Make It Real — Part 2: Marks in the Sand
Be sure to check out Part 1 of the series Make It Real – Off the Beaten Path. What do we do about 2D animation? Is it just a relic from another era? Are those of us that love it (and please understand that, much as I like Ryan, I also count myself among these ranks) clinging to the past? Like thinking, let’s hope those nasty talking pictures just go away so we can get on with making more silent masterpieces? Get rid of computers so we can go back to our typewriters? Bring back the dial phone? DVDs be damned, I love my videos? Screw those CDs, I’m sticking with my 8 tracks? Are we, in other words, flogging a dead horse here? Okay, I’m being melodramatic. But less than 20 years since it was revived from a near moribund state (a revival that took almost 20 years in its own right), 2D is once again on dicey ground. Yes, it’s holding its own, in limited form, on television and the net. But the top end, fully crafted, classical stuff, the kind that only really gets a proper workout in features, is being shunted into a kind of no man’s land. After that vigorous talk with Chris Landreth last time, I was anxious to see how this new landscape looks from the vantage point of 2D. So I sat down with renowned animation artist Charlie Bonifacio, who has worked on such features as Mulan and Lilo and Stitch, to talk about the future of 2D in a CG dominated world and see what role it has to play in making animated work more convincing. We began by talking about motion capture and some unexpected ways in which pencil and paper and a solid classical background can contribute to the creation of digital performance. Right off the top, Bonifacio pointed out that motion capture faces some special challenges. First, there is the question of how actors can adapt their performance to make it work in the graphic arena. Then there is the reality that even when adapted, live action performance has more subtlety than even the most advanced system can capture. Perhaps then the key to success lies in what happens after the material is captured. Examples like Gollum show there are ways to make it work. So what’s missing when it doesn’t?
Comparing stills from Polar Express of Tom Hanks as himself and as the conductor offers a clue. Bonifacio noted what an artist would capture from that performance compared to a computer, even from looking at a single still frame. “Things like tension in the neck muscle,” he said, “There’s a little crease in the back of his neck, in this still, from tilting his head back. On the computer rendering this gets softened. But an artist could capture that detail and make a statement of it.” Mocap can capture the result but perhaps not what makes that result, Bonifacio goes on to say. By comparison, the artist understands that the muscle has anchor points and that it’s stretched as far as it can go. The artist can capture the tension that holds that muscle and skin against the bone and can even capture the structure of the muscle fibers. “But they probably don’t have motion capture that will take this end of the muscle and that end of it,” says Bonifacio, “And realize that it’s at the end of its stretch.” Technology can capture where a crease is but it can’t so easily capture the compression of the flesh or the pull of the muscle that creates the crease. This is important because when we look at a facial expression, we perceive not just the crease but the tensions creating the crease and it is those tensions which help transmit emotion. The artist perceives the tensions and being human, knows what they mean and can use them to communicate a statement. But for the computer, they are just points in space. “And then,” continues Bonifacio, “They transfer those already arbitrary points to a character with totally different architecture that might have different stretch factors and end points.” The end result is performance robbed of meaning.
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