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Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Andy Serkis on Mo-Cap

The current issue of Wired has a Q&A with Andy Serkis, generally regarded as the Sir Laurence Olivier of motion-capture actors.

Two really interesting questions from it:

    Wired: What's on your wish list as a digital actor?

    Serkis: The environment you're working in for performance-capture is very clinical. There's no stimulation from sets or costumes; you're working in a black box with lots of lights around you. I want to be able to shoot a scene in costume instead of a Lycra suit. We need motion-capture studios that let directors use lighting, back projection and other forms of stimulation to help the actors feel immersed in the world of the film.

    ...

    Wired: You got dissed by the Academy because Gollum was considered a collaboration with the animators at Weta Digital. Will a CG character ever win an Oscar?

    Serkis: For The Elephant Man, a whole team of prosthetics artists worked on John Hurt's character to help him create that performance. Whether or not the Academy can learn to see ones and naughts as a digital form of prosthetics — that is the question.

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Friday, August 03, 2007

'Beowulf' Begs the Question: What is animation, anyway?


The debate is already starting as to whether Robert Zemeckis' 'Beowulf' (coming in November) will be eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, since it uses live actors and performance capture as a foundation. The Oscar rules require animated movies to have been created "using a frame-by-frame technique."

(Aside: is there anyone else who wishes Zemeckis would just go back to using actual non-animated actors in his movies? Let's start a petition...)

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SIGGRAPH Previews: What's in store for 2007 confab?


I'm not going to make it to SIGGRAPH, which starts tomorrow in San Diego. But I've been poking around the Web to look for some previews and overviews of what's going to be happening this year at the big computer graphics/animation/visual effects gathering...and here's what I found interesting:

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