Monday, February 28, 2011

Monday, 2-28-11

Monday, 2-28-11

Today we went to the motion-capture lab in Wean Hall to do some work with the guys there (who are actually on Pixar’s payroll). We took turns having little reflective marks stuck all over our bodies, and then were recorded moving around as our animals in front of the 16 infra-red motion capture cameras.

This was really cool because motion-capture is being used increasingly often with special effects in film and television… and video games and animation and so on. It’s going to play a big part in our careers. It’s important to remember that we’ll have to be comfortable with that to get work. But it’s also important to know that it’s not going to take our jobs away.

There’s a growing fear (and to my mind a largely unfounded fear) that technology and animation is going to completely replace and render obsolete actors. As computing power rises exponentially, theoretically hiring technicians and animators will become more and more feasible. Eventually, the question is asked, wouldn’t actors just be left out of the process? Once animation is no longer distinguishable from live-action, wouldn’t actors be left out of the digital film world?

Well. No. And here’s why:

1. Technicians and animators like working with actors. They prefer it to just coming up with stuff on their own, and they’re happy to admit that in interviews. They get a lot of good ideas from actors (as happened with Andy Serkis’s work in Lord of the Rings), and it makes their jobs easier. Any time collaboration is preferable to working alone, you know that the people who are collaborating won’t be out of work.

(This is from King Kong. Notice the marks on his Serkis's face)

2. Even if hiring technicians becomes less and less expensive, and hiring actors for huge sums of money becomes less and less attractive, it still doesn’t make economic sense that an actor would ever be paid less than a technician or animator. If anything, the technology rise may just equalize the paychecks, as actors and animators become more closely tied in importance and in the process.

3. Even if you somehow denied my first two points, audiences like having names to attach to faces. Or at least names to attach to voices. Something purely synthetic, a hypothetical movie created by a design team and director without any actors, would have less “character appeal” in the media. I’d imagine, at least, that because individual characters can’t be tied to individual performers, there would be less identification and a corresponding loss in fan-base, which isn’t good for business. So there would still be a financial incentive to at least hire a few voice actors.

So those are a few of my thoughts on the digital revolution in technology. It’s a really interesting shift that’s going to be changing the business quite a lot, but not in negative ways. And it certainly won’t endanger my future career so long as I stay flexible and mindful of the technological nuances of the job at hand.

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