CARS is about a rookie racecar named Lightning McQueen who thinks he can do everything by himself.  Speeding on his way to a big race, he crashes into a town called Radiator Springs, destroying lots of the inhabitant's belongings. In order to make up for what he did, McQueen is sentenced to community service. Though he will do anything to get away from the work, McQueen must learn to respect and bond with the Radiator Springs inhabitants in order to get out of the town and back on the racetracks.  A simple plot but entertaining.

In almost all the animated films, the script / dialogue of the characters is the most entertaining of them all.  Carefully written and delivered perfectly.  Film creators hire the services of popular celebrities as voice actors/actresses giving realism to the animated film.  The one I enjoyed most are the lines of Dory - a blue tang who accompanied Marlin (Nemo's dad) in their journey to find Nemo. 

Now let's discuss the creativity part - the animation.  The most evident about most of the animated films is that the creators try to make the characters as life-like as possible.  Every little details are given importance to make it look real.  The same importance was given to the movie CARS. 

Greg Brandeau, Pixar's VP of technology explained that Cars, has put more strain on their internal systems than any other movie, swallowing up a colossal 2,300 CPU years over the course of the last five years. In other words, in Brandeau's view, a single CPU would have to run for 2,300 years in order to do all the number crunching for Cars.

The rendering system runs on Dell servers with Linux OS.  Initially, NFS file system was being used and was found to be causing the slowdown.   A gigabyte of memory on file server heads was not enough, Pixar needed something in the region of 32 Gigabytes.  Pixar eventually opted to replace the NFS with a SAN (Storage Area Networks) based on an EMC CX700 box, linked to Dell Linux servers running parallel file system software from startup Ibrix.  The new system, which was deployed last year, has helped cut Pixar's rendering times to their previous levels, while keeping hardware costs to a minimum.

With the technical aspect solved, the next biggest challenge for the "CARS" technical team was creating the metallic and painted surfaces of the car characters, and the reflections that those surfaces generate.  An algorithmic rendering technique known as "ray tracing" was used for the first time at Pixar to give the filmmakers the look and effect that they wanted.

In addition to creating accurate reflections, ray tracing was used to create accurate shadows, like when there are multiple light sources and they want to get a feathering of shadows at the edges. Or occlusion, which is the absence of ambient light between two surfaces, like a crease in a shirt. A fourth use is irradiance. An example of this would be if you had a piece of red paper and held it up to a white wall, the light would be colored by the paper and cast a red glow on the wall.

Another technology used is called the "ground-locking" system that kept the car firmly planted on the road, unless the story called for some exception to this rule.  this system is built into the models themselves, and as you move the car around, the vehicle sticks to the ground.  Another major accomplishment for the Characters team was to come up with a universal rig that would work for practically every character. This means the same animation controls (or avars) could be applied to each of the nearly 100 unique car characters without creating new articulation components. The same basic chassis was also fitted to the geometry of each individual car, but the suspension was customized for each vehicle.

In case you're wondering how many cars are there in the movie Cars - 120,000 cars in the stands, and an additional 2,000 in the infield, the biggest crowd scenes ever done at Pixar even surpassing the milling ants in "A Bug's Life".  And because of this, 300 times more computing power was needed to make Cars than Toy Story, since the average time to render a single frame of film on 'CARS' was 17 hours. Some frames took as much as a week.

Now why am I discussing all these?  Not that I am promoting the movie, but I want an honest to goodness animated film be produced by Filipinos.  In as far as technology and talent - we have them all.  The challenge really is to come up with new ideas.  Ideas that will be attractive to all ages as much as possible, and not only to kids.

In spite of the technology needed to produce an animated film, I believe the process of creating, developing, and producing an animated film isn't so different from that of a conventional film.  We have great directors, talented actors/actresses and creative graphic designers and animators.  What we need really are ideas. 

Did you know that there is an upcoming animated movie entitled "The Ant Bully"?  The story is about a boy named Lucas Nickle, who floods an ant colony with his watergun, and he was shrunken down to insect size and sentenced to hard labor in the ruins.  This is the kind of idea that I want our Filipino talents and filmmakers to do.  I believe in the Filipino ingenuity.  With proper motivation, we can create one soon.

Am logging off.  God Bless us all!

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