TMZ posted an article two days ago about Robert Zemeckis who is about to sign a deal with Disney to create his little motion capture beauties at twice the pace and half the cost that Pixar produces it’s films.
To read the article, GO HERE:
It’s quite a juicly little piece; full of typical Hollywood banter about rows with studio heads, creative differences and the promise of new things to come. And while the intrigue behind directors and executives makes me yawn and wish for my bed… i do think this is a significant event and surprised I haven’t seen more articles about it. While Monster House hasn’t done so hot with a meesly $60 million domestically… world wide, Polar Express made a respectible $297,775,955. Not great.. but not peanuts either. I’m not surprised that Disney wants to corner the market in animation again, but I am rather surprised…with their history and tradition of quality that they are willing to take on Motion Capture films as well. Then again, this is the same company that’s been remarketing and rereleasing their Classics just to make an extra buck.
I don’t know, i guess because their recent deal with Pixar I was expecting more of John Lassiter but maybe I’m being harsh. Then again… the article implies that this is a way Pixar can keep on the schedules they’ve created.. thus protecting the quality and not having to output work at a quicker pace. So i take that back. John Lassiter is a GENIUS!!!!
Still, i’m not happy about more of those motion-capture movies being made. I’m not a huge fan of motion-capture as most people who know me can atest. But I’ve worked my fair share of it and i do believe there is an appropriate time and place to use it. But is it more cost effective? Both in time and money? I don’t think so. I get steamed up when I see it promoted as being a “cheaper ” method for performance. It’s a nice pipedream but I bet those animators who worked onMonster House can atest to, it’s just adding an extra step that will require so much tweaking, they might as well start from scratch. But hey. I’m not a producer. What do I know?
*snicker*
Well, cost-effective or not, this seems to be the way it’s going. (For faces too. Eeeep!)
Maybe the producers are reassured by the illusion that “technology” is going to help them out, rather than unreliable old talent?
Reply to maryI am with you Melanie, especially since I do lots of Motion Capture work. It all depends on what you are trying to do. For example on Lord of the Rings: Return of the Kings we did the full body capture of Gollom on set with the 35 mm photography, but the facial work was left to Randy Cook and his folks. That’s why it works! Randy’s people are a amzing and they MADE Gollom work. Use the appropriate tool for the job. There is no be all and end all.
We did tons of facial capture for Enter the Matrix game because it was relativley simple human faces and we could record the audio (dialog) at the same time so the sync was perfect. However the implementation of that work was not so good.
We all see the end result of bad application of technology on Polar Express (or Polar Expressionless as it has come to be known) the Motion Capture data was so poor that they bascially had to try and roto-capture (from Andres Bustanaby at Digital Domain) or key frame over it.
Bad application of a good technology.
Reply to Clark GraffHi Clark
Ha. funny small world we live in.
Yeah, i worked with Randy on LOTR for the first 2 films. ( i quit for Return of the King. That’s probably why you didn’t know me. ) So yeah, i am familiar with the process and what it took to get Gollum on the big screen. I would say, i spent 1/3 of my time rotoscoping, 1/3 full animating, and then another 1/3 working with motion capture. I can’t speak for Mike or some of the other Gollum animators but most of the time the motion capture was not straight out of the box. Jason Schleifer wrote some great tools for allowing us to keep the main key frames of the motion capture and blow all away the inbetweens so we could add weight and reanimate parts of the body. We had to.. Andy’s frame just didn’t work well with the Gollum model in certain situations. (When he squatted, etc. ) So I hear you about the use of motion capture, but its false advertising to say that the animators ONLY worked on the face. Every shot I got, i ended up working on the body in some capacity. There were shots where the motion capture worked without tweaking from the animator, but i didn’t get very many of those.
So LOTR is where most of my experience with motion capture lies. Like I said, i think it has it’s place. It did wonders for the crowd scenes in Massive that were used in LOTR. But i’ve yet to see a character driven show that used it successfully without major tweaking.. (But granted, i heard some good things about “Monster House.” I haven’t seen it yet so i can’t atest.)
Thanks for your comment!
Reply to melanie