If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from the film by simply clicking the image.

The digital acting in King Kong was a huge leap forward, because it was the first such performance that really brought emotional weight. © 2005 Universal Studios.

Several years ago, I got to spend some quality time alone with Ray Harryhausen. It was only about half an hour, but I count it as a career highlight. Although I don’t recall his exact words, Harryhausen told me that he always had a deep commitment to the animated performance, believing that a great one was as engaging and emotionally telling as life itself… or at least a great human performance. The thing that convinced me was his work on Mighty Joe Young. I know that he’s right – it’s not just movement; it’s performance.

Following in Harryhausen’s footsteps is Dr. Mark Sagar, who was responsible for much of the wonderful facial animation in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Sagar too has a commitment to performance. I’ve been fairly outspoken about Kong’s MoCap performance being just awful. He looks like a 4,000-pound gorilla bouncing around Times Square like a 190-pound man. It just doesn’t sell. But the face was a different matter. I said to myself, “Kong’s face doesn’t look MoCapped.” MoCap in general still has a “look” that I’d rather not see. Kong’s face -- and all the other truly great facial performances so far -- arise mostly from the brilliance of the individual master character animator(s). Each subtle movement of the face imbued with the loving touch of a dedicated and talented artist. I understand that as much as 75% of Kong’s face was keyframed, and I think it made the movie. But keyframing is an expensive, time consuming luxury and it’s all changing.

Perhaps the finest example ever of this hybrid approach with MoCap tracking being used with keyframe animation is found in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I believe ILM has crossed the valley into the land of believable virtual human performance, but more about this later on.

With the unprecedented popularity of animated performances these days, we need a way increase production, believability and magic. When it takes the delicate hand of a great character animator – and they are few and far between – you’re not going to see useful increases in output. It certainly would not be possible to keep up with even current demand and tight schedules. So we end up with what happens all too often these days, inconsistent animation of the same character. Shrek, as successful as it was, went from great (for example, the eye animation on Princess Fiona) to mediocre at best, with inconsistencies within characters. Shrek is not alone: the Star Wars franchise has had its uncanny digital actors as well. Not to pick on them, but nearly all virtual performances in features have been inconsistent because of the number of people working at different levels on them. But they were entertaining and they set the ball in motion. We now need better virtual performances. Imagine going back to the old Felix the Cat animations: you might still find them entertaining, but the animation would likely be annoying…it is to me.

Taking a large portion of the responsibility for life-like performance out of the hands of lower level animators is changing the business big time. In a way, it’s sad. Many animators are developing a whole new set of skills. It actually takes a different, more technical type of person to be a character animator these days. Some of the great artistry is being lost, and I, for one, think that artistry can never be fully replaced by technology. I call these newbies tech-animators. Most of the one’s I’ve talked with recently truly have hand animation talent, but they’ve been trained to use technology to power through a ton of shots quickly. I believe in the near future, this new breed of tech-animator will evolve into a population with little or no knowledge of traditional animation, digital or otherwise. They will know the technology and how to use it to create life-like performances. Thus we are bound see a decline in animated character performances a la Chuck Jones et al.

With the demand putting pressure on producers, it’s necessary that we move on. I’m thinking there will be a place for master character animators for a long time in tweaking Hero characters to give them that special animated personality look, that’s bigger and more engaging than any recorded performance. But I’ve already seen a small army of tech-animators on the rise.

Getting back to technology, though, there are three basic approaches that I’m looking at, and all involve MoCap. First, the long standing standard MoCap approach and its newest refinements that is making capture more accurate. The second uses fewer capture markers to give the general performance, with the detailed nuances created by underlying virtual face structure. The third is the use of virtual sensory perception and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create behavior streams on-the-fly using MoCap libraries and behavior blending.

Where Kong wowed us with one powerful performance, Narnia was able to bring to life a whole world of expressive characters. © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media Llc. All rights reserved.

A Time Of Transition
Sony Pictures Imageworks is one of the most respected vfx/animation, and I think they have a great attitude about virtual performance. They’ve been responsible for some of the wonderful virtual performance work done in movies such as Narnia and Monster House and many more. Imageworks seems to believe in both the power of MoCap and magic of talented people. It’s one place where you’ll find a lot of talented animators who are working hand-in-hand with new technology. According to Debbie Denise, evp of production infrastructure/exec producer at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio’s basic philosophy toward animation and character performance strongly impacts their R&D and staffing efforts. It may sound cheesy, but it’s that philosophy that makes all the difference in what you see on screen.

“Imageworks’ approach and philosophy is that through motion capture and animation tools, we try to preserve the essence of what actors and directors bring to the performance of a character. This applies to body and/or facial capture. To this end, we are always trying to improve our ability to get that performance on screen as faithfully as possible, taking into account the design and feel of the animated character.”

I asked if she thought all the equipment and greenscreen claptrap hampered performance at all: “We feel that it’s critical to allow the performer and the director to be unimpeded by the technology we deploy to capture the data. That’s why our R&D group is working hard to develop new and better ways to capture the data with less invasive technology and in creative environments.” Naturally, I wasn’t able to get many details of the actual R&D efforts or how next year’s Beowulf improves the process. However, this is what she offered: “As you know, there are several ways to capture a performance. Generally we go about getting the character’s skin to animate by tracking drive points on the mesh skin surface directly with the markers (on the actors) and another approach is to develop software that analyzes the movement of the markers to trigger muscles or shapes to deform the surface.

“Our current solution uses both of these techniques. We work directly with the data in an extremely efficient way, and animators can alter it to reflect any changes in dialogue, sight lines or exaggerated or toned down movement. And we can choose the degree of application of each method in all shots. This seems to us to be the best of both worlds.

“We are also working on methodologies that would give us ways to capture the facial performance with as much data as we currently capture, but with few or no markers on the performer... in all types of environments or stages... Not too much to ask!”

I knew that Imageworks has long taken character animation seriously on many levels. I asked Denise to comment in general on the artistry vs. technology of their philosophy: “No matter how great the technology is, the animators are still the ones who turn the data into magic. To that end, we build “animator friendly” tools that allow the animators to enhance the data intuitively, rather than through overly complex user-interfaces.” She stressed that for Sony, it’s as much about art as it is about technology.