It does, however, include a startlingly high number of stop-motion films - Tim Burton’s “Frankenweenie,” Laika’s “ParaNorman” and Aardman-made “Pirates!” - which have an incredible track record of being rewarded by the branch (the impression being that the hand-puppeted frame-by-frame approach is considered even more artistic than hand-drawn toons by the pros). The Academy’s toon branch is spared the debate of whether to award such work in the animated feature category this year, since the 2012 crop of submissions features no mo-cap pics. It’s really interesting how the technology has fully integrated now with animation.” In the old days, you’d set up a video camera, you’d film yourself as reference and you’d go in and try to match it all. The animators, if they’re assigned to a shot and they have to go in and animate a character, they’ll put on a (performance capture) suit and just do it themselves. Even though James Cameron didn’t submit, it would technically have been admitted, since keyframe animation was involved in every single frame of the simulated action.”įurther blurring between performance capture and traditional character animation can be found in such “live-action” projects as Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit.” Referring to the role mo-cap played in the production, visual-effects supervisor Joe Leterri says, “These guys just use it everywhere. “I look at ‘Avatar’ as one of our kind of films. “We’re the guys who make films that are 100% technology,” Kroyer says. That’s not to say that the branch members are all a bunch of Luddites opposed to impressive technical leaps in animation, despite the fact they snubbed Steven Spielberg’s motion-capture “The Adventures of Tintin” last year. “Anything hand-drawn and hand-painted immediately has an impressionistic, very unpredictable quality to it that makes it very difficult to come up with a computer film to which audiences will respond in the same visceral way.” “Let’s face it, a lot of the older members have a real hunger for what they consider to be art in animation,” says Bill Kroyer, a governor on the Academy short films and feature animation branch. Although CG “Rango” ultimately took the prize, American toon studios are starting to get nervous again, now that GKids (the indie distrib that released “Chico” and “Cat”) plans to Oscar-qualify four more titles this year - three of which are traditional hand-drawn entries. By giving two of its five nominations to small, foreign-made, hand-drawn toons - “Chico & Rita” and “A Cat in Paris” - the org appeared to be taking a stand against the sort of computer-animated pics that have become the industry’s bread and butter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |