#Motion capture animated movies movie

The technology and techniques had moved far enough ahead that the amount of data which could be captured from an actor's movements meant that the refinement and recreation needs continued to lessen, and that's when people started to determine their own tipping points. In 2009, Avatar was released (see above). Only Disney-Pixar's Cars was animated without mo-cap. By the time we get up to 2006, 2 out of the 3 nominees for Best Animated Film used motion capture: Monster House and the winner Happy Feet. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (considered a live-action film), just one year later in 2002, saw Andy Serkis on-stage performing as digital character Gollum with his co-stars instead of alone and then composited in as it would've been. It was released in 2001 and at this point only the joints and major rotation points were tracked so there was a lot of work turning it into something cinematic.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was the 1st full-length photorealistic animated film. This is done the same way as it is in rotoscoping: either using the filmed reference footage or creating it straight from their own imagination. The computer fills in the blanks as well as it can but for any 'conscious movement' (meaning hand or face) the animators need to fill that in.

For every point on the body that isn't tracked, that is 'lost' data. All those white dots in the image up there are reference points, the same as you use to check that you have smooth arcs (it's one of the 12 Principles of Animation, so you should be checking your arcs). So here's where the comparison usually is. There isn't any good way to 'trace' reference footage in a 3D environment with a 3D model without the use of the computer. In order to make the movement seem real again after all that lost the animator needs to use the same pencil to add in the lost data (adding speed to an impact to feel more 'real' for instance, many of you have probably done this off your own reference footage). think of it like it's being filtered through the pencil. There's a lot of information in conscious movement - it's one of the reasons that in rotoscoping if you just trace the footage strictly it feels 'off.' So much of that information is being lost. The reason this setup is needed is because of the 3-dimensional environment. I think everyone reading this blog knows at least that much. The white, glowing balls are the reference points which the computer will assign to a model with similar reference points (ie the 'elbow' dot's motion will be tracked and applied to the 'elbow' point on a computer model). So when Neytiri’s tail lashes and her ears lower in fury, they are merely further expressing the anger created by Zoe Saldana in the moment of acting the scene. But even here, the goal was to stay consistent with the emotions created by the actors during the original capture. Of course the animators added a little bit, with the movement of the tails and ears, which the actors could not do themselves. The animators sought to be utterly truthful to the actors’ work, doing no more and certainly no less than what Sam, Zoe or Sigourney had done in the Volume. They were not embellished or exaggerated. But at the same time, no liberties were taken with those performances.

It took great animation skill to ensure that the characters performed exactly as the actors did. Ask Jim Cameron, and he’ll say the characters were performed by the actors. the question is how much was 'motion capture alone' (which isn't considered animation by the academy) and how much was a 'frame-by-frame technique?' Well there were actually production notes released with Avatar with a section called 'IS IT ANIMATION' which says: Ask the animators at WETA, and they’ll tell you that the avatars and Na’vi are animated. So far, Avatar fits 2 of the 4 major factors to call it animation. Now we have to look at the technique of the animation itself.

#Motion capture animated movies movie

Around the release of Avatar, Gawker (which was quoting a Hollywood Reporter article I can't find) reported that 'when completed, Cameron expects Avatar to be about 60% CG animation, based on characters created using a newly developed performance capture-based process, and 40% live action, with a lot of VFX in the imagery.' Many people take this to mean that the movie is 60/40 in terms of animation/live-action but that's only counting the character animation, not the scenery and vehicles and I would assume it also does not include the alien animal animation. The next step for DALL-E and Midjourney is animation