Always good to see animation climb higher:
... After debuting in second place the previous weekend behind Oscar-fueled "The King's Speech," the animated family film [Rango] moved into first and has $120.4 million in global box office revenue to date. American-made animated family films have gained broad acceptance overseas, with "Gnomeo and Juliet" and "Tangled" also finding favor ...
Thus far, Romeo and Juliet has gathered up $144.3 million from world turnstiles while Tangled has collected $551.5 million.
Apparently it's "mocap animation" that's not getting much love.
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I completely agree with this post but be careful the way you use "mocap animation"... Avatar can be considered as "mocap animation", similar to "Mars Needs Moms"... S, what makes the difference of success between these two movies?
Story, marketing and Art direction are some of the answers I guess.
Avatar didnt have CG humans (primarily).
Okay, but Na'vis are similar to humans:
they have human facial expressions and similar bodies. So, I guess it is due to the huge amount of work provided by Weta and James Cameron to make them look alive... and not just "creepy-cg" creatures...
People seem to neglect to note that MNM and Avatar were not remotely the same kinds of films, and comparing their relative success is like comparing a fish to a wheelbarrow. Avatar was marketed as an FX-heavy dramatic sci-fi extravaganza. MNM was, for want of a more fitting category, tossed in with animated family films. That's how both the critics and the public looked at those films.
Films like Beowulf and Avatar don't say much about whether mo-cap can be accepted as a substitute for hand-keyed animation. Films like Monster House, Polar Express, and MNM can.
Specifically, Avatar's (tech) Oscar-winning achievement was being able to capture detailed eye and facial movements. (And that was about the ONLY "realistic" thing it captured.)
Zemeckis started on making the bodies move like people, but never knew what to do with faces once the camera was in closeup--As long as he got the lip-synch, he was happy.
IMD may have its tech up to date, but Z's brain was still using out-versioned software from six years ago.
... Avatar can be considered as "mocap animation", similar to "Mars Needs Moms"...
Not really. Avatar had a lot of live action humans, some of them stand alone, some of them combined with mo cap characters.
"Harry Potter" has done this, "Lord of the Rings" has done this. Hell, "Stars Wars Part I" (fourth filmed installment) did this.
Audiences (apparently) buy mo cap mixed with live-action. Audiences aren't as happy with mo cap and mo cap.
Gotta disagree with ya', Steve. It wasn't the mo-cap that kept auidiences away. It was the crappy trailers and the crappy designs that happened to be mo-cap. Zemekis has no design sense and he's demonstarted that in every animated film he's made since RR. Mo-cap when done right WITH GOOD DESIGNS and good key framing works fine - like it did in Monster House. When done right it's no worse than rotoscope and Disney used that for years without hardly a complaint from anyone.
When Monster House bombed I never heard anyone complaining about the mo-cap, but they did complain about it being to scary for young children.
The audiences aren't nerly as sophisticated as everyone is assuming as far as mo-cap goes, but they do know a crappy film when they see the trailer for one and Mars could've been animated completely by Pixar or DW and it still would've bombed.
Mo-cap when done right WITH GOOD DESIGNS and good key framing works fine - like it did in Monster House. When Monster House bombed I never heard anyone complaining about the mo-cap, but they did complain about it being to scary for young children.
Although you did start to hear some complaints that switching to cartoonish character design on realistic 3D Mocap looked too much "like live actors in rubber Disneyland suits"--And that was from the paying folks in the audience.
Even if Z made a hundred films, he'd always have "creepy" attached to IMD's reputation from Polar--But Monster House showed that Mocap couldn't quite acheive a Pixar-stylized Cute, either. It just...wasn't good for anything besides live-hybrid FX, really.
The audiences aren't nerly as sophisticated as everyone is assuming as far as mo-cap goes, but they do know a crappy film when they see the trailer for one
A movie that opens big and falls fast at least interested audiences to see it, even if it didn't deliver--
A movie that can't get past the starting gate, NOBODY went out their door to see, and that's the marketing. There's Sam Goldwyn's old quote about "Audiences lining up not to see it", in a nutshell.
Gotta disagree with ya', Steve. It wasn't the mo-cap that kept auidiences away. It was the crappy trailers and the crappy designs that happened to be mo-cap.
So you say, and yet there are plenty of examples of all mo-cap films being reviled, with Polar Express being the one financial success. Monster House still lost money, and wasn't a fraction as popular as literally dozens of all key-framed animated films.
The pattern is overwhelmingly clear. All-mo-cap movies are at least as expensive, and often far more expensive, and the results aren't nearly as entertaining, as all-key-framed animated films.
I heard the same 'crappy trailers and crappy designs' stuff before Gnomeo and Juliet opened, and that's been a hit. The public has spoken -- mo-cap is DOA.
Mo-cap in theory has always promised a lot, and in the early CG days, when skilled animators who could do believable body mechanics were few and far between, it looked very appealing.
Then came Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The first massive mo-cap flop, and a brand new studio bit the dust. Over the last ten years mo-cap technique has improved, but not as much as the workforce of skilled animators has improved and enlarged. And now there's Mars Needs Moms, another massive mo-cap flop, and another brand new studio bites the dust.
