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Tuesday, 14 September 2010 16:24 |
New Oscar Rules for Mocap?
the Motion Picture Academy’s new rules for defining what is animation (see press release here), which states in part that,
a sentence regarding motion capture was added to clarify the definition of an animated film. The language now reads: “An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of greater than 40 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.”
Live-action directors, like Cameron, like motion capture because it enables them to do animation in a way similar to the way they film live-action (i.e., they direct actors instead of animators).
For whatever reason, The new rules regarding motion capture were added in part to assuage companies like Pixar, DreamWorks Animation and Blue Sky, as it would reduce possible future Oscar competition. (Needless to say, I feel motion capture is animation.)
In a discussion about the new rules at Cartoon Brew, a number of people felt that motion capture films could still be considered animation if the data was finished by animators frame-by-frame, some asked whether this would disqualify Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature several years ago (the same year that another mocap film, Monster House was also nominated)?
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Tuesday, 14 September 2010 16:16 |
New Rise of the Apes Set Photos
August 31st, 2010
io9 has received two new images from the San Francisco set of Rise of the Apes, which will debut on June 24, 2011. The pictures feature an actor in a motion-capture suit portraying an ape on the street.   Rise of the Apes is a completely new take on one of 20th Century Fox's most beloved and successful franchises. Oscar-winning visual effects house Weta Digital - employing certain of the groundbreaking technologies developed for Avatar - will render, for the first time ever in the film series, photo-realistic apes rather than costumed actors.
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Monday, 30 August 2010 20:13 |
US Army wants 2.3 gigapixel camera for aerial surveillance
DARPA may have already gone to the trouble of building a 1.8 gigapixel camera as part of its ARGUS-IS project (pictured above), but it looks like the US Army is setting its sights a little higher, and it's now soliciting proposals for a 2.3 gigapixel camera that would be used for some super-wide aerial surveillance. While obviously still quite a ways from becoming reality, the Army hopes the system will be both smaller and lighter than previous systems, work in the infrared range to boot, and capture images at a rate of two frames per second. The key bit, however, is of course that 2.3 gigapixel sensor, which should let the camera provide continuous coverage of a range of about sixty-two square miles at a resolution of 0.3 meters, or just enough to make out the outline of your tinfoil hat.
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Wednesday, 11 August 2010 00:13 |
Ninja Theory envisions that more studios will use performance capture in future.
Chief designer and co-founder Tameem Antoniades said that recording with separate performers is inefficient by today's standards.
"I think it's totally inevitable that [studios will] have to [use performance capture], because we get to the level of Avatar, anything less is not going to be good enough, and we will get to that level of performance," he told DS.
"You can't replicate that on realistic characters with animators, you just can't. Well, you can, but it would be grossly inefficient, it would take just too long.
"There are still games out there that voice separately in a recording studio, capture movements with different actors, and then they put it all together, and I just think that's just insane. Why would you do that? It's just ridiculous!"
Antoniades said that the technology is now affordable for big budget releases and he doesn't know why it is not used more often.
"If you're doing a fairly big budget game then it should be the way you do it, I think. I don't see any benefit or reason to do it any other way," he said.
"Hiring a massive team of animators to do it is not going to be cheaper than hiring some actors, a crew and a set to do it. So I don't know why it's not done more often. I think it's early tech, we're just at the cusp of it, the tech we developed at Weta was ahead of its time. Now, other games are catching up, and I think it will be used more."
Enslaved: Odyssey To The West follows Heavenly Sword in employing Andy Serkis and other actors for simultaneous motion and voice capture for its cutscenes.
The title will be released for Xbox 360 and PS3 on October 8.
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Wednesday, 11 August 2010 00:03 |
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 Take a look at Andy Serkis in the mocap suit he'll be sporting while he plots his domination over all of mankind. Rise of the Apes is the origins story of Caesar, the world's most devious ape.
Also in the shot is James Franco and Frieda Pinto, who appear to be Caesar's caretakers. Frieda is a primatologist.
Synopsis
Rise of The Apes is an origin story in the truest sense of the term. Set in present day San Francisco, the film is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man's own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.
The tentative release date is set for June 24, 2011.
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