By: Shawn Kelly

Celebrating Three Years of Tips & Tricks
Holy moly!  THREE YEARS?  Crazy, right?  For those of you who have been here since the beginning, that means we're celebrating 36 articles, 36 bacardi anejo y cocas, an e-book collection, a blog, an incalculable number of emails, and approximately 53,000 references to Fried chicken!

I can't believe three years has passed already.  Right now, instead of my traditional bacardi anejo and coke, I'm having a cocktail suggested by fellow Irishman (well, he's an actual honest-to-God Irishman...  I have Irish blood, but I don't think I'm allowed to say that I'm an Irishman until I actually finally get to visit the place, right?!) Brendan Fagan.  Brendan suggested Jameson and 7up, which I'm drinking right now.  You know what it's taught me?

When it comes to booze, always trust the Irish.

I like it!  It's different from what I usually go for, but it's really smooth and refreshing.  He says you can even drink it with white lemonade instead of 7up, if you like.  Anyway - if you're celebrating with me, grab some Jameson and give it a whirl.

In a weird way, Brendan's suggestion really points out my favorite aspect of these Tips & Tricks articles.

I just got a cocktail suggestion from a guy I've never met who lives halfway around the world.  How cool is that?!  Getting to talk with so many of you has been the single most exciting outcome of these articles, and I wanted to take the chance to thank you all SO MUCH for three years of support and encouragement and suggestions and questions and yes - even the criticisms.  It's been so cool to meet so many people through AM and through this newsletter that are as excited to talk about animation as I am!

And of course, as always, the fried chicken recipes and cocktail suggestions are much appreciated as well!!  Ha ha ha  :)

A lot of you have been coming by the new Tips & Tricks blog as well, which has been a BLAST for me.  It's so cool to read through the comments, and get to reply on the blog.  It feels a lot more like a running animation conversation to me, which has been really cool.  Thanks for the great topic ideas, and all the comments!  You guys are awesome.

So Brendan, happy three years to us, and happy three years to all of you reading this too!  Thanks for sticking around, and putting up with my over-wordy articles for so long...  And wow, I'm actually already feeling this drink, so if this article is even longer than normal, don't blame me, blame Brendan! 

Speaking of which, I guess it's time for another over-wordy article, huh?  Let's jump in!
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Let's get something out of the way right off the bat. I realize some of you really dislike motion capture. Some of you even have a real hatred for it. So before we dive into what is sure to be a sticky topic, know

this: I don't care how much you hate motion capture, I have hated it more than you. Period.

Back in 1995, my whole life was about trying to learn this animation stuff, and I believed motion capture was a knife in the art that I held so dear. A robotic and artless solution to the budgetary dilemmas of short-sighted producers who had long since sold their withered souls to their great god: Profit. A shortcut that would not only put all of us animators out of business, but also delivered awful results. Sure, the motion was technically accurate, but in leapfrogging over the absolutely essential step of filtering a performance through the eyes of a true animator, the end-result looked like some kind of zombie brought back to some semblance of life.

For 1995 Shawn, motion capture was animation lobotomized.

Back then, I had my hater-pants belted firmly around my waist and had nothing but upturn-nosed condescension for this new technology. I¹m sure some of you feel that same way right now. But guess what? Some of you won't want to hear this, but an enormous percentage of you are going to work with motion capture in one form or another at some point in your career.

Scared? Don't be!

It turns out that I was wrong about the potential that exists in motion capture, which, over the last decade, has evolved into a robust and useful tool for us to use.

Now, does 2008 Shawn think that Motion Capture is an art form? Nope. No more than a camera is an art form, or a paintbrush is an art form. The

*creation* of any artistic tool could certainly be described as an art form, but the finished tools themselves are no more than that - tools waiting for the magic of an artist's touch. It's the painter and the photographer that are the artists here, as are the joint-effort of the motion capture performer and the animator.

Motion Capture has evolved and grown into a truly useful TOOL. It's nothing more, but it's also nothing less.

Does 2008 Shawn specifically enjoy working with motion capture? No, of course not! My preference is the same as most of yours - to start from scratch and bring characters to life through my keyframe work.

(And to be fair, I haven't done *that* much motion capture work. Of the over 250 shots I've done at ILM, I've used motion capture in exactly 12 of them (yes, I counted), and almost all of those ended up being mostly keyframed by the end of my process. So I'm not claiming to be a huge motion capture expert, just giving my two cents on the issue...)

However, when motion capture is used properly, it can be a solid addition to your animation toolbox. , but (and this is the importantpart!) when used IMPROPERLY, I still think the end result feels about as alive and emotional as a doorknob.

That said, here are some pointers if you find yourself working with mocap:

1.The usefulness of motion capture is DIRECTLY tied to the intended style of the project. It's pretty much only useful for ultra-realistic work. Trying to motion capture a film like Horton Hears a Who! or Wall-E would be a huge waste of money and time, and the end result would be an ugly shadow of the gorgeous hand-keyed work on display in either of those films, no matter how much an animator tried to augment the captured performances. Trying to push and pull motion capture around to turn it into something very stylized would be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming for any artist. I would expect that an animator could have simply hand-keyed a far superior version of that same shot in a fraction of the time it would take to capture, clean up, and then try to augment the motion capture data.

