Tim Borrelli has one point of view regarding motion/performance capture ... and the New York Times has one a tad different:
... “Rise [of the Planet of the Apes]” uses a video system that analyzes the facial expressions of the actors playing the apes. “The system can capture every subtle nuance of expression down to the pixel,” Dr. Bregler said, “and every wrinkle. The wrinkles are especially important.”
Performance capture technology, as its name suggests, is based on actual performances by human actors. ...
Happily, the New York Times does make reference to the artists sitting in dark rooms with their computers and monitors.
... Software may do most of the animating, but human artists still apply their skills, adjusting the rendering if Mr. Serkis’s protruding human nose is not squashed exactly as it should be to become a chimp’s nose, or if the emotional intent of the performance is not conveyed properly.
“The process is not completely mathematical,” said Joe Letteri, a four-time Oscar winner and senior visual effects supervisor for Weta. ...
I guess it depends who you talk to ... and who has the bigger megaphone ... that ultimately determines whether the public believes that actors in wired suits are doing most of the heavy lifting, or it's somebody else. Because an animator writes this about one of the actors on another ape picture:
... we ended up using about 10% of what [Serkis] did on stage [for King Kong]. 10%. Most of it as a baseline for facial movement, the body was completely off and useless. And then I bring my family to the film, and I see that that Andy Serkis is credited as King Kong TWICE before any animators are mentioned. ...
Based on the above, I think the battle over who does what in animated/ motion capture features is going to be a long one. Right now, the public relation victories seem to be tilting toward the actors.
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18 comments:
It sure doesn't help much when animators themselves are screaming that mo-cap isn't real animation.
Thankfully, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines animation as CREATION OF A PERFORMANCE by key frame animation.
I always felt that MoCap is like rotoscoping... for some reason, both always seem to lack real artistry that true animation delivers.
Thanks for making my point...arghhhh!!!!
There is good rotoscope and bad rotoscope. There is good mo-cap and bad mo-cap. There is good non-rotoscope animation and bad non-rotoscope animation.
BUT THEY ARE ALL ANIMATION!!!
^ NO.
There are, however, bad actors.
r.
I record video reference for my shots and if I am unable to perform the actions myself I will have another actor perform them for my reference. I then use the reference for the basis of my blocking. It is not a perfect 1:1 transfer, I exaggerate and adjust poses/arcs (and sometimes create a new action from scratch) as I manually block the acting into the computer, but the similarities between my original acting and the animated shot are obvious. So how is animator-polished mo-cap (or rotoscoping) any different? If I could put on a mo-cap suit and act the same shot directly into the computer, I could skip the "manual blocking" and then make the same frame-by-frame adjustments I would from my video reference and likely end up with the same final product. If the end product has an animator polishing and adjusting poses frame by frame to create the best performance, does it matter where the source acting comes from?
(although, I agree that automated process that don't use an animator to finesse the work shouldn't be considered animation)
Some people have asqued me what an "animator" is.
What Jay describes is a process a lot of animators have adopted for dificult scenes. But the question here is wether Serkis (and other actors) deserve ALL the credit, as he seems to believe. Big companies and big directors seem to have a beef with animators. Between Jackson and Cameron, there's no much love for us.
Hey everyone, I have an idea!
Let's take a brand new technology that's never existed before and rather than address it on its own terms, let's draw a strained analogy to some older technique so that we can label and pigeon-hole it as either "this" or "that".
Then we can argue endlessly on the internet over whether it's a "this" or a "that".
FUN!
Question: What kind of horse is the brand-new motorcar? I say it's more of a draft-horse, because of its strength.
The idiots who disagree with me call it a donkey, because of its stubbornness!
"What kind of horse is the brand-new motorcar?"
This analogy doesn't quite work. The horse and the motorcars are both tools of transportation directed by a driver. The end result is the same: the driver gets from point A to point B. Only the tools are different.
2D, 3D, and mo-cap are all tools of animation but they create the same result: giving the illusion of life to inanimate objects to create a performance. (some people may add "non-real-time" to this description otherwise Muppets would fit the definition, but that's another debate)
"... we ended up using about 10% of what [Serkis] did on stage [for King Kong]. 10%. Most of it as a baseline for facial movement, the body was completely off and useless. And then I bring my family to the film, and I see that that Andy Serkis is credited as King Kong TWICE before any animators are mentioned. ..."
Sounds like animation to me and sounds like Serkis is an ass and a liar (or just plain stupid)
Due to most animators own immaturity and pompousness, Live-action films are shoving animators into a new ghetto. - just when it's clear that the live-actions films that make the most money need animators!
Good going you morons!!! Keep fighting about whether Mo-Cap is true animation or not.
WEEEE! Looks like people picked up on my fun new game: "Let's Argue about MoCap!"
Time for the Bonus Round: Is MoCap a FLOORWAX, or a DESSERT-TOPPING??
For 5000 points and the bonus Secret Square prize package including the trip to Mazatlan and the wonderful mink stole from Dicker and Dicker of Beverly Hills!
The effectiveness of the mo-cap in Apeschas far mire to do with editing than performance.
That's "...Apes has far more to do..."
Here's the common viewpoint, which I think is both wrong and nonsensical:
If mocap is done by Robert Zemeckis, it is glorified rotoscoping, with "dead eyes," "no souls," blah, blah, blah...
But if mocap is done by James Cameron, Peter Jackson/Andy Serkis, it is suddenly a revolutionary process, the future of cinema, blah, blah, blah.
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