Ed's Newsletter - May 2003

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE, in its January "Sight and Sound" magazine, features an outstanding and in-depth article by Chloe Veltman about the importance of acting in animation. I was one of the people who were interviewed for it. Take a look: http://www.chloeveltman.com/features/arts/actingandanimation.html

"PSSST...WANNA SEE SOME COOL FLASH ANIMATION?"
Adam Phillips, an animator at the Disney studio in Sydney Australia, sent me links to "HitchHiker" a short two-part Flash animation he did in his spare time. I'm impressed. Take a look for yourself. You'll need Flash Player 6 installed. The direct link to part one is:
http://www.oohbitey.com/hitchHikerWindow.html and there's a button at the end of the movie that will take you to part two. Or, part two can be seen at this link: http://www.oohbitey.com/hh2Window.html Or, go to his main website: http://www.oohbitey.com

INTERESTING FACT: According to Weekly Variety (Jan. 20-26, 2003), "...ten percent of movie tickets sold in France are for animated films.... U.S. and Japanese animated pics currently account for about 80 percent of that total." This is why French production of animated films is increasing. Producers there are pursuing their own personal market share.

ED HOOKS - ACTING FOR ANIMATORS UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Mid-March - Seattle. Maybe. Working on it.
March 22nd - Chicago - open class $125 for the day.
Mid-April - Australia. Maybe. Working on it.
Late April - Kuala Lampur, Malaysia
Early May - Stuttgart Germany
Mid-May - Kalamazoo, Michigan (Animation Festival)
November - South Wales - UK (SAND '03)

CRAFT NOTES
"Mo-Cap is a Tool"

The press is brimming with advance hoopla about the new $20 million 244-page-script "Enter the Matrix" video game and, already, much is being made of Shiny Entertainment's inventive use of mo-cap. David Perry, president of Shiny Entertainment, says in a New York Times interview ("A Thin Line Between Film and Joystick", Feb. 20th, Circuits Section), "When Jada reaches for a phone in the game, she was motion-captured reaching for a phone." He explains that they also employed a kind of facial mo-cap called "alpha-mapping" to create faces and hair that look "real".

It is bothersome that the press on "Enter the Matrix" doesn't seem to be talking much about actual animation. One could easily get the impression that mo-cap is the Holy Grail and that it is so wonderful that it may one day actually replace animators. In his excellent book Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games, Alberto Menache observes, "The media ...have made no distinction between the look of real-time digital puppeteering and that of keyframe animation and have covered them as if they belong to the same medium, which is upsetting to most animators." That is an understatement, and animators pull their hair out when this subject comes up.

Before going forward with this discussion about mo-cap, we should add Gollum ("The Lord of the Rings - Two Towers") to the mix. The animators at Weta Digital, under the overall direction of Randy Cook, worked closely with actor Andy Serkis, in the development of this ground breaking character, and one of the techniques they employed was mo-cap. Again, the press tended to over-emphasize the role of mo-cop and to under-emphasize the role of animators. When we see magazine articles of Gollum in production, they most often feature Andy Serkis wearing a rubber mo-cap suit -- as if Andy did everything by himself. One could conclude that Andy did 100 percent of the acting and the animators became glorified mo-cap stenographers. This is definitely not the case, and it is unfair to Weta Digital's team to suggest otherwise.

MO-CAP IS A TOOL
Mo-cap is a powerful tool, and it is what it sounds like it is: the capture of motion. More to the point, the capture is of the final end-product motion. To the degree that it also captures the actor's impulse behind the motion, it is by inference only. At some point, animators are going to have to finesse the motion capture into something that looks like a performance. Weta Digital's animators did it to the inth degree. Bay Raitt rigged Gollum's face and, even when Gollum's CG face was coordinated with Andy Serkis's own, the animator team had to provide the Rembrandt detail of emotional expression. I've heard from credible sources they actually created something they called a "thought graph" and animated Gollum's expressions to match each individual thought. (!) They closely studied the photo-examples of facial emotion that psychologist/sociologist Paul Ekman has enunciated. ("The Expression of Emotion in the Human Face" -- http://www.paulekman.com/). They got inside the acting impulses, empathizing with Serkis on a scene by scene basis, and then extended it digitally to performance. Yes, the Gollum we see on screen has Serkis's influence on it to a greater or lesser degree, but it is definitely not Serkis's work exclusively. We are looking at animation.

VIDEO GAMES
When I teach my class out in the field, I see a lot of excellent motion-capture and, while it is far more detailed than it was six or seven years ago, the characters generally still have a kind of plastic and stilted quality, especially in facial animation. Production restraints and budget considerations at game companies make it virtually impossible at the present time to produce a whole video game the way Weta Digital did Gollum. I have no doubt that some of them are working overtime trying to get the ball through that hoop though.

ACTING - IMPULSE- PERFORMANCE
** If an animator is creating performance out of whole cloth (sans mocap), he will have to understand the character, the scene, the story and the acting impulse. He may use live-action reference and Paul Ekman pictures but, in the final analysis, he's either going to understand the force behind the movement, or he will not. Like Don Graham pointed out in those old Disney Studio lectures (http://www.actingforanimators.com/News/newslett/may02.html), if you don't animate force, then you are merely going to animate form. Force is the lifeblood of human action.

**Too often, animation companies do not hire talented-enough actors to provide the performance behind mo-cap. Instead they hire athletes, dancers or ("gasp!"), they even do the mo-cap themselves! Garbage in - Garbage out. If you don't have a motivated and credible performance going in, it doesn't matter how you capture it, it won't look right. If you hire an athlete and tell him, "Okay, let's see you run from this side of the room to that side of the room..." or "...now bend over and pick up the ball real fast..." or "...swing the sword harder..", the final end product will look lame. Peter Jackson, the director of "The Lord of the Rings - Two Towers" is an experienced live-action director who is accustomed to casting and working with powerful actors. He knew precisely what he was doing when he cast Andy Serkis. Andy is uncommonly talented, formally trained and is a physical kind of actor. He right away got onto all fours and started slithering through the rocks. Another actor might well have created Gollum with less inner fire. And if Jackson had hired, say, a gymnast, it would not have worked at all! The movement would have been there, but the acting would have been empty. The Weta animators would have had less to work with.

Constantin Stanislavsky defined acting as "Playing an action in pursuit of an objective while overcoming an obstacle." It is also true that emotion (not thinking) tends to lead to action. Audiences empathize with emotion, how the character feels about things. In a compelling theatrical scene, you need to have all of those elements working together, regardless of the animation style. You can hook up actors to motion capture apparatus all day long and still not fulfill these requirements.

I wish the animation community would do more to get their own story out there. Whenever we get another of these stories that present mo-cap as the be-all and end-all of animated entertainment, it hurts animators. Mo-cap is a tool. It is a marvelous tool, and it definitely is here to stay. Animators who look at mo-cap and animation as an either-or situation or a zero-sum game are being short sighted.