Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277927
Approach Three For the third style of animation production mixing, I had the opportunity to chat with current CAS Treasurer and well-known production mixer Lee Orloff CAS. Lee's work has ranged from Terminator 2 to Westworld to The Suicide Squad. I wanted to talk with him particularly about his early work in the all-digital world of theatrical animation. In particular, the pioneering work on Rango which, like The Adventures of Tintin, also came out in 2011. But unlike that other, early, all-animation show, this was done with no motion capture or performance capture of any kind. In fact, all of the on-set performances were filmed to create an elaborate guide for human animators! The only thing recorded during these performances that made it into the final film were the lines recorded by Lee and his team. With the audio being made such a priority on set, Lee and his team had a fair amount of say in terms of where mics could go and how to treat the set. Lee tells me they had an entire stage at Universal carpeted! There were no walls of any kind either, the space was wide open. After the lighting team had lit everything evenly, Lee was able to have curtains brought in to cover the walls and hung baffles to create tighter acoustic spaces when necessary. Lee tells me that Rango director Gore Verbinski referred to the process as "emotion-capture" for the purity of the performances created by actors outside of a recording booth. Performances that allowed interacting with actual objects, other actors, and Gore himself. Approach Four So, to explain the fourth style of animation dialogue recording, let's pop back to my conversation with Ron Judkins, and recount where we've been. We've spoken about the traditional, the performance capture, and the emotion- capture styles of production recording for animation. But in that quick interview with Ron, it became clear to me that there was a fourth variation; one we would come to call a hybrid style—one that Ron is seeing more and more of. For all intents and purposes, this hybrid form is an amalgam of the previous three. For example, Ron described The Jungle Book as a half- performance capture and half-CGI animation shoot. So much for the "people yelling in the booth" assumption! The Jungle Book