I’ve been debating whether to post this it’s been bothering me a bit.
So I have this post about Kathryn Beaumont that has been circulating nicely on tumblr. As a little girl, she has been the voice actress and live action model/actress for Wendy and Alice for Disney.
Most people are pleasantly surprised that artists back then use live action references. And that it’s rotoscoping. Well to be clear there are some famous animated films that use rotoscope (eg. Snow White, Anastasia, the list goes on), but that doesn’t mean that it is wholesale copying/tracing. The artist still have to maintain the design of the character, as well as embellish the movement for stronger posing and silhouette.
The same is pretty much for mocap. However, mocap get a very bad rep cos most people think that all it requires is for the actor to act, and everything is digitally transferred to a shot and viola! Animation is done. The animator can pack up and call it a day.
But that is not the case.
In VFX, when an animator work on a mocap shot, the first thing we do is to clean up the keys. And we still refer to the actor for reference for further embellishment. We push a pose to make it more appealing. We tweak an eyebrow for a better read. We add breathing in the character’s chest to add more live.
If you compare the raw data from a mocap performance to a final shot enhanced by an animator, you can see the remarkable improvements and differences.
So in short, if I were to create a simple analogy, it’ll probably be like akin to baking.
If you animate without references, it’s just like baking from scratch without a recipe. You’ll have a nice cupcake but puzzle at it’s density, and with experiment you’ll probably get the fluffiness you want eventually, but it takes a longer time to get there.
If you animate with reference, it’s like referring to a recipe. You have a good base, and no one’s stopping you from substituting flavors or the way you ice your cupcake. This creation is still inherently yours.
If you animate with mocap data, its like using a pre-mix. You still need to refer to the box and add butter and eggs. But you can still add chocolate chips to that vanilla premix to create your very own cupcake. It’s still baked from the heart.
3 different cupcakes from 3 different methods. The result is still a batch of cupcakes lovingly made by a passionate baker.
So please, do not discount the efforts of an animator for working on mocap shots.