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New Zealand is poised to enter the Academy Award race this year with "25 April," an adult-skewing animated feature about World War I.

The post ’25 April’ Opens Tomorrow in L.A. To Qualify For Academy Awards appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Find out how Double Negative created a battle sequence between skeletons and invisible creatures in Tim Burton's latest film.

The post ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ Goes For the Harryhausen Touch appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Music video for The Chemical Brothers "Wide Open" featuring vocals by Beck and dancer Sonoya Mizuno.

The post ‘Wide Open’ by Dominic Hawley and Nic Goffey appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

An experimental animation using motion capture data set to Autolux's song "Change My Head."

The post ‘Change My Head’ by Thomas McMahan appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

He'll stop asking for an Oscar when he gets an Oscar.

The Golden Globes, awarded annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., has revised its rules for the animated feature category. The winner of the category has gone on to win the Oscar in six of the last seven years.

Like its predecessor, "Planes: Fire & Rescue" opened in third place at the U.S. box office. The new film, however, grossed only $18 million, or 19% less than the opening of the first "Planes."

Actor Andy Serkis may have changed his tune somewhat from earlier this spring when he insisted that animators do nothing but add 'digital makeup' on top of his acting.

The animated feature "JOYFLUID" opens in a limited number of IMAX 3D theaters in Mexico this Friday. The Mexio City-produced motion capture animated film was directed by Alejandro Rodriguez Huerta and made by the Rodriguez Brothers Animation Group.

"Entertainment Weekly" has published a piece on the upcoming "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" without once mentioning the terms 'animation,' 'motion capture,' or 'performance capture.'

Our post about Andy Serkis's inflammatory rhetoric about the limited role of animators on his performances generated a robust discussion in the comments. By far, the most informative comment was provided by Randall William Cook, who was the animation supervisor and designer at WETA on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy that was released between 2001 and 2003.

In his never-ending quest to be recognized as a serious thespian, character actor Andy Serkis continues to minimize the role of the animators who make his performances possible. With each interview he gives, Serkis seems to do more and more of the work, and the animators less and less. About the only thing Serkis doesn't do at this point is build his own motion capture rigs and provide his own craft services.

India's first 3-D mo-cap CGI feature, "Kochadaiiyaan," will open on May 9th. By Western feature animation quality standards, it looks unwatchable, but perhaps it's considered acceptable in India.

With seemingly the entire Internet yakking about the new "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" trailer, it hardly seemed necessary to bring it up here. But for the sake of posterity, here is the trailer for the Jonathan Liebesman-directed film, which will debut on August 8th:

Continuing our series of trailers for those who think The Croods isn’t living up to their expectations… Submitted for your approval, Tarzan 3D, a German motion-capture desecration of Edgar Rice Burroughs, directed by Reinhard Klooss. O’ Robert Zemeckis, where art thou? This looks incredibly awful.

Brazilian artist Jomário Murta used multiple Microsoft Kinects to generate a sequence of point clouds (a set of points in 3D space) as reference for creating animation. The process is akin to motion capture, but not the same:

This is something like animating over the videos. Just like we usually do as reference for timing and more complex movements. The difference is that I can animate three-dimensionally “inside” the video; the advantage instead of mocap is that the animation process is more free, where I can easily exaggerate the movements and play a lot with the poses without compromising my style of animation.

Murta admits that he is still in a research phase and hasn’t figured out any practical applications for the technique, but that’s to be expected of any exploration of a new technology. The results are promising thus far, and it’ll be interesting to see how he and others build on the process.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Brazil, Jomário Murta, Kinect, motion capture

It’s looking like this weekend’s box office crown will belong to Seth MacFarlane’s Ted. Even though it’s a largely live action film, the main star—Ted the bear—is an animated character. The character animation was divided between two studios—Melbourne/Sydney, Australia-based Iloura and Berkeley, California-based Tippett Studio.

In the film’s promotional materials, Universal Pictures is encouraging the idea that the character was created by recording the actions of MacFarlane wearing a motion capture suit. There’s a video posted on the LA Times website that compares MacFarlane’s live-action performance to the animation.

