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The Art of Pixel Performers
scriptedfun writes "The BBC features the growing role of computer graphics in movies, but points out that it is still the human actors behind the CG characters which make them alive. From the article: 'It seems that the performance artist can still bring something to a performance, which [ a CG ] artist cannot.'"
Oh yeah, Tom Hanks' performance in Polar Express totally made that movie.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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It seems that the performance artist can still bring something to a performance, which [ a CG ] artist cannot.'"
I'm probably going to get modded as troll again but never mind!
A Hollywood actor can get $zillions because everyone recognises their face. Few people will recognise an actor from behind the CG mask. Actors for computer generated will be easily replacable and probably not earn anything like their Hollywood counterparts. In fact the computer generated character will probably be worth more money than the actor that played their part behind the scenes.
Voices though... that's a different story.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
What's the difference in pay for a live actor, and a likeness with their voice?
How many commercials are on now where they've made an animated form of the human actor, and still have that human's voice behind it? They could have shown the actor speaking, but I've been told that there is a huge decrease in pay when they can animate the person, and only pay for the voice.
Is that true?
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it is still the human actors behind the CG characters [CC] which make them alive.
Only a human could make Jar Jar so f*#king annoying!
Oh no... it's the future.
I don't know about everyone else, but I thought that most dazzling and endearing scene in the new Pixar movie was when Tow Mater went backwards at high speeds through dusky, misty, wooded landscape with his hazard lights twirling. The voice actor (Larry, the proverbial "cable guy" comic) was mostly contributing things like, "woo hoo!" Otherwise, that bit of manic choreography didn't involve any actor motion capture - it was completely, crazily synthesized out of untold hundreds of hours of desktop work.
Knowing Pixar's people, they were probably playing with toy trucks or watching video of kids scateboarding, or something... but the magic, comedy, and sweetness of that scene was entirely visual and not about the actor(s), per se - though the cast vocalizations and great foley work certainly added to the atmosphere.
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Motion capture is nothing new. The real credit should still be given to the animators.
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That Andy Serkis didn't get nominated for best supporting actor speaks to how out of touch the accademy awards are.
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old movies
"Hopefully some of it will be invested in R&D for better graphics so that we might actually get to watch some decent special effects."
You do realize that the movie industry isn't some monolithic affair? Now as far as the groupthink complaint about pay. I don't see any of you "'celebrity' programmers" giving up your paychecks, to someone more deserving. e.g. India
John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, keeps an awesome blog that deals with this topic from time to time. I think that he'd suggest that artistic craft and technique can add a whole lot of reality to the performances of cartoon criters. The golden age of all this stuff, 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros, demonstrates that the state of the art can get pretty high.
1: I didn't say they were animated well.
There are a series of banking commercials on here. They have animated an actor into looking like they're hand drawn, but it's close enough you know you've seen their faces before. It adds nothing to the presentation of the information. I personally think it's because it is cheaper. That's why I asked the question.
There's a series of pharmaceutical commercials here as well that animated somebody swallowing a pill, but not any of the inside of the body. I could see animation used to show what you can't see, but just animating a person instead of filming somebody drinking a glass of water seems to me that they're trying to get out cheaper.
2: Just because something is shiny and cool looking, it doesn't make it work without the voice underneath. If Gollum had the voice of Spongebob, it wouldn't have worked.
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you need modelers, texture artists, riggers, animators, etc... to build a convincing character
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
I think you're absolutely right -- just because a lot of CG characters are modeled directly from human actor footage, it does not mean that the state of the art is at a stand still. Companies like pixar are taking it to new levels as far as fully-imagined characters from scratch. Note, however, that all their best characters are non-human: toys, bugs, fish, monsters, cars (even the incredibles are comic-book stylized). It is simply too unconvincing when they try to modal humans from scratch. However, I'm not sure there will be that many technological leaps required to achieve a convincing effect -- it is party also a matter of psychology. We are ingrained from birth to recognize and characterize other humans, so essentially, we're a very tough audience. But some subtle changes in modeling -- more grime, more wrinkles, more blemishes, will help humanize the CG characters.
