Animation

An Animator’s Open Letter to Andy Serkis

Animation /

 Via: Collider

Andy Serkis has become the public face of motion-capture technology and one of its biggest proponents. However, it seems that he also believe that a motion-capture performance is worthy of an Academy Award for acting.

Animator Tim Borrelli took issue with this and has crafted an open letter in response where he outlines why, if motion-capture is considered an “act”, then animators must also be considered “actors”.

It’s a very well written letter that does outline the fallacy of suggestion that motion-capture is really acting. Serkis’ stance is actually quite surprising, given the recent push to have motion-capture considered as animation. Thankfully, that campaign was rejected by the Academy, leaving motion-capture to inhabit a wasteland between live-action and animation.

Borrelli really does hit the nail on the head with this statement though:

Animators, both hand-keyed and motion capture artists, breathe life into their characters. They push performances of their characters to an artistic limit, based on the direction they are given

He’s absolutely right, and that fact has been gnawing away at animators for years (even decades) because they are never recognised as being actors, even though they produce an acted “performance” (one frame at a time).

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The Beatles Rally Against “Piracy” With Animation

Animation /

Tip of the hat to Tim Cushing over at Techdirt for pointing out that the Beatles have joined together with the recording industry group Music Matters to create an animated video rallying against file sharing or “piracy”.

The interesting twist? The guy in the video discovered The Beatles because someone was “sharing” it out in the street. The video is also embedded on YouTube for all and sundry to share and embed. I can almost smell the irony from here.

The video itself is by a guy called Lee Gingold, who was not linked to by Music Matters leaving me to fend for myself by visiting Google.

The video itself is OK, but is on the whole, unremarkable. If you listen to it without the sound, it turns into another Flash cartoon with the pencilly look and some über simple character movements.

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Slate’s Cartoon Color Wheel Displays The Entire Spectrum of Characters

Animation, Misc. /

Via: Slate

The fine people over at Slate used the premiere of the Smurfs movie as an excuse to do some goofing about and this is what they came up with: The Cartoon Color Wheel.

It’s interactive so you can hover over each character to see who they are and yes, it really does display a truly varied set of characters from Zorak from Space Ghost to Bonkers D. Bobcat.

The only thing is, I think they cheated slightly by using some Pokemon for a few of the more unusual colours.

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This Sculpture Contains $5,000,000 in Illegally Downloaded Files

Animation /

Ever so slightly off-topic but still very relevant is this “sculpture” by Manuel Palou.

Via: Rhizome

Yes, it appears to be your bog-standard 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook, except that is not what makes it worth so much. It is the content stored on it that is so “valuable”.

While some over on Reddit were questioning its artistic merits (of which there are very few), this “art” should nonetheless serve as a bit of a reminder that content should not be valued at how much you wish to sell it for but how much the customer is willing to pay for it. Just because something is sold at a price does not give it “value”.

The picture also serves as a bit of an eye-opener as to how much content people can store at home these days. Way back when, you could maybe spend $10,000 on a nice record collection but you’d have to give up most of your wall space, or your basement. Now I can store the entire published works of fiction from 2003 to 2011 on my bookshelf and still have more than enough space left for much much more.

Content creators (animators included) MUST keep this in mind when posting stuff online. The internet immediately increases the supply of your product to near infinity, and as any economics professor will tell you, as the supply of a product approached infinity, the price people are willing to pay approaches zero. Embrace this by giving people a reason to give you money. Remember, anything that’s scarce is valuable, anything that’s physical is scarce.

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If The Poster is Overwrought, What Chance Does the Film Have?

Animation, Film /

 Via: Movie Fanatic

It doesn’t so much say adventure as it screams “THIS IS GOING TO BE A BIG BIG MOVIE THAT YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY SEE BECAUSE IT’S SET ALL AROUND THE WORLD AND WE’VE USED PHOTOSHOP FOR THIS POSTER TO PROVE HOW AWESOME IT IS”

Apologies for the screaming.

While I’m aware that this is more of a teaser poster than anything else, it does seem to be beating its breast a bit. This doesn’t concern me so much as why it’s doing so this early in the game. Most teaser posters are much more sublime and only really hint at what the audience can expect. This goes full bore and leaves relatively little to the imagination.

It’s slightly disconcerting to know that the studio feels the need to put this much information on a poster that should show a lot less (yes, the earlier ones did show a lot less, I’m aware of that). It’s a sure sign that a film is overwrought/overproduced if ever there was one.

The creepy looking characters don’t help matters either.

For putting you through that, here’s the teaser poster for Luc Besson’s upcoming feature A Monster in Paris. Much nicer don’t you think?

Via: Shockya.com

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