New Thunderbirds cartoon...in CGI

[thejboy88]

That's right, the classic children's show from the 60's of the Tracy family and their international rescue is getting brought back to our screens in the near future. However, this one will not feature puppets like in the original, but rather have the characters be computer animated. This will be very much like the attempted remake of Captain Scarlett a few years back, and just like that show, I'm not impressed with this decision.

Now I realise that the puppets in the original weren't the most realistic, in fact I daresay that it was almost comical how obviously fake and inhumanly they moved. But to me, that was all part of the charm of the show. Having them be replaced by literally non-existant CGI models just seems wrong to me.

And before anyone out there accuses me of some inherent anti-CGI sentiment...yeah, I kinda do. Sorry, but that's just how I feel about it all.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

A source for this information would be helpful. Also remember what yesterday in the western hemisphere was.

That said I never understood the purists who hate CGI so much. A lot of really high quality stuff has been done in CGI and it just keeps getting better. Sure poor quality stuff has been done. But on the other hand Iron Man for example could have never been done as good as it was with out CGI.

 

[FireAza]

CGI has it's place. But when it's being used for EVERYTHING, especially something that was originally 2D or stop motion, one gets to wondering if the choice to use CGI might have been motivated by cost-effectiveness or market research rather than art.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I found a teaser trailer for it-


Overall I kind of wished they went in the same style with the Captain Scarlet CGI a while back but in saying so I didn't exactly watched nor liked that version either.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

CGI has it's place. But when it's being used for EVERYTHING, especially something that was originally 2D or stop motion, one gets to wondering if the choice to use CGI might have been motivated by cost-effectiveness or market research rather than art.

Market research is a possibility, but probably not. It's more likely due to the fact that most artists today know digital art better than old style pen and paper art, or stop motion.

As someone who has made some 3D models(including full people_ in the past in the context of games let me tell you something: It takes dozens of man hours at the minimum and tons of artistic skill. First you have to make the model, then you have to make the bones, then you have animate, then you have to texture the model, and usually that means making the texture. Then if everything is right you still have to consider all of the effects and interactions that go with said model. That's just one model for a game where it has predetermined interactions. You basically have to take into account skills that are valid for both cell animation, and stop motion animation.

Now consider this: When making a movie, show, short, etc with CGI you don't have all of the predetermined interactions. You also have to animate for each fully 3D environment. So you can have dozens of models doing different animations in the same environment, all of which have to be done with painstaking detail. Then you have to figure in effects, render the scene in stages as you add textures and effects. In all it's a very difficult process. The rendering it self is also rather expensive on the whole because for media other than video games you need very powerful computers(Business class CPUs and Rendering video cards like Nvidia Quadro series) to render the scenes. To do this with any decent speed requires more than one computer working on the task due to the high polygon count of the models and resolution of textures. Which means using tons of server stations with very specialized set ups.

I'd argue that CGI is actually harder and more expensive than traditional hand drawn cell animation, or stop motion.

 

[Lightspeaker]

A source for this information would be helpful. Also remember what yesterday in the western hemisphere was.

That said I never understood the purists who hate CGI so much. A lot of really high quality stuff has been done in CGI and it just keeps getting better. Sure poor quality stuff has been done. But on the other hand Iron Man for example could have never been done as good as it was with out CGI.

Pretty sure its real. I saw an actual trailer for it on TV last week so unless they were setting up for a long prank prior to April fools day...

And yeah, as someone who was a huge fan as a kid I am seriously unimpressed.

 

[deleted+75193]

DELETED

 

[Gizmo1990]

I actually watched the live action adaptation of The Thunderbirds (directed by none other than Jonathan Frakes). Gerry Anderson called the movie "the biggest load of crap I've seen in my entire life". It was laughably bad, and I was lead wondering who could have possibly thought it was a good idea.

This new adaptation doesn't look very impressive. Can't seeing this appealing to fans of the original or to children.

I am with you but I will still give it a go for 1 reason. Gerry Anderson was involved with this new series before he died. How much input or control he had I cannot say but if he was willing to give this a shot then so am I.

I found a teaser trailer for it-

Snip

Overall I kind of wished they went in the same style with the Captain Scarlet CGI a while back but in saying so I didn't exactly watched nor liked that version either.

I always ment to watch Captain Scarlet but I never got around to it. Was the remake/reboot any good?

 

[Scarim Coral]

I always ment to watch Captain Scarlet but I never got around to it. Was the remake/reboot any good?

Considering I didn't watched anymore out of the two episodes I watched (when it was on TV) pretty much say it all to me.

Sure I was more of a Thunderbird fan but I do remember getting their airplane and watched it as a kid.

 

[Zontar]

Why is this just being talked about now? Not only have teasers been out for some time, I've known about this project for well over a year.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

Why is this just being talked about now? Not only have teasers been out for some time, I've known about this project for well over a year.

Well apparently not everyone else did. So if you were worried about the discussion about it you should have posted something sooner.

 

[Bat Vader]

This looks completely terrible. I used to watch the original Thunderbirds TV show when I was younger and I thought it was awesome that it used puppets. I don't understand why they can't do that now.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

This looks completely terrible. I used to watch the original Thunderbirds TV show when I was younger and I thought it was awesome that it used puppets. I don't understand why they can't do that now.