It seems that the performance artist can still bring something to a performance, which [ a CG ] artist cannot.
Yet. The state of this particular art is nowhere near its peak. And there are things that an animated character (CG or otherwise) can bring to a performance that a live actor never could. Unless you're Jim Carrey, and while I'm not suggesting that he's computer-generated, he's definitely animatronic at the very least.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is so lame that I just have to comment on it.
The BBC article says: "So are we moving towards a time when we can get rid of human actors and just use voice artists and computer generated characters? [Visual effects supervisor] Joe Letteri says: "I don't think so. That was the lesson we learnt on Gollum. Andy Serkis was brought in just to be the voice, but what worked really well was that you had an actor there present in the scene doing all of this."
Hmmm . . . "Get rid of human actors and JUST use voice artists"?? Oh, so I guess this Joe Letteri assumes a voice talent ISN'T an actor? Or human, for that matter? Gee, thanks.
Voice artists ARE actors. Acting is just as much about the voice and the way lines are delivered as it is anything physical. If it wasn't, we would just cast models and stunt people in all our live-action films.
Nope, acting requires a voice. That's why it's called an "audition": acting is an auditory medium.
I think it's difficult to pick apart voice and physical action. You can't really have one without the other. Anyone who has seen a decent voice talent at work in the recording booth can see that they're acting using their whole body. The guy who plays Homer Simpson goes nuts inside there. He's an actor all right. The body backs up the voice.
And if voice were only a small part of what makes a good actor, then Julia Roberts and Morgan Freeman would never be doing any voiceover work. (They do lots.)
A visual effects supervisor who brings in someone not to act the part, but "just to be the voice," clearly lacks the understand that "being a voice" IS acting.
In fact, it's very hard to make it really believable: the lighting, perspective of the background are often slightly different from the actors, so it appears really bad: you have the actors 'in front' of a scene and not *in* the scene.
I remember seeing a preview of Kink-kong and decided not to see the movie because the effect was too obvious&disturbing..
There was the same problem in the arena scene with the monsters in Star Wars episode2.
That "something" is natural movement which doesn't trigger the Uncanny Valley reaction in viewers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
As an animtor, I may be biased, but I have to take exception with the basic premise of the article. Motion capture still has a lot of problems. Not that I'm against mocap, it's great for making Tiger Woods swing the golf club like Tiger Woods in his latest game, and it's terrific for other types of realistic human motion.
But when it comes to acting, there is nothing to replace the frame by frame attention that an animator can give to a scene. Polar Express proved that humans acting using mocap still look like humans wearing rubber masks. Gollum in LOTR was a good exception, yet the basic mocap of Andy Serkis was gone over by real animators who could use their knowledge and skill to truly bring the character to life.
There's also the issue of character design. If you mocap a real human and put that data on something that isn't really human, you lose a lot. The musculature of a human face might not quite match up to that reptillian monster (or whatever) and the result will appear soft and lifeless. If the body geometry is different, you might be able to compensate in software, but the underlying motion will still be that of a human. If you mocapped a human and put in on Godzilla, you'd have what looks like a human in a Godzilla suit (which may actually be a good thing if you're doing an homage to the old Japanese films)
Mocap is cool, and I'm sure Tom Hanks loved putting on that nifty mocap suit... but the best acting on CG characters today is still the result of animators working one frame at a time
Last time I checked, "infinitesimal" meant "extremely small, negligeable", which is the exact opposite of the notion the writer has in mind (that is, that water is hard to animate).
And it went right through the BBC editors, who are apparenlty easily dazzled by latinate words,
Poor Beeb.
I suggest that the author of the article, Spencer Kelly, should be replaced by a random tech news generator.
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Q: Who is, by wide consensus, agreed to be the creators of the best and most expressive 3D moviemaking in the world?
A: Pixar.
Q: Who is the one 3D moviemaking studio in the world that uses only hand-animated modelling, no motion capture?
