It’s unfortunate that in his egomaniacal zeal to make sure he and his live actors get the lion share of the credit he feels it necessary to denigrate the animators. Someone definitely needs to slap Cameron hard and remind him that no one motion-captured those flying lizards, and that someone of skill took that raw mocap info from his actors and made it live digitally.

But still, let’s recognize that this wasn’t like Eric Goldberg sitting down and 100% creating a performance from Robin Williams’ voice. The performance began with actors on a stage and that performance is largely preserved in the final film. That needs to be recognized.

If there’s any justice, however, when Cameron goes to make another film using this process, the team of animators who broke their backs for him on Avatar will tell him to go shove it. That way he can go searching for an all-new group of people who will have to be trained from scratch how to do it, and likely won’t be as skilled.

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I do agree with him, though, when he says that the Na’ vi are not animated. I do not see Mo-Cap, or as he calls it “Performance Capture” (I guess Perf-cap for short) as animation. Especially when the live performance is as closely followed as in Avatar.

Animation is when animators create the performances. They can and should refer to as much reference as they want, but at some point they must commit to their creation or interpretation of the performance. If an animator actually uses a preexisting performance to dictate all or part of their performance, then they are not animating. They are Mo-Capping or Perf-Capping, whatever.

In traditional (hand-drawn) animation the process of tracing live action performances frame by frame was called Rotoscope. Disney developed a process called “Selective Rotoscope.” That is when only the key poses, or selected poses were traced, and these poses were sometimes pushed by the animator to be more extreme, or appropriate, etc. to fit into the style of the animation. The actions dictated by these selected, and sometimes altered drawings were then re-timed, broken-down and inbetweened by the assistant animators with no reference to the live action. Disney did this to try to remove the curse of feeling false that came with rotoscope. They problem is, even after all of that, you could still tell that the performance was based on live action; and that stinks on the screen.

Well, Mo-Perf-Cap falls victim to that very same curse of feeling false. What works is an animator’s interpretation of a performance. Not the since that someone’s hand is stuck up a character’s back-side controlling their actions. The characters should exist sincerely on the screen, for their own sake. Not manipulated by some distant live action like some kind of avatar. That sincerity only happens when the animator is creating the performance. This why animators make the best Mo-Cap artists, even though they are not actually animating, but nursing performances.

Instead of wasting time fighting this battle, I guess Kristin Thompson and Henry Selik are right when he suggests a new catagory. Call them MoPerf-Captors.

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“You can’t enhance a bad performance with animation. You can’t dial it up, lift the lip or the eyebrow. It has to be right at the core moment. It’s the same as conventional shooting.”

When actually, you CAN enhance a bad performance. Not only that, you can change it completely. You can do whatever you want to it. In fact, with gollum we DID change things.. not just lift eyebrows or the lips, but changed the body, the face, the fingers, the toes.. we removed parts, added parts, completely changed parts. We modified the heck out of that performance. And while gollum would certainly not have been gollum without andy serkis who is a brilliant actor, it also would not have been gollum without animators like randy cook, mike stevens, steven hornby, melanie cordan, beth arko, etc etc etc. Let alone bay raitt, eric saindon, and all the other sculpters, riggers, technical artists, lighters, and compositors who made it happen.

I’m all for giving actors tons of props and kudos.. just don’t ignore or belittle all the work the animators do to make the performance as well.

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