After a long and grueling weekend of moving, I decided to treat myself to a film last night; namely, Joss Whedon's Serenity, the film to cap the series Firefly that has gathered a fan base large enough that it can almost be labeled a cult following (perhaps I only avoid that label so I don't, as a fan, have to call myself a cultist). First and foremost I have to say that I immensely enjoyed it; it was a fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping tale rich with both visual effects and storyline twists that held my interest through both somber plot intricacies and the quirky turns of off-the-wall humor that began with Firefly.
While I would love to indulge my inner fanboy and write a novel's worth of enthusiastic commentary that would probably only make sense to other Firefly geeks, the real purpose for this article is to discuss the movie's visual effects and how they're used. Some time ago I wrote about Robots as a perfect example of the wrong way to use computer Flash Animations to tell a story; while Robots and Serenity can't truly be compared fairly considering that one is a children's full-length animated film and the other is a young-adult-and-older oriented live-action film, one can still place them upon a spectrum denoting the effectiveness of visual effects in the storyline--and they stand at entirely opposing ends of that spectrum.
There are many parts of Serenity that are, in fact, entirely virtual. Outer space scenes; scenes involving large futuristic cities, space stations, and colossal galaxy-spanning ships. Zoic Studios used Light Wave 3D for these scenes and many other effects in the Firefly series, and brought the same look and feel from the series to the movie. The graphics themselves are stunning--realistic without losing a cinematic science-fiction feel, that touch of fantasy that makes suspension of disbelief so much easier. But what makes them truly wondrous is how easily the computer animation integrates with the live action; for example, in several instances in the film, the crew of Serenity could be seen through the ship's windows/viewports from the outside, framed at times by outer space or other virtual fields in a composite layering live actors with rendered environments. There was nothing to act as a "dead giveaway", no mismatched lighting, no displacement effect that separated the actors from the digital environment in a "magazine cutout" effect that happens to too many such scenes.
Another remarkable use of animation Design Tutorials and effects was the camera work. Firefly itself often used clever camera tricks, such as focus shifts, to heighten the immersion in the scene, but the virtual cameras used in Serenity's animated scenes went far beyond that. The scene that stands out most in my mind (warning: spoilers) was the escape from Reaver territory near the dead planet Miranda, and Wash's jaw-dropping, gut-clenching aerial stunts to avoid both Alliance and Reaver ships. Rather than set a single point camera to observe the entire field of action from a distance, or even set a single perspective camera to follow a set path and observe in "tunnel vision", the camera whipped about wildly--jolting, jostling, whirling around the action in wild jerks and swooshes that brought the sense of frantic, whizzing motion from the screen right to your seat. It's a clever use of visual vertigo, and one that takes you beyond suspension of disbelief to the point where you're gripping the arms of your chair to brace for impact.
Explosions? Laser fire? Crashes? No problem. Rather than occur just for the sake of a little fun mayhem, destruction, and showing off Flash Animations skills in a "look what I can do!" fashion, the combatant aspects of the film blended perfectly in a seamless, continuous flow of motion that never seemed to jump or jar from one action to the next and that never went to the excessive extremes often labeled as "gratuitous violence". No matter how extreme the animated effect, it was done well, and it was done tastefully rather than to excess. In addition, the soundtrack was timed well; the audio effects, the music, and the dialogue synched so well with the action that it was entirely too easy to lose awareness of any one as a separate entity rather than a perfectly orchestrated whole.
The point that I'm making here is that Serenity by no means skimped on the animated visual effects; it's every bit as shiny (no pun intended, for those acquainted with Firefly's slang) as Robots, but with so much more depth and substance that it wasn't just a quick flash in the pan. The animated effects weren't there just to be pretty; they were there to enhance the story, and they did it in a stellar fashion. Rather than overwhelm, the talents of Zoic Studios' animation team brought the crew of Firefly from life to larger than life in Serenity's big-screen debut, and provided a positive example of how to use animation as an asset to complement and complete a film's storyline.
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