A: Pixar.
Motion capture is like trying to act through a mask. Okay, maybe you can do it if you really want to, but you're seriously hampered. Animators have no limitations.
There is not _A_ CG Artist, there is a team of them. The characters they create are already handed to them by their bosses, who are working under contract from the studio (who thought up the idea in the first place for the character/movie).
If anyone has the kind of control over a single character that you suggest, it would be the concept/character 2d artist who draws sketches to hash out what the character will look like in the movie- and he's only trying to realize the director/producers vision for the film.
If the above situation were possible in the structure of Hollywood, it would have probably already happened in the 2d animated world- but just like the 2d animated world there's so many people involved in the process that there simply isn't room for something like this to ever happen.
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Right there with you.
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As a 3D modeler, this doesn't sit right with me. Now, I'm nowhere near as good as professional CG artists, but even I know that a CG character can show just as much emotion and, in effect, act just as well as a human actor.
So, have they not seen the newest Hulk movie, or are they just ignoring it? Granted, it wasn't a very good movie in most people's opinion, but it sure wasn't the CG artists' fault.
I don't remember the totally CG Hulk saying much in the movie. So, you can't say that the voice of the actor did anything for the character. And since the character was completely done in a computer, the actor's acting skills didn't bring anything to the performance either.
I'd say that's one for the CG artists.
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What's the difference between a "performance artist" and a "performer"? Is "performance artist" just an excuse for claiming a bad performer is just misundertood, because they're really an "artist"?
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The main difference between Pixar (from what I've read around) is that most companies get the famous actors first and build the characters around them (see Shark Tale), while Pixar seems to go the other way around, they set the character and personality first, and then they start looking for an actor whose voice would fit the character.
a big part of animating is acting....we don't just move parts about willy nilly. Every gesture, posture change, eye shift, and facial expression is painstakingly contemplated in the context of who the character is and what he/she/it is thinking or doing at that moment. Most importantly all of these actions are derived from a real persons performance, be it the voice actor, or more often the animator, their colleagues, family members, or just people they filmed on the street. Usually these performances have parts exaggerated for clarity and appeal, but their roots are from some performance somewhere.
It makes me think of a line in the beginning of Ed Hooks, "Acting for Animators": quoted from Brad Bird, "A friend of mine supervised the animation of a lead character in a major animated feature. In many interviews, the well-known actress who voiced the character immodestly claimed that the animators had simply, in effect, copied her mannerisms and performance. In reality the animators had found her acting style generic and boring, and had turned elsewhere for inspiration: to people they had known in their own lives, friends and members of their families, even to studying Julia Louis Dreyfuss in episodes of Seinfeld". I don't know whom he is referring to, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was Jennifer Aniston from Iron Giant, or perhaps Cameron Diaz from Shrek....just guesses.
"The nature of the animation / comics industry is to hand over the rights to your creation to those who are going to publish and/or distribute it. That way, you can be replaced without the publisher/distributor losing money on their investment, should you breach your contract or become unable to continue working on the project itself."
I was about to burn you a new one, but I'll point out instead that some contracts allow the material to revert back to the original creator at the emd. I should also point out that copyright isn't a uniform "take all or nothing" body. An artist can sign some rights, while keeping others.
Is this really a new issue? Winsor McCay was doing animated movies without human models or voice talent in the 1920s. Human voice actors and performance models have never been needed for great animation; but many animators have found voice actors and performance models to be very effective. What is The Grinch without Boris Karlof or the Warner stable of characters without Mel Blanc?
And there is an entirely different direction that filmmakers can go that started with Tron and was used extensively in Lord of the Rings and Mirrormask. In addition to CGI characters built on human motion-capture, you can build the CGI setting around the human performances. Then, you don't have to worry so much about the complex optics of skin tone, or the physics of hair and clothing.
Actors are also necessary for commercial success. Silent films or films with minimal dialog are automatically doomed to be "art films."
no he was implemented in prolog
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Correct,
Pixar actually auditions the actors while looking at 2-D sketches of the characters. The actors who make them "jump off the page" get the part.