But that’s only part of the story. This interview with visual effects producer Jenny Fulle explains that motion capture wasn’t used nearly as much as the film promos would suggest. Fulle says:

“We really focused on motion capture from his waist up—because he has a lot of mannerisms with his hands and he rocks back and forth and moves backwards and forwards and stuff like that. What we would also do is keep a high-definition camera on his face. That way we could also capture a visual representation of what he does with his eyebrows and when his eyes go wide and that sort of thing. We would then give that to the animators so they could just manually take that look and apply it to the bear.”

Not only was all the facial animation keyframed, a lot of the physical performance was too, according to one of Ted’s animators, Jonathan Lyons, who wrote an informative post on his blog Comedy for Animators:

“There was motion cap­ture used on the film. MacFar­lane would put on a Moven suit, on set and act out the parts for the Ted scenes they were shoot­ing that day. It was mostly used for scenes of Ted sit­ting and talk­ing. So it was a lot of arm ges­tures and head and shoul­der motion. That’s about it. For the larger action, it was all keyframe animation.”

The film, which is pleasantly amusing if overlong, succeeds largely on the merits of Ted’s animation, which serves the needs of the story quite well. While motion capture was undoubtedly part of the filmmakers’ toolset, it’s clear that a large portion of the animation was keyframed—the same kind of animation that we see on Pixar and DreamWorks films. Motion capture will continue to receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage simply because it’s more exciting to show an actor jumping around in a fancy suit than it is a sullen animator sitting behind a monitor. But at the end of the day, it’s still traditional character animators who are most responsible for bringing to life audience-pleasing favorites like Ted.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: motion capture,

“Billy Dare” gets a mysterious note from “Zmekberg” to meet him in the Uncanny Valley. The latest installment of Ruben Bolling’s comic strip, Tom The Dancing Bug, is a parody of Spielberg, Tin-Tin and a statement about the use of Mo-Cap. Boing Boing posted it here and it’s a must read. Hilarious, sad and true!

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Ruben Bolling

Mainstream motion capture performances have the paradoxical effect of looking both flawlessly perfect and utterly unconvincing and unnatural. The problem is that the directors who use motion capture aren’t interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of the tool they’re using so much as wanting an off-the-shelf technical solution for recreating something that already exists—human actors. Thankfully, there are artists like Ian Cheng and his fascinating mo-cap experiment This Papaya Tastes Perfect. In it, he explores a more honest form of motion capture that hasn’t yet been cleaned up into a sterile imitation of live-action, and in the process he discovers a more expressive and intimate use of the technology.

Cheng described the film to us as such:

Performed under the influence of whiskey, wrecking the mocap suit. . . .dirty data resulting in 3D animation as drunk and unprofessional as the characters within it. Un-integrated stupidity one-to-one at scale with its form. Note: you might have to tilt your laptop sideways or watch it on your cellphone.

Credits
DIRECTION & PRODUCTION: Ian Cheng
MEMORY: Christian de Vietri & Ian Cheng
CHOREOGRAPHY: Madeline Hollander
PHYSICAL PERFORMANCE: Jonny Mandabach
VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Sean Manning
MOTION CAPTURE SERVICES: Steve Day, Motion Capture NYC
THANKS: Mark Bowman, Paul Chan, Clay Deutsch, Pierre Huyghe, Roy Pak, Erik Wysocan

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Ian Cheng, Mo-Cap, motion capture

No one turns to the Wall Street Journal for insightful animation coverage, but that’s still no excuse for this egregious error in an article about the use of motion capture on Rise of the Planet of the Apes:

The film, which follows the development of the chimp Caesar from baby to adult, takes advantage of “motion capture,” a technology the visual-effects company Weta Digital Ltd. first developed for the 2009 blockbuster “Avatar” and has evolved one step further.

The sentence is written in such a way as to imply that Weta developed motion capture, which it clearly did not. Motion capture is a major filmmaking technology that has been used in dozens of films and has been utilized for decades. A newspaper claiming that it was invented in 2009 by Weta defies comprehension.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 11 comments | Post tags: motion capture, Wall Street Journal, WETA

Spielberg says its “animation”. The Academy says it isn’t. I say the characters are creepy looking – but it feels like a fun “Spielberg-ian” roller coaster ride… so let’s wait and see.

(Thanks, Riley Phillips)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Tintin

Trailer: ‘Mars Needs Moms’ | Animation Magazine

I… don’t know what to say. I guess… I’m glad Disney is continuing to make animated movies, and thus employing artists? Yes. That.