So I just watched a featurette about the motion capture used on Avatar and one thing they kept saying over and over was, "This isn't animation, it's the performance of the actors," which is true and not true at the same time. Maybe watch it yourself and then see if you agree with my point of view.
http://www.avatarmovie.com/index.html (In the movies section all the way at the bottom, "Performance Capture")
To be honest, I was a little offended because I felt like they were devaluing the prodigious effort and incredible artistry and skill from the animators involved. On one side, yes it's amazing that they can capture these fantastic actor's performances on digital models, but those models probably took months, if not years to build, rig, and perfect with all the texturing, dynamics, and topography involved. Not only that, but every environment, every object in those environments, every effect, was a digital creation. The performances of every non-humanoid creature is created by the animators, which had to stand up next to the motion capture. They completely ignore this and make it sound like James Cameron playing with some wire frame toy versions of helicopters made the movie. No, absolutely not. That's a storyboarding stage where they filmed possible angles of where he wanted things and then the animators did all the heavy lifting. They also didn't mention that in every scene that was mo-capped they had animators go through and finesse each performance because the cameras aren't
magical.
In the end, I can understand that they probably wanted to stay away from the stigma attached to animation in America (i.e. animation is just for kids) but instead of distancing themselves from that, why couldn't they take this opportunity to say, "Hey, this is a form of animation, see how cool it is? This is a totally valid storytelling format that isn't just for Disney and Looney Tunes anymore." Please, credit where credit is due.
On a different note, it's 5:20 and I have class at 9:30, go me. Also, I bit my lip snow tubing today, but it was totally worth it.
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