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The celebrity worship won't extend as far into CG, there is a need for a real person to worship; maybe something to it, or its just cultural.
I suggest you see the film S1m0ne.
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I'm not an arts specialist, but I do believe that there are an extremely wide number of media and mediums of expression with which we communicate in this world. Sometimes, it's a telephone call, sometimes it's a musical piece, sometimes it's a painting.
:)
Moving pictures have been with us for over a century. Black and white silent movies with just actors and no sound (or some lovely fellow playing a piano). We've increased the flexibility of expression of this medium by adding sound and colour, and further being able to incorporate computers to add to the expression of the movie.
Animated film has been with us for as long. If you look back at some of the really old Disney movies - the ones of Silly Symphony, with a black and white old school Mickey Mouse running around - only animators were behind those colourful expressions. No voice overs.
There's so much that one can do just with facial expressions. No, voices and people will never be replaced. (I've never liked cell shading, but I've come to accept it as a form of expression that some artists choose to use) There are a number of animated (CG) shorts with no verbal content, because the director/artists are able to convey everything they need to without (eg. see some of the stuff by blur studios). Mr. Bean and Charlie Chaplin are classic examples of physical humour - communicating their ideas without sound.
So yes, a number of full length CG films have voices, but it's just an optional medium for the director/artist to use to communicate the storyline they want to express to their audience.
I want to know why human CG characters still look fake. We are missing something. I don't think it's about polygon count any more, it's something more subtle. I can't quite figure out what it is. The eyes seems like a good candidate. Obviously the human mind is very scrutinising when it comes to faces. At some point though, we will have characters indistinguishable from real ones. When that day comes, voice artists will be A-List stars.
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It's because celebrity names sell. At some point people go see a movie just because it has some celebrity in it. And I don't just mean celebrity actors, like Tom Hanks, which could at least be defended as "well, he acts well, and people like a movie that's well acted." I mean look at your average rapper, sports star, boy-band/girl-band celebrity manufactured by the recording industry, etc, starring in some movie. Most can't even act at all, yet people go to the movie anyway, just because it has their favourite celebrity in it.
It's, if you will, like merchandising. People will buy a T-Shirt with Darth Vader's head on it, not because it actually does anything to make the t-shirt better, but just because it's Darth Vader. Or insert some band's mug shots instead of Darth Vader. And some company is very happy to use that kind of merchandising to take their money.
So what you're seeing here is the same effect. "Acted by Tom Hanks" is something that makes people fork over the cash. "Animated by Neon Noodle" doesn't quite work the same.
It could work the same (after all, yes, we do give credit to the painter and not to whoever posed for them), but (A) it would require taking some risks and making a loss until the public is educated enough to accept Neon Noodle as an equally cool celebrity, and (B) then you'd ask for more money. So, well, I just can't see anyone making that move.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... lets nominate as best actors the pupeteers that handled Miss Piggy and Kermit in the Muppets movies.
You want to hnour Mr Serkis? Cool, just do so in the correct category (a new one may need to be created).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They got it right. Expressive face on top of lots of well-done motion.
Of course they stayed on the other side of the valley by virtue of animating a robot.
Polar Express was 'dead people talking'.
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the author of TFA never saw complete CGI films, like FinalFantasyVII: advent children (http://www.adventchildren.net/) or he wouldn't claim such bold statements.
Everyone that has seen that film, knows it's only a matter of time before even real actors can be replaced. At this pace, I predict the first complete CGI films undistinguishable from 'real' movies will come out within the next 5 years.
Some scenes in Advent Children were already so good it was impossible to tell if it was real or not. If they use high-resolution skins througout (which they didn't due to constraint of render-time, I presume) and improve a bit more on their natural human movements (which were already extremely good in some cases), you couldn't see the difference anymore.
So I call it wishful thinking if people claim actors always will have that 'little bit extra', and can't ever be replaced.
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