Every year, the biggest movies tend to have the biggest effects. Motion capture, computer-generated imagery or 3D?cutting-edge technology is empowering some of the most creative minds in films and animation bring feature films to life, with characters literally flying off the screen and into your face. In 2009, James Cameron?s science fiction epic Avatar captured the imagination of millions of people from around the globe. Creating a completely new world from scratch, one with hundreds of species of flora and fauna and breathtaking landscapes is a daunting task that the Oscar-winning Canadian filmmaker completed with flying colours, courtesy computer graphics.

Cameron has always tried to be on the cutting edge of film making. If The Abyss featured the first photo-realistic computer graphics character, The Terminator combined computer graphics and human actors. True Lies pushed the bar even higher with composite technology. There is no doubt that 3D adds significant value to movie content and Cameron has shown it in Avatar; computer graphics characters in 3D look more real than in 2D.

Of late, The Adventures of Tintin, brought to the screen by director Steven Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson, is running to packed houses across the country. Jackson?s skill with motion capture technology (as seen in his films like The Lord of the Rings and King Kong) is well-translated in Spielberg?s first animated project, creating an immersive world you can easily escape into, while the director?s love of telling an adventure story bursts through each frame. Spielberg used Cameron?s performance capture technology? as seen in Avatar?which helps him to see his characters perform in real time as digital replicas. All in all, Tintin is a fun adventure that should thrill both fans and those getting to know the series for the first time.

Viewers can expect yet another visual treat soon when Dream Works? Puss in Boots launches in theatres this week. Technology from the American PC maker Hewlett-Packard has played an integral role in many of DreamWorks? awe-inspiring films, including the Shrek series, How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2. In Puss in Boots, film makers have deployed a range of technologies, from HP desktop workstations to networking products to HP digital rendering resources accessed via the cloud.

Artists used more than 200 high-performance HP Z800 workstations, allowing the flawless execution of exceedingly detailed and creative tasks in the forthcoming film. The workstations helped design everything?from the swashbuckling hero Puss, to digital effects such as complex tornados and cloudscapes. HP ProLiant BL460 blade technology, geographically dispersed in five server render farms across the United States and India, provided peak compute power at crucial stages of production. The blade servers powered an unprecedented 117 terabytes of data and more than 60 million render hours.

To meet the massive data demands of the film, DreamWorks deployed HP cloud services, which eliminated the need for an estimated multi-million dollar physical data centre expansion.

?Our decade-long collaboration with DreamWorks has challenged HP to develop technology that continually meets the intense, high-performance needs of the world?s best digital animators,? said Santanu Ghose, country head, Converged Infrastructure Solutions, HP India. HP DreamColour technology was utilised in the film?s production process to provide high-end colour prints of the creative team?s visual development work. This technology enabled designers to print accurate colour proofs of critical reference imagery such as character designs, environments and key storytelling moments.

There is no doubt that computer animation has become more and more prevalent in movies. As technology evolves and computers become faster and faster, the animation will be more and more convincing and realistic.