Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 306

TRENDS 14 Comedy special blends zany humor computers "I felt like I was barely scratching the surface of motion-capture technology You get lost in it You're seeing a monitor and you're seeing this other character and you get lost in it People just start acting really bizarre I love that It has the ability of taking a staunch stuffy man and turning him into a little kid jumping around punching the air stuff like that" from Modern Cartoons and Oede Battle a bizarre video game that pits the Oedekerk a blowhard techno-tyrant against such opponents as an accountant and a sick old woman There are also such human guest stars as John Mendoza Stephen Root (News Radio) Fred Willard Tom Wilson Robin Riker and Kristian Alfonso Oedekerk (the plain old human one) also appears in a computer-generated comedy club where his audience is composed of aliens fish an octopus and other weird creatures and as an abusive gas-station cashier in Glass Booth Guy which boasts a computer-generated set "I used a lot of the cutting-edge stuff that's available right now" says Oedekerk "but that's not being used extensively especially motion-capture" In motion-capture a person is fitted with special patches at strategic areas on the trunk limbs and now face As the person moves a computer tracks the motion of the patches and creates a fluid computer rendering of the movements This can then be used to guide the movements of existing or future animated characters Internet for help "I like going out and finding talent it's fun A lot of my on-line time is spent finding guys like me" After viewing online a frame of two characters designed by John Davis and his DNA Productions in Texas Oedekerk opened a dialogue with the company and later hired DNA for his special With DNA Oedekerk now also has a pilot at Nickelodeon called Johnny Quasar and an upcoming ABC holiday special called Santa vs the Snowman "This ends up escalating into a full snow battle with ice walkers and melting little snowmen with hot-cocoa guns" And Oedekerk has "zero percent fear" about diving headlong into new cyberspace technologies "There'll always be an argument of 'Well people don't want to do that They just want to watch a show sit back It's not going to work' You can almost chart every single thing in entertainment it has always been said that it wouldn't work from movies having sound to black-and-white going color There's always this amazing contingent going 'No no it's not going to work' "But as soon as somebody gets on the Net the first time and we've all heard the same redundant story 'I blinked and it was 3 am' People don't say that about TV "It's a new inevitability It's all going to happen But it needs to be more fun in my opinion It's still too information-based and not enough entertainment-based But like everything else that will change" By KATE O'HARE TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES teve Oedekerk wants you to have fun in cyberspace He has plans for a Web site with interactive comedians goofy games and insane virtual-reality scenarios But just in case you're not wired yet he's offering a sample of what he's got in mind on old-fashioned two-dimensional non-interactive television At 7 pm Wednesday NBC presents steveoedek erkcom a one-hour comedy special that makes use of sophisticated computer-animation and digital-effects techniques blended with the kind of zany physical humor employed by Oedekerk in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls and Nothing to Lose (which he wrote and directed) and Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Pmfessor (which he wrote) "I tend to think very visually" says Oedekerk "I always picture this wild stuff all day long And then it just hit me I'm watching TV and I thought 'Wow there's not comedy like this on television There's no real visually based comedy show' So then I got excited about it 'Wow this is an area that hasn't been exploited in And boom there's the birth of the show" The special begins in a boy's (Robert Hutchinson) bedroom where he pops in a CD-ROM bought at a garage sale and finds himself sucked into Oedekerk's surrealistic cyber-world Among the characters are CGI Steve a computer-generated version of Oedekerk Steve's Skeleton animated through motion-capture technology The computer-generated or COI sets in Glass Booth Guy are not unusual on television Foundation Imaging which provided some of the technical expertise to steveoedekerkcom also works for the syndicated science-fiction show Babylon 5 which frequently uses CGI sets to save money But CGI sets are as common yet in the movies where Oedekerk usually works "That's one of the big ironies of features vs TV that cracks me up Doing feature films people will not use CGI locations because it's cost-prohibitive But in TV CGI sets and locations are used because they don't have enough money to do it live-action It really shows you the difference between how much people charge when the work is basically the same "From my end it ends up being really neat because once you know that equation you can bring the right companies into the feature world actually save money and get a better look" Because this sort of high-tech filmmaking is evolving so quickly finding new talent can be a challenge To solve this Oedekerk turns to the I in the special motion-capture is used to animate Steve's Skeleton who is seen in a segment being jilted by his girlfriend (Alfonso) "You can get a real human quality about the character" says Oedekerk "Like you see the woman in the car breaking up with my skeleton you really empathize with him He feels like a real person which is hard to get with hand animation.