Prince Of Egypt Production Diary


	"The Prince Of Egypt" was Dreamworks first traditionally animated feature film and it is soon coming to DVD which gives us the chance to take you behind the scenes to see how this production comes together. We will keep this section updated as soon as new information and material comes in, so make sure to check back often.


	by Guido Henkel August 1, 1999

The Dreamworks team eventually found a segment that would give people an inside look at the creation of the technical effects that were done for the film, but also showing that at the same time they were doing this, they were building the effects department and the studio where they would utlimately reside. This particular segment of the DVD will show a little bit of what it took to coordinate all these things.

The featurette will cover some of the film’s most memorable effects scenes, such as the Exodus sequence when the believers follow Moses and leave Egypt. It will show how the artists created hundreds of thousands of bodies and how they went about having each one of them

animated individually as opposed to being a generic stamp.
“Each one of them moves differently and has something different going on in the Exodus sequence, “ Gustafson comments excitedly. Dreamworks also created a special system for this sequence that allowed them to completely stage the shots in a 3D environment. In order to maintain the traditional look they had characters painted and animated separately to match the camera angle and movements of their 3D scene. These paintings were then placed in the 3D scenery as ‘stand-up cards’, allowing them to move and scale correctly as the camera moved through the 3D environment. It is a perfect example how 3D and 2D combined can result in much more visually striking scenes.

Of course, the film’s most breath-taking scene, the “Parting Of The Red Sea” will also be show in

detail in this segment, pinpointing how CGI (computer generated images) and traditional cel animation enhanced each other. 3D generated images and animation of the water was blended with hand-painted 2D elements to make sure the scenes stayed within the artistic boundaries of the entire film. Only that way were the filmmakers able to achieve the kind of awe-inspiring look and feel to the scene that was necessary to make it believable. After all, the scene had to show how much faith it really took these people to walk through Moses’ passageway.


	Owners of the “Antz” DVD will be familiar with one other feature that will be part of the "The Prince Of Egypt" DVD, although in a different variation, a supplement called “Basics Of Animation”. It will take you behind the scenes of traditional animation this time, giving viewers a good look at the different stages a cel animation goes through as it progresses until you have the final product. “We start out with a storyboard sequence of the Chariot Race from the film, “ Gustafson says. “Then we move to a two-panel screen (work in progress), and finally to a four-panel screen that includes the final finished composite with the directors talking about it all the way through, explaining the creative process, the 2D the 3D stuff and some of the animatics and other animation tools they utilized during this film.”


	"The Prince Of Egypt" will also contain a photo gallery consisting of 75 - 100 images that were put together during the actual visual development stages of the film. It includes backgrounds, character sketches, things that motivated the artists or inspired them, all done to music. The gallery will allow you to control your way through the images or run automatically, where every six or seven seconds it will fade from one image to the next, almost like a screensaver.

A commentary track with the film’s directors, Simon Wells, Steve Hickner and Brenda Chapman will also complement the materials found on the disc. “What’s kind of fun is that Brenda Chapman was pregnant and literally within days of having her baby at the time that we recorded the commentary,” Gustafson remembers. “So, she was sitting in there and we were all just kind of waiting, hoping she wasn’t gonna suddenly say “Ahem, I gotta go!”

Of course there will also be a nearly half-hour long “Making Of” featurette on the release with interviews with directors, producers, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the artists and animators themselves who animated individual characters. It will also cover a real trip that was taken to Egypt to research all of the story and is intended to show what was required to make the movie.


	We will keep these pages updated with new information, as soon as we get it in, so check back frequently to see what happened on the production of the “Prince Of Egypt Signature Selection”


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	© 1999 by “DVD Review”. All rights reserved. Reprinting only with written permission by the publisher. All “Prince Of Egypt” images are copyrighted and used by permission from Dreamworks SKG.