Phil Willis

By now you would have seen the Academy Award nominations for best animated feature for 2011.

Congratulations to all the Oscar nominees: Une vie de chat (A Cat in Paris), Chico and Rita, Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots and Rango.

It’s impossible to say whether a film like The Adventures of Tintin was excluded from the list because it included motion capture as a technique.

But in a recent interview with Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor for Weta Digital, he indicated that he had his own theory on why Tintin was snubbed.

I think that was a really big oversight… Not to recognise those achievements. The visual effects branch didn’t recognise it, because they thought it was animation, and the animation branch didn’t recognise it because it was using performance capture and visual effects techniques. – Joe Letteri

Whether you agree with the decision or not, it’s probably as good a time as any to dispell some myths about films that use motion capture.

Full disclosure: I worked on Happy Feet 2. In this article, my views are my own, naturally, and do not represent the production team or the studio.

Myth 1: Motion capture artists aren’t animators

Note: that is distinct from saying that motion capture is animation. Obviously the techniques are quite different.

But as far as the people hired to edit motion captured from a live performance, in all cases I’ve seen: studios hire animators.

The animators are hired based on their keyframe animation skills and on their showreels.

Why?

Because studios know that motion editing requires the same set of skills that make good keyframe animators: timing, spacing, strong poses, weight, exaggeration, appeal etc.

Myth 2: Movies that use motion capture look terrible

To be honest, there are some horrible looking films out there that use motion capture. You could probably think of three right now off the top of your head.

You want me to name them?

Ha! Nice try.

But you know what – some keyframe animated films don’t look that hot either, quite frankly.

I’m sure for every beautiful film that uses motion capture, like Avatar or Tintin, you could provide a counter-example, but the technique of motion capture by itself is not to blame for crummy films.

Myth 3: Using motion capture makes it a “motion capture movie”

Speaking from experience, there is no way you could possibly take just take the data from the motion capture floor, clean it up a bit and send it off to be rendered.

For starters, there are often many characters and objects that are not suitable for capture by a person in a suit: four-legged animals, birds, vehicles, sets and props.

Seriously. No-one is going to squeeze into a motion capture suit and flap around like a bird, when you could just as easily keyframe animate it.

No-one stuck reflective balls on a trained dog in order to capture the motion for Snowy in Tintin.

Calling a film a “motion capture movie” is about as accurate as calling something a “special effects movie”.

Myth 4: Motion capture movies have no animation in them

On Happy Feet 2 I had a chance to work with George Miller as my director and Rob Coleman as my animation director. When these directors were in a darkened room looking to improve the shot, they honestly didn’t care whether a scene was captured from a dance, a drama performance or animated by hand.

They just wanted the result they were after.

A lot of the time spent as motion editors was perfecting the already brilliant performances, including adding extra motion, adding spins and new gestures, selling the weight of the characters and adding overlap to the body and limbs.

All of these involved adding motion and frames where there were none previously.

In other words, even the motion editors were animating by hand in many cases. Frame by frame.

Myth 5: Films that use motion capture are ineligible for the Academy Award for Animated Feature

If you want your animated feature film to be eligible for Oscar nominations, the rules read as follows:

An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of more than 40 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time. – Academy Awards Rules for Best Animated Feature Film (my emphasis added)

I agree.

Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique.

The argument for films like Tintin and Happy Feet 2 is that while they use motion capture as one of their techniques, there is plenty of animation in the film to allow it to qualify.

Happy Feet 2 ran at about 1100 shots, and only around 750 out of those shots contained motion capture. And of those 750 shots, almost all of them would have had some elements animated frame-by-frame: keyframed characters, lip synch, facial expression, moving sets and props.

Honestly, it would be more difficult to find a shot in the film that didn’t contain any keyframed animation.

Whether we like it or not, motion capture is here to stay.

When used intelligently, there’s no reason it shouldn’t compliment frame-by-frame animation as another technique for producing television, videogames and films.

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