quality of individual shots and number of different shots.

 

[Ace Rimmer]

That makes sense to me...