I found this interesting article in a thread at the CGTalk forums. There’s a very controversial statement in it by Avatar producer Jon Landau:

“Our goal on this movie was not to replace the actor, it was to replace the animator.”

Ouch….  And then, to make things worse he also says:

“A great actor withholds information. Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” can sit there and do nothing. No animator would ever allow that, they would put in a twitch.”

Well, let’s start with this last statement, in which he is utterly wrong and shows a total lack of knowledge about the world of animation.  As he says, “a great actor” could do nothing in a scene, if that particular scene required it, but he forgets to say that a “bad actor” might ruin that same scene with some overacted performance.  The same thing happens with animators, there’s also good animators and bad animators. And of course, a good and talented animator will be able to have a character doing nothing and also keeping him alive, and he should know when to do it. As animators, it is our job to know what’s expected from the character in each scene. Just as any good actor would know.

I have to say that it is probably more difficult to have a character “doing nothing”, or to keep a solid performance in a scene, in animation than in real life, because of the fact that it takes so long to animate a shot. There’s many revisions of one single shot, and many people can have an opinion about it (I might write about feedback someday), so that the whole point of the shot might get diluted over time. But trying to avoid that is part our job, and the job of the “Animation Supervisor”, and the job of the Director during dailies.

And this takes us to his first statement, about replacing the animators with mocap. I think that behind that sentence, and behind all the marketing and PR stuff that’s having the mocap technology nowadays, there’s the mind of a producer, the person in charge of handling the budget and schedule of a movie production. Animation is an art-form, not a mathematical process, and this means that it’s hard to control, and a total nightmare from the production department point of view. So, getting an actor in a suit at a mocap facility for a few weeks, and getting all the data that’s been captured straight into the character rig, and then getting this “animation” into the movie shots, this process is like a dream come true for a producer. You can put all the info required in a project-planning software, and you won’t get many surprises down the road. And that’s why many producers will keep selling and promoting to the audiences a technology that they can control, more than the actual artform that their own movie is actually based on.

I’m not against mocap. I once was, but a few years ago I had the chance to work in a couple of projects that were all mocap-based, and realised that used properly it can be an interesting tool for the animator. This projects demanded a very realistic animation, which is precisely  the case where mocap can help. Of course, it would be foolish to think that you would use mocap in a cartoony film or game. What we discovered while working in this projects was that although the characters were very realistic, they were still animated characters and hence subjected to a world based on the laws of animation,  so it was a mistake to simply use the data from the mocap session, without any alteration. We had to push the poses and the timing in order to make it work. In short, we  stylized the movement, which is exactly what animation is. What we got from the mocap were the mechanics and the physics of the movement, and they were perfect, but we had to add animation on top of that in order to make it work, to make it appealing, to make the character alive and believable. So an animator is still needed. And will remain so. Although ignorants keep saying otherwise

One last note, here’s another quote by Jon Landau from that same article:

“Movies aren’t about worlds, they’re about characters,”

And I have to admit that he is absolutly right in that one.