This goes for games as well: while motion capture is a great foundation for a photo-realistic football game, it would be silly to use much motion capture in something like Halo 3. While the movements are pretty realistic in Halo, the style of that universe demands a certain level of subtle stylization to the movements which would probably be faster/cheaper to achieve by simply starting with hand-keyed animation.

2.Along those lines, in most cases it would be a waste of time to attempt to motion capture any extreme physical actions that are above and beyond what a human can do, even in a photorealistic project using human characters. In other words, there's no sense in trying to motion capture superheroes flying around and battling each other in hand-to-hand combat when an animator could again create that same shot, most likely having a better result and costing the studio less money.

Motion capture can often be far more trouble than its worth, and many of us know how common it is to waste days trying to somehow edit motion capture data into the performance that the Director is looking for only to eventually have to scrap it completely and key it from scratch.

3.For feature films, television, or game cinematics, motion capture straight out of the box, untouched by an animator, will invariably have less life than it otherwise could have had, and has a very high likelihood of looking dead, stiff, boring, wrong or just plain creepy.

4.For in-game work, depending on the movement style and budget, motion capture is very commonly used, and I think this is a proper place to do so. However, as games become more cinematic, and resolutions and graphics continue to climb, more care should be taken to ensure that animators have the proper amount of time and allocated budget necessary to give these characters more life, more dynamic poses, more interesting timing, etc. While motion capture will continue to be an important part of the equation in the creation of sports games and other lifelike games, studios need to keep in mind that it is only one step of the process, and those characters are never going to feel truly alive until their motions and emotions are augmented by a talented animator.

5.Motion capture can be an excellent and data-rich source of 3D reference for any animator, working in any medium. If you happen to somehow end up with motion capture data that you won't be able to really use for one reason or another, it still might be very valuable to at least study and learn from what the performer did.

6.MOTION CAPTURE IS ONLY AS GOOD AS THE PERFORMER BEING CAPTURED! If you're going to be motion capturing something, be sure to cast the actor appropriately, and have the director involved as early as possible in the capture process. This will save a fortune in reworking the performances later.

7.No matter what, animators will ALWAYS need to do some amount of reworking the mocap data, almost regardless of the intended style.

Untouched mocap, or even ³cleaned-up² but not augmented mocap, is rarely going to be acceptable as the final product if there are any quality standards at all. (If any producers happen to be reading this, please do the rest of us a giant favor and factor this into the budget from the get-go!)

8.Most important of all: If you are working with mocap, your primary focus needs to be on exaggeration. You'll want to subtly exaggerate the poses to push them into something more dynamic or exciting, or more forceful. Exaggerate the weight a little bit, push the line of action, etc. You'll also probably want to exaggerate the timing in some way ­ speed this part up slightly to make it a little snappier, slow this part down a little to give him more of a pause here, etc. In other words, use the mocap as a foundation upon which you can use YOUR artistic skills, and your knowledge of the principles of animation, to create a true performance that can hold up on-screen.

Some of you out there might be 1995 Shawn. I'm here to tell you that there is a light at the end of the mocap tunnel. That it doesn't have to be scary, and it doesn't have to be anything other than an occasionally useful tool. Not only that, but particularly in the games industry, motion capture makes a lot of projects possible that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive, and as such, actually *creates* a huge number of animation jobs.

There's an elitist vein of snobbery running through our industry right now, where some "keyframe" artists like to stand up on their pedestal and look down their noses at animators working with mocap. Some of these animation purists even have the unbelievable audacity to proclaim themselves the only "true" animators, and that animators working on photorealistic films such as Lord of the Rings or performance captured films such as Beowulf are not "animators" at all, but rather some tech-heads doing grunt work or something.

How quickly they've forgotten that not so long ago, the 2D animation industry was saying the exact same thing about them!

Back in the early 90's, many 2D animators had those same elitist opinions about computer animators in general - that the only "real" animators used pencils. From here in 2008, that sounds ridiculous, and I would be willing to bet that even the most ardent among them would be forced to admit, in the face of Kung-Fu Panda or Wall-E (or any other amazing CG film!) that they were wrong.

To these thankfully few people, who clearly just don't understand how an animator might properly embellish motion capture, I would suggest you get over yourselves and realize that this art is bigger than any one tool, bigger than any one project, bigger than any one medium, bigger than any one style, and it's certainly bigger than you.

Yes, I agree with you that plenty of animation that began as mocap data looks absolutely horrible. Dead, lifeless, boring, or just wrong. But you know what? Plenty of animation that began with a blank piece of paper ended up looking horrible as well, and plenty of animation that is keyframed in the computer looks just as bad or worse!

I think we can all agree that the end result has more to do with the artist and their environment and training than with any particular tool.

As far as I'm concerned, a solid well-trained animator who is allowed to apply their artistic animation vision to whatever tools they are working with will always have the potential to create something terrific, regardless of the tool or medium.

Animation is the act of bringing characters to life. If that's what you do, I don't care if you're using Maya , Softimage, Lightwave, Animation Master, Flash or Motion Builder or your H1B Pencil or an armatured puppet! I don't care if your reference is video reference, yourself in a mirror, or a day at the park, and I certainly don't care if you are using your animation skills to mold a crappy motion capture performance into something memorable and truly alive! If you are using the tools at your disposal to bring characters to life, then guess what?

YOU ARE AN ANIMATOR.

And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Shawn :)

If you have questions, you can also email: tipsandtricks@AnimationMentor.com

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