20th Century-Fox's big-budget television bet Terra Nova rolls out next week. And it has got lots of animation:
... In visual effects for television, [viz effx supervisor Kevin) Blank says, it’s much more common for effects shots to be created by individuals referred to as “generalists,” who have skills in all of those areas. “Rather than having experts in 10 fields working on one shot over four to six months, you might have one person taking it all the way through, over a course of two to three weeks. ...
T.V. is going in various directions these days. Cheap-jack reality shows. More expensive sitcoms (live-action and animated). Cop shows. Doctor shows. Then there are the ultra expensive "event" series that sometimes work but often don't. (Time Magazine's review is titled Dino-Snore -- arrgh.)
Pixomondo is doing the animation for this new epic from Fox and Steven Spielberg (a long-time deliverer of Dinosaur epics.) They're not the low-cost provider, but they're headquartered in Burbank, California* close to the producers and Fox (the live-action gets shot in Australia.)
More animated visual effects will likely be migrating to television. Costs keep coming down and requirements for thrills and chills keep going up, and network execs decide that, despite the miserly licensing fees, the gamble is worth it.
And there you are. Explains why a lot of animators and compositors are working. Also explains why they often get chewed up by frantic schedules and unpaid overtime. Hopefully the Burbank crew has time off and a decent quality of life.
* Pixomondo has studios around the globe. You'll note that much of the c.g. work here is being done stateside.
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Apparently Pixomondo went down the wrong road. Some bozo convinced them that mocap is viable for dinosaurs, and they were going to do ALL the "animation" that way. Yeah, right. What a con job. So I was wondering if it worked out with mocap, but this quote from a FILM & VIDEO interview says it all:
"Though the majority of the dinosaurs’ moves are done using keyframe techniques, a percentage of some of the creatures’ animation begins with motion capture for one reason: weight. “One of the biggest things about animation is getting weight correct,” Blank explains. “When you keyframe animation, that’s the hardest thing to do properly. And that’s the one thing that’s great about motion capture. A foot touches the ground and it’s real. You maybe just use that portion of it, and then we keyframe everything else.”"
In other words, they barely used mocap at all. And if they did, it was minimal and to cover the ass of the guy who convinced them to use mocap. Motion capture is fine for humanoid characters, but dinosaurs? Waste of time money, and effort.
Wow. He sooo has that backwards. Mocap gives you weight? Really? ROFLMFAO
I work at Pixomondo-Burbank. I do not work in the animation department. I remember hearing about one shot that started with motion capture as a basis, but I do not know if any other shots started with motion capture. The creature animation all looks absolutely fantastic to me, but the more seasoned character animators who read this blog might be able to point out to me where motion capture was used in this show.
Hopefully the Burbank crew has time off and a decent quality of life.
I hope so, too. This show involves a heavy amount of custom scripts to help automate the non-artistic parts of the matchmove, animation->rendering, and rendering->compositing pipeline. For example, the Maya artists hit a button when they finish animating to geocache their work and build a LightWave 3D scene. The LightWave artists hit a button to bring up a custom render pass system that makes shot breakouts for the compositors faster and easier.
Despite this, I do remember compositers pulling 14-hour days earlier this year, and I have seen a few of the LightWave artists come in on Saturdays. My own workload has been mostly 10-hour days with only a few Saturdays this year, but I am not sure what the next two months will bring. We'll see.
All that work for a show that is dull, and characterless. A big budget Land of the Lost with very weak scripts and weaker visuals.
Doubt it'll last an entire season.
It seems like the above motivational speaker and overall positive co-worker has been presented with all the episodes for a pre screening, lets all follow this person's words >:p
I asked one of the Maya character animators who worked on the show how much mo-cap was used. He thinks it may have contributed to three shots for the first episode, but those shots were also heavily keyframed.
As far as he knows, everything else is keyframed on the show right now.
Fox's dinosaur drama ''Terra Nova'' opened to lukewarm numbers Monday, including a 3.0 rating,.
It will be cancelled within the month.
Fox's dinosaur drama ''Terra Nova'' opened to lukewarm numbers Monday, including a 3.0 rating,.
It will be cancelled within the month.
That's news to the VFX house that's contracted to deliver 13 episodes of VFX for the show.
You forgot to add, yeah!!!more artist will become unemployed to the end of statement.
Still employed...!!!!
Maybe this is the new pixar movie about dinosaurs. After cars 2, nothing would surprise me..
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