Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/48986
Character Animation n n n n ON If the young reporter Tintin, star of the comic-book series by the Belgian artist Hergé and, most recently, an animated feature film, were to write about the making of that film for his news- paper, Le Petit Vingtieme, he'd surely headline it: "First animated feature directed by Steven Spielberg! First animated feature pro- duced by Peter Jackson!" And then we'd see the headline espe- cially interesting to those in computer graphics: "First animated feature created at Weta Digital!" Or, is it? It wouldn't be much of a stretch to call large por- tions of Avatar—the most successful film of all time, also largely created at Weta Digital—an animated feature. After all, in much of that film, the Na'vi are animated characters in a virtual environment. And, as they did for Avatar, Weta Digital animators performed Tintin's characters using data captured from actors wearing head rigs as part of a facial-capture sys- tem developed at the studio. Award-winning directors famous for live-action, action-adventure movies directed the actors for both films on a performance-capture stage set up by Giant Stu- dios and "filmed" them with a virtual camera while watching a real-time, on-set composite. "[Tintin] was really an evolution of what we've done for vi- sual effects," says Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital, who received Oscars for the work on Avatar, King Kong, and the two Lord of the Rings trilogies he supervised. And therein lies one of those clues that Tintin and his dog Snowy so famously uncover: A clue to the reason critics are praising it as the most successful performance-capture film to date. Letteri brushes off the distinction. "We rolled straight into what we had done for Avatar," Let- teri says. "We developed a new subsurface technique for the skin to have it look a little better, we developed some new facial software to add a layer of muscle simulation beyond what we could track and solve from the facial capture, and we developed a new hair system that we also used on Planet of the Apes. But, from a performance-capture point of view, we are still recording an actor's performance. It was no different from mapping data to the Na'vi or an ape. We were making comic-book inspired characters, not ones that looked like humans, but there's always a level of animation and interpretation. We had big sequences in King Kong that were entirely computer-generated, most of the scenes in Avatar were entirely in a CG virtual world, and Tintin is in a virtual world all the way. For us, there's no difference." Tintin was successful two months before opening in the US. The film's approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes hovered around 86 percent as it topped the international box office during the first two weeks following its release in Europe, and by the end of the third week, Tintin had captured $159.1 million at the box office, even though it had yet to open in the US or many other regions. Presented by Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures, the film is a rollicking action-adventure that sends Tintin and his dog Snowy dashing through Europe and Africa, on ships, trains, and planes, and even into the past, and a comparison to Spielberg's Indiana Jones films is apt. It stars Jamie Bell as Tintin; Andy Serkis as the whiskey-soaked Captain Haddock; Daniel Craig as Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, a pirate and a descendant of Red Rackham (whom he also plays); Toby Jones as the pickpocket Silk; Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the bumbling detectives Thompson and Thomson; and Snowy, a little white terrier who is Tintin's con- stant companion. All the characters are CG; Snowy is the only star performed entirely with keyframe animation. And yet, everything about Tintin, except for the fact that it is an animated film, has a live-action sensibility. The characters have a cartoon patina, and their performances are a bit broader than a human's, but the artists started with real performances and then referenced reality to add skin, clothes, and hair. For environments, the crew didn't have live-action plates, so they December 2011/January 2012 11 The artiste t o their ne t tur fea s axt film and cr t t W o the surprise o e a Digit al turn their f ea ery te a r v f e emark astidious t one e able anima x cept themselv alen t s tedes By Barbar a R obert son