The authors present the different steps involved in making a film starring computer generated and animated reincarnations of Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. In an introduction, they describe how to make a film, using their experience as a guide. They cover different elements of filmmaking, such as decors, actors, and scenario.

The authors then present the steps they took to create computer actors Bogart and Monroe. Different techniques were used and are rapidly described, yielding a simplistic decomposition of the body into only four parts, followed by a rapid study of local transformations of actors.

The next three chapters focus on the animation of an actor’s body, hands, and face. Many references are made to a system used to specify human motion, but no formalization of the movement is proposed. Instead, the different actions are hand-coded, and the system relies on spline interpolation to smooth movement. This approach seems painful for the movie-maker, who has to create his or her own database of movements or actions. The movement of a hand to grab something requires the frame-by-frame control of some 15 parameters during 200 frames. Similarly, facial animation is controlled by about 30 parameters.

The next chapter covers color, reflectance, transparency, and texture in less than seven pages. References to other books, or more precision, would have been welcome. The authors then look at cameras, lights, and shadows. Nice images show some of the effects that can be obtained, but again the chapter lacks any references, formalization, or detailed description.

A chapter introduces decor, nonhuman actors, and the animation of lights and cameras. Some examples of spline-interpolated camera paths, generated for another film realized by the authors, are listed with no further explanations. The last portion of the book focuses on the commands for the different modules developed by the authors.

Although the book presents an exciting aspect of computer graphics--the realization of computer actors and their integration in a movie environment--it is more an overview of a specific example than anything else. The bibliography is poor and lists several other papers by the authors. No comparison is made with other systems or approaches to computer movie generation. Some techniques announced as original (such as the “InterPhong method”) lack both explanations and references.