So this is the follow-up post about Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (ROTPOTA). Thank you to all who read the last one and talked about it on Facebook and Twitter.
In this promised follow-up post, I want to talk about performance capture and Andy Serkis.
I had planned to discuss this at length, but Tim Borrelli, an animator at 5th Cell Media in Seattle, made this post which I think sums it up.
Today, Andy Serkis was not nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Caesar in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (as Mike Jungbluth noted on Twitter, "Guess all those animators doing the digital makeup must have ruined his performance"), despite his recent self-initiated media campaign.
This is probably why (credit to the afore-mentioned Tim for pointing out these videos on the blog post linked above):
These videos are from Serkis' own Vimeo channel, in which he "demonstrates" how his performance became Caesar in the film:
Rise of the Planet of the Apes / "Coming Back Soon" / Andy Serkis - Caesar Morph from Andy Serkis on Vimeo.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, "Caesar Attacks Neighbor", Andy Serkis/Caesar Morph from Andy Serkis on Vimeo.
And this is the current showreel of Animation Mentor graduate and WETA animator Jeffrey Engel:
Jeffrey Engel Character Animation Reel from Jeffrey Engel on Vimeo.
These shots are on Jeffrey's showreel because he animated them. By hand. Presumably because the performance capture data was corrupt or incomplete. He used what Serkis had done as reference, and animated it by hand.
Case closed, really.
I'll end with a few quotes from Serkis from this article, and my thoughts (in italics) posted on Facebook in December.
"An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer."
Sorry Andy - no time? Is that why we spend weeks working on a few seconds of screen time?
"If you give a bad performance, you can never make it great, no matter how much you layer and texture it after the fact."
Yes we can, mate, we can delete all your shitty keyframes and do it from scratch, after the fact.
"[Animators] are actors in the sense that they create key frames and the computer will join up the dots."
Er, sorry? That's like saying you're only an actor in the sense that you're a dick in a monkey suit connected to a computer that joins the dots and it magically appears as a lifelike monkey on a screen.
1 comments:
I’m surprised that Serkis would say things like this to give a sense that animators don’t give or do the same amount of work that actors do. I love animation and after finding a lot of free animated content on DISHonline.com, I found “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” the animated series. It was made in the 70’s and is a nice piece that was added to The Planet of the Apes collection. Being that I work for DISH I watch a lot of content in different mediums and I have a lot of respect for animators and actors a like. Keep up the good work!
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