Does this mean it’s the same process and the difference is only in the degree of subtlety?

“Exactly. And you can’t blame the pose to pose process for poor performance,” continues Bonifacio, “It’s the animators who make too many choices, with too many poses. The quote I hear is ‘a pose for every accent of dialogue’ but we know that doesn’t work. You have to pick and phrase. Bad animators, like bad designers, choose every accent in the book — a bad designer would fill this room with plaid, on everything — a good designer will make choices and it’s those choices that make good design and good animation.”

But why, then, do we see so much of that “one pose for every accent” out there?

“Because people are badly trained. I don’t think it’s because of the 12 principles.”

They do talk about staging and unified fronts in The Illusion of Life and the necessity of making sure there is no ambiguity. But the importance of ambiguity is one of Landreth’s big points.

There’s ambiguity and then there’s ambiguity. Chris Landreth strives for the kind that says this character is thinking two thoughts at once which creates internal conflict. Photo credit: Shira Avni.

“But what’s the difference between the chosen ambiguity that Chris achieved in Ryan and the unintentional ambiguity in motion capture films like Polar Express?” asks Bonifacio.

Well, there’s ambiguity and then there’s ambiguity — the kind that says, “I don’t know what the character is thinking,” is uninteresting or off-putting. But ambiguity that says “this character is thinking two thoughts at once” is interesting because, as Landreth said, it creates internal conflict — I’m interested in you but I’m scared of you; I want to say something but I don’t want to say something.

Here Stephen Barnes chimes in with the concern that in the hands of a lesser talent than Landreth, the ambiguous approach could deteriorate into self-indulgence, reminiscent of the period when painters discovered video and you ended up with hours and hours of vague footage. By allowing for more subtlety in the animation, CG-3D opens the door to ambiguity but it takes discipline and clarity to make it work.

Remembering one of his first assignments, when he was making the shift from drawn 2D to CG-3D, Barnes says, “I had animated a dog scrambling in fear and when the director looked at the shot in the graph editor he said it looked like a bird’s nest to analyze — the paws were doing one thing and the ears another. But the director said that when he watched it, he couldn’t take it apart; it had to be the way it was. It was a successful shot because I just naively thought, hey, I can move these separate body parts whenever I wish.”

But can that be done consistently, particularly in a commercial setting?

“It can all be handled in a fractured approach,” says Barnes. “But I think it still takes virtuosity to be able to rein it all in. The worry with vague ambiguity is that it would be undisciplined. And I think there is still a discipline in having all the elements seemingly, to paraphrase Stephen Leacock, chaotically running off in all directions.”

In fact, it may take even more discipline. As with any art, what it seems to be on the surface can be different from what it is underneath. In this case, apparent chaos on the surface is actually a controlled process where the whole is greater than the parts. But what would a commercial CG-3D director have expected more typically to see in the graph editor?

“The accepted norm is to have all the essential elements locked in, with what would be a keyframe, wherever there is determined to be a key pose,” says Barnes, “This becomes the equivalent of a single page of drawing. Eventually you get to polish your shot so that there is follow through, overlap etc.”

“But with my bird’s nest, it was fundamental that every element of the character’s body had different keys at different times. It was exciting to animate because it was straight ahead stuff and I didn’t record anything until the very end, so instead of being this analytical thing, it became a performance.”

This is interesting because people talk about CG-3D being more mechanical. And, it’s thought, too reliant on the default settings of the computer.

“Once you’re up at the feature level, at least,” says Barnes, “A lot of things are done from scratch and there is the effort to be very gestural. Of course, if you’re told you need to come up with 28 seconds of footage per week that’s going to determine how much you rely on the computer to do the work, whereas, in Geri’s Game, for example, I produced 20 seconds in 16 weeks.”

So the context of using the default settings is, perhaps, more like the CG equivalent of limited animation. But what’s really striking in all this is the feeling of having achieved an animated performance, something that some consider harder to accomplish in CG-3D. And it was accomplished not by the current standard industry approach but more in a manner that supports what Landreth has discovered. So does this contradict the industry philosophy about applying classical principles to CG-3D?

“Maybe this is not so much a contradiction,” says Barnes, “As an indication that the medium and our understanding of it simply hasn’t matured yet.” Nevertheless, how do both Bonifacio and Barnes feel about the levels of performance that have been achieved so far in industry CG-3D?