Stop Motion… What is it?
Used to animate physical objects
Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit,
What is CGI?
Computer-Generated Imagery
Toy Story
Drawbacks of CGI?
Not entirely realistic
Best for cartoons, monsters, objects
What is the most difficult to simulate using CGI?
Hair, facial expressions, fur, emotion
Monsters Inc., Final Fantasy
Today's Lesson
We have looked at the challenges of animating hair and human body movements, but what about facial expressions? This is an enormous challenge. The movie "A Scanner Darkly" attempts to replicate human facial features using a technique called rotoscoping.
The animation process took 15 months.
Each minute of animation required 500 hours of work with 30 people working full-time every day.
Although this is computer based you can see how this is still similar to the early days of hand drawn animation. It is similar to painting on pictures. This technique is also used in the opening credits of the movie Juno.
Again, we notice that when attempting to replicate human features, the process is not perfect. It does not work well enough to be used for movies, but it has been adapted along with CGI and other formats to be used quite well for gaming.
The next step in the process of animating humans was Performance Capture Technology. It is not entirely computer based. Instead, it uses sensors attached to human actors/actresses, these sensors capture the tiniest movement and relay that information to a computer program. The program digitizes the information and creates a computer model that responds, moves and has emotions identical to the human model. The first movie to attempt this was The Polar Express. The results are outstanding!
The emotion and body movement that was captured and relayed through a 3 dimensional computer character is outstanding with the exception of a few things...
You see, the way this works is actors/actresses where skin tight suits with sensors placed on the suits, sensors are also placed on their faces in many places to capture the slightest muscle movement. Unfortunately, the sensors cannot be placed in the eyes or the mouth, so these two areas have to be created after the fact and it takes away from the overall effect.
Editing took 2 1/2 years!
Brought animation closer to reality.
Essentially shot like a real movie.
Let's see what is captured through the sensors....
You can see in this example that they are focussing on the body movement and not the facial expression. This would be used more for athletes or medical purposes, it could be applied to animation or film if the focus is on movement and not expression. For a movie such as Polar Express, there would be more sensors on the face to capture the emotion.
Then we have The Incredibles
An amazing animation that was the first to animate long hair (Violet's) and have it intereact with several different environments. They also created a program called "Goo" which allowed the animators to show muscle and body movement underneath clothing.
In 2007 came Beowulf. It used the same technology as Polar Express. Actors and actresses wore suits with sensors and that information was relayed to computers. It was ideal for this style of movie because the information could be exaggerated to allow for the larger than life characters that were required. Grendel could be 12 feet tall without the actor having to wear a suit or costume. Performance Capture Technology removes many barriers in the animation process. Actors and actresses can focus more on performance and less on make up and costume.
Again we see where animation and film share technology. Performance capture was also used in the movie Avatar.
This concept of capturing an actor/actress's essence on set was applied to the making of "Rango". The director felt that the animation would be best if it could capture the moments in between the script, where people react to situations. To accomplish this, they brought in the actors/actresses, used very little props, and had them talk out the script. At first this was a difficult task, but eventually it started to work. This allowed for more realistic and natural audio for the animation.
It also allowed the animators to make subtle changes to the character movement once they saw the way the actors moved and how their faces changed.
As you can see, the world of animation is constantly evolving and applying newer and better technologies.
