The article posted below is very troubling -- I'm about to go on vacation so I can't write much more but I'll update this post when I get back from the UK!!
read the article here:
The "Avatar" Effect: Don't Replace the Actor - Replace the Animator
Here are some bits to chew on:
"To me, it's the exact opposite," Landau says. "Our goal on this movie was not to replace the actor, it was to replace the animator. If you think about it, what a great actor does and what a great animator does are antithetical to one another.
"A great actor withholds information. Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men can sit there and do nothing. No animator would ever allow that, they would put in a twitch. So our objective was to preserve Sam Worthington's performance and have that be what you see in those characters."
3 comments:
interesting quote. the only problem is, it cost them US $ 270.000.000.-- and more than 6 years to solve that problem. another quote 'Movies aren't about worlds, they're about characters. So we needed to know we could create characters with performance capture that were emotive and engaging, so that's why we waited until we could get there.' looking at snow white and the 7 dwarfs again, well - that performance was pretty good, good enough to keep audiences around the world interested in that film since 1937. as far as I remember it cost less and was in production a bit less of that time. and they were DRAWING emotions. no motion capture and wild technologies. I would not listen to idiot comments like that. hope the film will be successful and they get their money back. and I hope they don't exchange too many good animators until they find someone who just executes executive ideas. I was there and I think we don't need it...
I don't know how I feel about that. It's great that new technology is being invented to capture actions, but it leaves very little room for the animators to work. People watch animation because an animator can create something that doesn't work in real life, but works perfectly in a fiction world. I don't know if I want to see an animated character that just acts like a normal human.
I totally agree with you all! In working with mocap for the past year or so I don't see how the technology will ever be so perfect that it can stand on it's own without any secondary creative influence. Animators are actors and I don't understand why there's so much hostility and resistance to animation in the 'world of mocap'. It's like there are two sides and neither one wants to admit that they have anything to do with each other. One wants to say that it's all about the technology and the other strives for traditionalism and 'purity' in the animation.
But in the end neither will make up for bad story development or a poorly written script despite what all the film executives and investors may think. :P
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