Motion Capture Animation Review

The article talks about how, when creating fantasy-like characters in movies or such, actors use their skills to create facial movement to help animators make a more lifelike animation. The author argues that the actors are "expected to emote fully on camera before the data is exported to their digital selves" (Gray). She states that the movie Avatar is one of the first movies to use this technology called "performance capture". This process help animators to be able to animate the whole face without having to add facial expressions post-production. The author talks solely about how the affects of this process can truly merge animation and acting together as one, they use several quotes from the director of Avatar, James Cameron, to promote the use of performance capture in other entertainment. The author has several strengths when talking about this article, I believe that one of their strengths was having several quotes from directors of movies who have used this type of animation before to give credit to their claim. I believe that one of their weaknesses is that they don't really have all that many sources for this process, they only use two different sources, they probably couldn't find any because this is a new process in the animating world, but they could at least try to get some quotes of the company that created the process. The author's general conclusions was that they believe that other movies should start using this process to pull the line between acting and animation. It helps animators get the expressions they need to give a clean and clear animation, but they also give actors the credit due to the fact that they keep the features the same, most of the time, there are really only small details changed to fit the character.


I do believe that the article did have key points that were incredibly significant to the future of animation. I believe that it did give good quotes and such for the directors that have used this process before, but they could have tried to create a more persuasive article on why people should use this type of animation in future production, but overall it had supporting commentary as well as creditable information, creating a very useful and reliable article.


I believe that the author's argument does support the main points of this article. They specifically talk about the process and how much simpler it is to use this process instead of what directors have been using. The evidence is convincing, not as much as it probably could be but enough. I thought that the article could use a bit more convincing information, but the way it is now is as perfect as it could be at the time. If this article was written when the movie Avatar came out, then I can infer that they used what they had to create this article and use as much convincing information as what they had at the time.


This could be useful to me, as an animation and video student, in the future of my e-Communication career, I could attempt to use this style, if we had the time, to create a more lifelike animation instead of the more choppy, cartoony, style that I have. I understood the whole article, the author uses very general terms, though it still moves the article along just as efficiently as it would if the author bumped up their vocabulary terms.


Overall, I believe that this article could be used in an extremely useful way to influence others, or to just give others information about this animation process.


Here's the article