Next Generation spoke interviewed Ralph Eggleston, who is the production designer for the upcoming movie, Wall-E. Eggleston answered questions about how video gaming technology has grown, the difference between the technology movies use and video games use, as well as other things.

Pixar has yet to take a wrong step with its melding of pioneering CGI technology with kid- and adult-friendly entertainment. But as videogame rendering technology reaches new levels of fidelity, with realtime graphics now routinely used for cutscenes, is Pixar beginning to see convergence between videogames and the films that it creates? We spoke to Ralph Eggleston, production designer behind Pixar’s upcoming movie, Wall-E, to find out.


How do you regard the way videogame technology has grown since you first started working on CGI movies?

I’ve seen games catching up with us. The games based on our films need such large lead times that we aren’t necessarily settled on the look of the film when they start. So we give them some conceptual images and I’m not only surprised but sometimes jealous at how fast they can work and how quickly their realtime rendering engines seem to move things along. We sometimes wish we could have something like that to move things along early in production.


How much of a gap exists today between current-gen consoles and the tech you use?

A vast, vast difference. If the player is involved in the narrative they can render it only so fast, really, though it will get faster. But when you’re in control of a narrative, as we are as film-makers, the level of detail has to be much greater and we have the opportunity to create that because we have full control – our worlds are finite as opposed to videogames, which are not entirely infinite but a lot more infinite than what we do.

tyranitar24 via next-gen.biz »