In a fluff piece promoting James Cameron's new film Avatar, the director and producer make predictably outlandish statements about the importance of their film, the height of its artistry and the momentousness of their accomplishments. So far, par for the course.
Of course there's the usual noise about performance capture and yadda-yadda. But the line that seems to be getting animator's undies in a bind is this....
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."
The general reaction from animators? A predictable call to arms and an overriding sense of indignation. "Insult" is a word I've been reading a lot. But why? Here's where I think the real truth lies in this...
"We pitched to people that we were preserving their performances," Landau says.
"We said, 'Look, what we're doing is the 21st-century version of prosthetics. No longer will you have to sit for hours and hours in make-up for you to give the performance of the Grinch or the Godfather. We're going to do it with CGI (computer-generated imagery) but it's going to be you, it's not going to be somebody's interpretation of you."'
Actors, like animators, care about their craft. They have professional pride and they're (usually) very good at what they do. They don't like the idea of people messing with their performances, as if somehow their performance weren't enough. Having 'animators' tweak their performance is insulting to the actor. Really. How do animators feel when they see somebody (usually in another department like finishing or FX) took their shot- without their knowledge- and changed it for some reason? Here's a hint. WE FREAKING HATE IT! So what allows us to think we have the right, nay the responsibility, to do the same to the actor? Just because it's rendered? If I'm an actor I hate that some guy gets to torque my performances around. In films like Avatar motion captured CG effects are not really about animation and it's not about animators. It's about what Landau says- it's 21st century prosthetics. It's the new age version of foam ears that Leonard Nemoy wore to play Spock. Avatar is not an animated film. It's live action.
I eagerly await the day when mo-cap technology gets so good that animators won't be stuck wiping the poo from the data or twiddling the performance because the director can't keep his hands off it and trust his actors. I say get the tech good enough to let the live actors do their job. It'll be a good day for actors and it'll be a great day for animators because then we'll finally be left with only one option- do what animation alone is great at doing. The impossible, the fantastic, the wonderful, the exaggerated, the un-mocapable. When mo-cap tech gets so good that you don't need to shoot video reference of yourself and then copy it to get a scene, but the directors can just get the actors to act (which is often what they'd prefer if given the choice), then we'll finally be done with this nonsense that says that the final arbiter of good animation is how closely the motion can hew to live action. Will there be fewer jobs for 'animators' once the tech gets that transparent and good? Yeah, probably. Will the jobs that exist for animators be more interesting and rewarding? I like to think they will be. Because then we'll be animating and doing the impossible and not cleaning up after somebody else's performance. No sane person would ever attempt to use mocap to do anything like this....
Meanwhile, we spend so much time in animation trying to re-create this...
They're both great, but in completely different, practically incompatible ways. The actors' performances in the second make it amazing. No animation could top them. Ever. The animation in the first makes it amazing. No live action or mo-cap could top that. Ever. I personally can't wait until we can just accept each kind of greatness for what it is. But I'm weird that way.
