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Most animation and visual effects houses have found that projects aren’t often cut and dry. And while time and budget do play a role, for the most part these studios are picking the right tool — or tools — for the job. More and more projects are employing a combination of keyframe and motion capture anima- tion techniques. If time is a factor, mocap offers a fantastic head start, especially if the project in- volves the need for humanistic motion. But that humanistic motion can be nuanced with keyframe animation, creating exaggerated motions and a more cartoony feel. DANCING HARES For Dallas-based Janimation (www.janimation.com), the decision between using keyframe or motion capture on a project is, in almost all instances, a creative one. And because the costs be- tween the two are starting to line up a bit better — it’s either time spent behind a desk with a lot of animators plowing through shots or time spent working with a motion capture house to speed the process — the decision can be based solely on what is best for the job. The only time that’s not the case, explains Janimation’s executive producer, Mike Duffy, “is when there is a scheduling issue where we need to move through a large volume of animation in a short period of time. In this case it’s just faster to get the animation with motion capture instead of adding more artists to a project, and you don’t have to worry about the problem of consistency,” he says. “When it’s a very fast turnaround with a lot of animators, the chance that everyone’s animation is going to keep the character exactly the same all the way through is rare; it just makes more sense to start with a good solid base of motion capture for consistency.” The other, more obvious, reason to pick motion capture over keyframing is when you want real- istic movement as opposed to getting a more cartoony feel. A recent project that called for capturing realistic motion was a spot for Indiana Live! Casino out of agency Fitzgerald & Friends.The interesting part of this job was that even though the characters were exhibiting realistic human motion, they weren’t human — they were dancing bunnies.Why were these rabbits dancing? The concept of the spot had bunnies migrating to Indiana in large num- bers because everyone who gambled there was so lucky, they didn’t need rabbit feet anymore. The client asked for sweeping shots with thousands of dancing rabbits outside the casino — on the roof and in the parking area. “In this case, motion capture was a fabulous way of generating a huge amount of animation for all these different characters and dance sequences, but it was also important that we were able to bring a high level of re- alism to the motion, so it did not feel cartoony,” says Duffy. The not-feeling-cartoony part was important because the client didn’t want it to ap- pear as though the bunnies were meant to target children — the spot was promoting gambling after all.“We wanted the motion to be realistic, and getting really good dancers and doing motion capture and applying that data to the rabbits was a great way to get a more so- phisticated look to the animation,” describes Duffy.“Quite often, if we are shooting for a cartoony feel,we’ll go the opposite way and use keyframing, where we have a little more control over push- ing the performance and making it more cartoony.” Duffy acknowledges that there have been some instances where after doing motion capture, For the Iron Man 2 videogame, Pendulum worked with SEGA and Marvel on the trailer and in-game cinematics. they or the client wasn’t satisfied with the performance captured on stage, and this was actually the case with the dancing rabbits.“Everything worked really well for the dance sequences but the mo- tion we captured for the end tag didn’t have the right personality.The client thought the rabbit seemed sort of mad instead of welcoming.” Janimation set aside that motion capture data and got its animators to take a couple of passes at the end tag.According to Duffy,“A lot of times the motion capture isn’t going to hit the emotion, so we’ll either layer some keyframed animation over the top to exaggerate certain emotions or we’ll just completely keyframe it,” which was the case here. When opting for mocap, Janimation chooses House of Moves (HOM) in LA and Dallas-based Motus Digital; both use Vicon systems.They pick the studio based on client’s location and comfort level. For the casino piece, the mocap was done at Motus Digital because the client came to Dallas. www.postmagazine.com Asylum: a good combination SANTA MONICA— Asylum Visual Effects (www.asylumfx.com) chooses its technique based on the requirements of the particular project, but often ends up using both keyframe and motion capture together. Piotr Karwas, the studio’s animation direc- tor, believes that motion capture technology has come a long way.“We can obtain clean data with all the nuance and incredible com- plexity of a realistic motion.That complexity is not easily achieved with keyframe anima- tion. It’s not that it is impossible but it usually takes a great amount of effort and time.Addi- tionally, capturing an actor provides us auto- matically with the consistency of the perfor- mance, where if the acting is created by a group of animators, unifying their styles pre- sents yet another challenge.” Karwas,who worked as an animation lead on I, Robot and Charlie and the Chocolate Fac- tory, two movies that used mocap and anima- tion, continues,“There are instances where re- quired movement can’t be captured.That often applies to fictional characters that don’t have a real-world equivalent.That is also the case when the creature is either too small or can’t be easily brought into a well-calibrated motion capture stage.That is where the skillful animators can step in and bring the characters to life.Also, stylized movement in an animated film usually works much better when it’s keyframed. Realistic motion in such context often seems distracting or even creepy.” Asylum called on both techniques for a Microsoft “Hyper V” campaign (pictured) cre- ated for McCann/SF.The four commercials featured digitally-generated robots.“The spe- cific nature of the motion required us to ei- ther alter motion capture or, in some cases, use pure keyframe animation,” explains Kar- was.They used House of Moves in Culver City for the mocap and Autodesk’s Maya for keyframe.The studio is currently keyframe animating characters in Sorcerer’s Apprentice. May 2010 • Post 29