Star Value

With so many films coming out before Christmas, it’s hard to keep track of the bevy of talented youngsters on our movie screens. Thankfully, Stephanie Meyer and the last installment of the Twilight Series, Breaking Dawn, has made it quite easy to identify the beginning of the next generation of talent: computer generated humans.  Special effects gurus Phil Tippet and John Rosengrant led the visual effects team for the last two Twilight films and created the masterpiece in Breaking Dawn that was the animatronic baby Renesmee. The baby, which in reality is a collection of wires and bolts, was transformed on screen to the fully functioning, wide-eyed, and almost too realistic offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Cullen. Though scenes involving the swaddled newborn scared many theatergoers, this very well may be the new Hollywood. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Avatar demonstrated that computer generated humans have a place at the Oscars now, and baby Renesmee is proof that this trend is growing rapidly.  We can only hope that the time when we are competing for jobs with puppet machinery is still relatively distant in our future.