But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.
That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.
For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.
I oversimplified for comedic effect, but the animation was just terrible in that movie. All of the character movement was awkward and didn’t feel natural at all.
The thoughts were, what could be more realistic than the motions of real actors? And the answer was: nearly everything. Sure, we use motion capture, but we’ve mixed it with traditional animation theory and fine tuned it to work. Far from the awkward mirroring they did in FF.
Well… nobody is right all the time?
But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.
That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.
For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.
I oversimplified for comedic effect, but the animation was just terrible in that movie. All of the character movement was awkward and didn’t feel natural at all.
The thoughts were, what could be more realistic than the motions of real actors? And the answer was: nearly everything. Sure, we use motion capture, but we’ve mixed it with traditional animation theory and fine tuned it to work. Far from the awkward mirroring they did in FF.