Super marination is extremely difficult to work with for a number of reasons. Just look at what Matt and Trey said after they made Team America. "Never again!"

 

[Zontar]

Why is this just being talked about now? Not only have teasers been out for some time, I've known about this project for well over a year.

Well apparently not everyone else did. So if you were worried about the discussion about it you should have posted something sooner.

I actually think someone may have posted a threat about it over a year ago and that everyone just forgot about it, though I admit that could have been on a different site.

Either way I didn't really bring myself to care enough to make my own thread when I found out, mostly because at the time all that was announced was 1) it was being made, 2) it would be CGI, and 3) until he died Anderson was working with the project, so it couldn't possibly be as bad as the live action movie, and probably will be better then the 80s cartoon as well.

 

[LaoJim]

No, do it properly or don't do it at all.

It's not even the puppets, half the fun was when they would have intricately designed model sets and then rig them with a hundred and one firecrackers and blow the hell out of it. So therapeutic somehow.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

No, do it properly or don't do it at all.

It's not even the puppets, half the fun was when they would have intricately designed model sets and then rig them with a hundred and one firecrackers and blow the hell out of it. So therapeutic somehow.

Unfortunately most kids today would probably laugh at those sort of special effects, and the artists that do that sort of thing are a real dying breed basically anywhere outside of Japan. And the model makers of Japan are essentially mostly hobbyists.

 

[CrystalShadow]

CGI has it's place. But when it's being used for EVERYTHING, especially something that was originally 2D or stop motion, one gets to wondering if the choice to use CGI might have been motivated by cost-effectiveness or market research rather than art.

Market research is a possibility, but probably not. It's more likely due to the fact that most artists today know digital art better than old style pen and paper art, or stop motion.

As someone who has made some 3D models(including full people_ in the past in the context of games let me tell you something: It takes dozens of man hours at the minimum and tons of artistic skill. First you have to make the model, then you have to make the bones, then you have animate, then you have to texture the model, and usually that means making the texture. Then if everything is right you still have to consider all of the effects and interactions that go with said model. That's just one model for a game where it has predetermined interactions. You basically have to take into account skills that are valid for both cell animation, and stop motion animation.

Now consider this: When making a movie, show, short, etc with CGI you don't have all of the predetermined interactions. You also have to animate for each fully 3D environment. So you can have dozens of models doing different animations in the same environment, all of which have to be done with painstaking detail. Then you have to figure in effects, render the scene in stages as you add textures and effects. In all it's a very difficult process. The rendering it self is also rather expensive on the whole because for media other than video games you need very powerful computers(Business class CPUs and Rendering video cards like Nvidia Quadro series) to render the scenes. To do this with any decent speed requires more than one computer working on the task due to the high polygon count of the models and resolution of textures. Which means using tons of server stations with very specialized set ups.

I'd argue that CGI is actually harder and more expensive than traditional hand drawn cell animation, or stop motion.

Having attempted both traditional hand-drawn 2d animation AND 3d animation, I have my doubts...
There's a reason 2d kind of died out for a while.

Still, it depends on what you're animating. Character animation is hard either way, but for mechanical objects, 3d is easier long term.

One thing about this is that a lot of the work for 3d is in the setup. Creating a character model is vastly more difficult than drawing a character, but once you have the model, there are many things you can trivially do with it.
Also, while the keyframes may require a lot of tweaking, you basically get the inbetween frames for free.
(flash and 2d vector animation negates this, but is essentially the middle ground anyway)

If you have a scene set up in 3d, changing camera angles is trivial. For 2d animation it would require redrawing the whole scene by hand...

Drawing a 2d animation frame is much easier than all the setup for a 3d scene.
But... Each additional frame is as difficult as the first, where for 3d a lot of the difficulty is up front setup.
As long as you aren't running into scenes your characters and models weren't designed for, you can do things with little effort, while the difficulty of animation is constant and pretty much directly proportional to the lenght of the sequence.

Which means which is easier or cheaper is very situational, and depends on how repetitive the content is.
(stop motion animation is another matter entirely though)

 

[chozo_hybrid]

I think it looks like it could be fun, we'll have to just wait and see.

 

[LaoJim]

No, do it properly or don't do it at all.

It's not even the puppets, half the fun was when they would have intricately designed model sets and then rig them with a hundred and one firecrackers and blow the hell out of it. So therapeutic somehow.

Unfortunately most kids today would probably laugh at those sort of special effects, and the artists that do that sort of thing are a real dying breed basically anywhere outside of Japan. And the model makers of Japan are essentially mostly hobbyists.

Yeah, so don't do it then. If you don't have a symphony orchestra don't try to play Beethoven's Ninth on a kazoo. I'm not suggesting that modern CGI artists don't have as much skill and I appreciate Pixar's movies for example, its just that the important thing about Thunderbirds was not the characters or the storys (which were rudimentary at best) it was the whole puppet asthetic, so I don't see anything good coming from remaking it.

(While we're only the subject of Japan, its the same reason that CGI Godzilla is never going to be as much fun as the guy in the rubber suit trashing minature Tokyo or for that matter why Jackie Chan's movies are more fun than any modern action movie).

But then I'm getting old...