However, before we go any further, I want to take a moment to thank Sony for inviting me to the junket. While I’m sure some of you are going to think my words on "Surf’s Up" are tainted from the free trip to Hawaii, I’d like to refer you to what I wrote a month ago when I attended a special event where Sony showed us about 20 minutes from the movie.

When filmmakers make an animated movie they follow certain rules. The biggest one is to never have two actors recording their lines in the same room. They always record each voice actor separately, and sometimes two people who are acting in the same scene never meet until the day they’re doing press for the final product. It falls on the editor to find a way to get an emotional performance out of the voice tracks, which can be quite a challenge.

What the filmmakers of "Surf’s Up" did was highly unconventional. Instead of having each actor record their lines separately, they would get everyone in a scene together and have them record their lines at the same time. What would happen is people would go over each other’s voices and the end result was a much more organic scene, one that sounded real.

Now with certain animated films this might not work. But "Surf’s Up" allowed this process due to the film’s subject matter as the film is done like you are watching a documentary. You have characters talking to the camera, getting interviewed, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen from a big budget CGI film and I’ll say it looked great.

For the first time when watching an animated movie I thought the characters sounded real. The way they recorded the voices absolutely added to the actor’s ability to craft a performance.

Also when I interviewed the directors they said that tons of the movie was improvised and they would only tell the actors the outline of the scene, allowing them to bring their own ideas to the characters they were portraying.

One of the great stories they told was when Shia LaBeouf was supposed to be at the recording session with the people who played his family. It ended up he was a bit late but the rest were already in the booth recording. When he arrived they sent him in and told the actors to act like his character was late for an interview that they were all supposed to do in their family home and what would they say to him. That scene absolutely used the way they recorded the movie as an asset. You had voices over one another, yelling, it felt like a real scene rather than an animated one.

While we only got to see about fifteen minutes of the film I was really impressed with not only the animation but the way they are going to tell the story. Having the frame act as a camera is a great stylistic choice and it’s also quite original. Also some of the shots went in and out of focus as the person who was supposed to be filming was running to try and catch up with a character. Another great shot was when Shia LaBeouf’s character was on a surf board and the camera was mounted on the board with him so it couldn’t move but sometimes water would splash on the frame. It was a little touch but it worked quite well.

Now that I’ve seen the final product I can tell you “Surf’s Up” is a great movie and one that I’m happy to help promote. The best thing I can say is it’s the first animated movie I’ve seen by another studio that reminded me of a Pixar film. Yes, it’s that good. And to give you a taste of the movie and the animation I’m posting some video vignette’s which you can watch below.

Look for the clips from the film later tonight. 

Dreams