In the 10 years between those two epic flops, there have been over 20 fully animated CG films that have been bigger hits (some by a VERY wide margin) than the single mo-cap success (Polar Express).
There's simply no reason to use mo-cap, unless you want animated characters who look vaguely human to blend in with live-action humans.
There is a reason to use mocap. Quantity!
Mocap should not be used for the 'hero' characters on a movie, but sould be relegated to background characters. It's all good and dandy for games.
Remember the "Golum". Although the mocap was heavily massaged, it would have taken a lot longer to keyframe every single control on that rig.
Mocap is not DOA. And it has provided work for a lot of animators as well.
OTOH, Monster House was really boring, Polar Express looked horrendous, and MNM just doesnt inspire much interest.
rufus
Remember the "Golum". Although the mocap was heavily massaged, it would have taken a lot longer to keyframe every single control on that rig.
Actually, it was the full body shots that were often fully keyframed on Golum, and those were the shots that required the most controls. It's a misunderstanding made by people who don't animate that 'every single control' on a rig is necessary for good animation. A good animator is usually using a tiny subset of the possible rig's controls.
Also, the best mo-cap setups are only putting data on the main controls. In the time it takes to clean up the garbage in that data, a skilled animator could usually have done it from scratch.
> Zemeckis started on making the bodies move like
> people, but never knew what to do with faces once
> the camera was in closeup--As long as he got the
> lip-synch, he was happy.
This is not true.
On Polar Express, Zemeckis was very concerned about
how the eyes looked. It was Imageworks that choked
on delivering what Zemeckis wanted.
One month before Polar Express hit the theaters, a test screening in Arizona with comments about the eyes caused a massive de-archive of shots to change the eyes yet one more time.
Okay, but Na'vis are similar to humans:
they have human facial expressions and similar bodies.
But to me, that makes all the difference.
Caricatures of humans seem to work, but trying to make them look like actual humans, doesnt.
I guess what Im saying is, its the Uncanny Valley.
So you say, and yet there are plenty of examples of all mo-cap films being reviled, with Polar Express being the one financial success.
And even then, ISTR Polar falling as hard and fast down the top ten as every other third-party CGI in the 2-D theaters, but making all its money back in the few IMAX and 3-D screens there were at the time--
Mostly since it was the first modern 3-D to hit mainstream non-IMAX theaters in the 00's, and the Bwana Devil novelty (and Z's taste for "rollercoasters") grabbed a new audience...As Disney found out when it used the same strategy to boost Chicken Little, and had its own divided box office.
If you want to blame the current saturation of 3-D, blame Bob for that one, too.
Actually, it was the full body shots that were often fully keyframed on Golum, and those were the shots that required the most controls. It's a misunderstanding made by people who don't animate that 'every single control' on a rig is necessary for good animation. A good animator is usually using a tiny subset of the possible rig's controls.
jeez. ok, besides the oblique insults there ( a 'good' animator, a non animator).
Keyframe animation takes longer than cleaning up mocap, althoug It does result to be more pleasing animation than mocap. With mocap, the performance depends largely on the actor. Sometimes, these actors are not the best.
You just can't argue with the fact that keyframing a character takes longer than applying and cleaning mocap. I've used both techniques myself.
I also did not say that for 'good animation' every 'single control needs to be used'. Im hindsight, I should have not used the words "keyframing every control on that rig". But I was just comparing the two approaches.
rufus. 10 years and counting!
No insults intended. When I look at beginners' animation, I find that often they don't realize how much they can get from just using a rig's main controls. It's the same mistake I used to make.
As for the speed of mo-cap, I would disagree about it being faster, at least in the way it's practiced everywhere I've ever seen it used. First, there's finding the actor, then booking time to capture the mo-cap footage. The directors who are in love with mo-cap are usually the directors who are fond of shooting lots of takes, and lots of coverage, and then waffling on which versions they want to use.
That's just to get the mo-cap data. Once the animator starts cleaning it up, there are always extra rounds of approvals and extra layers of supervisors, and those same directors are usually terrible at judging anything other than rendered final animation, so there are tons of revisions to 'finaled' shots.
In theory, mo-cap can be quicker, at least for simple actions that lack nuance and that an actor can act out. In practice, it's almost always more labor intensive, more technically demanding, and more expensive. And far less satisfying once on the screen.
In theory, mo-cap can be quicker, at least for simple actions that lack nuance and that an actor can act out. In practice, it's almost always more labor intensive, more technically demanding, and more expensive. And far less satisfying once on the screen.
Agreed on the satisfying part.Mocap tends to look weightless. As i said, I've used both methods. You're right in pointing out that mocap shooting schedules shoulb be accounted for when calculating the time it takes for a scene to be done. We do them in one to two days. Then we go again depending on our needs. All in all,I produce almost ten times the footage I could produce compared to keyframe animation. That's my case. Yours might be a different experience.
I do enjoy keyframing a lot more as well. After all, you can't mocap creatures/monsters, can you!?
Rufus
"One month before Polar Express hit the theaters, a test screening in Arizona with comments about the eyes caused a massive de-archive of shots to change the eyes yet one more time. "
You mean they used to be *WORSE*?!?!
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