I was fortunate enough to get into the two hour Paramount Pictures presentation at Comic-Con in San Diego this week and they had an impressive line-up of up-coming movies to showcase. The crowd of about 6000 people swelled the walls of the San Diego Convention Center's Hall H eager to set their eyes on never-before-seen footage from the Paramount schedule and they were not disappointed. The hours were packed with announcements, premieres, and Q&A sessions with many of the films' actors and directors. Here are the presentations that played the strongest.

Beowulf

Writer Neil Gaiman spoke of his reverence for what he called, "the oldest story in the English language" and co-writer Roger Avery's passion to get it done correctly. The two writers have been working on the script since 1997 and only in the last few years were they convinced that the technology was available to translate their vision of the epic poem. Director Robert Zemeckis convinced them to opt for a film-making process using CGI over a live-action performance that achieves the quality of a surreal painting. The live-action performances were shot in 2005 and the CGI work has been on-going ever since.

A brief trailer was shown (that may be available on the internet by now) and both Gaiman and Avery spoke of how they were able to achieve their dream cast for the picture (including Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Ray Winstone, and Angelina Jolie). They said they built their perfect cast list, sent it out to the actors, "and nobody said 'No'." "Beowulf" will see simultaneous release in the normal 2D as well as a variety of 3D formats and IMAX. The trailer reminded me of very high quality Final Fantasy cinematics from Square, but the eyes still looked a little lifeless. Some of that may be attributed to the unusual colors and lighting used in the footage and hopefully it will look more natural in the finished product. What is clear from the footage is that Beowulf will have a very unique look when it arrives in November of this year.

J. J. Abrams Mystery Project

The J. J. Abrams produced project that is being referred to as "Cloverfield" or "1-18-08" is definitely a giant-monster-attacks New York movie. Abrams came out quickly and talked about his love for "Godzilla" and his desire to make an American icon monster that would have the same impact. He had very little to say about the film other than to show the trailer that premiered before "Transformers" and quickly reveal the poster. The poster shows a decapitated Statue of Liberty and a path of destruction cut through the neighboring buildings.

The statue itself and many of the buildings on the poster suffer from long gashes that look like they were made by giant three-fingered claws. Abrams did not say if the trailer was made up of footage from the movie or if the movie itself was composed of all home-video footage a la "The Blair Witch Project". However he did say that more would be revealed about the project (including the name) in the coming months and that another trailer (the real trailer he called it) was in the works.

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