Bone movie to use motion capture

To my understanding, CGI is indeed easier to animate than traditional 2D animation and is a lot less time consuming as well. It also probably helps that 2D animation studios seem to be in short supply in the States, unlike computer animation studios.



There's already been plenty of failures with CGI films. That doesn't mean studios won't stop trying to reach the success of a Dreamworks or Pixar film.
 
Don't know much about Bone, but what I do know is that it looks like it would translate to motion-capture about as well as Spongebob would translate to live action. Seriously, what in the name of Robert Zemeckis are they thinking? This will likely go down in history as one of the worst artistic decisions in the history - I mean, just picture in your head what Bone would look like in the style of Avatar and A Christmas Carol, and try not to gag. :shrug:
 
If that's they're attitude, then i would love to show them a magic trick where i make a pencil disappear. :p :evil:It's almost as if these suits are hell bent on making 3D animation the standard because they don't want to deal with the time consuming headaches that come with 2D animation. (Wave of the future, baby!) Even though 3D has it's advantages, it's still hard work, and CGI isn't always bulletproof unless you have a good story to back it up.
 
That film was pretty weak, and I saw it in 3D! But I've tried hand-drawn animation and 3D and from experience I stand by old 2D being the easiest, of course my 2D attempts were just flip-books while 3D was with 3D Studios Max but with a pen and paper I didn't have to spend time figuring out what tool does what, making models, making movement, positioning characters, etc. All I had to do was trace and alter slightly.
 
Basically we know that you can create anything with a computer. However there's a life and vibrance in the characters of Princess and The Frog that Zemecks has not brought to a movie in years.

So i think to try and do something like motion capture for Bone which has such great story and characters and for it to fall short would be reall disappointing.
 
To be fair to the technique, mocap CGI was also what brought Gollum, the newer King Kong, and Davy Jones to life (and the latter two were arguably the best things about those overblown, underdone movies), so it's not like everyone's trying to mimic Robert Zemeckis. If nothing else, the bits I've seen of Avatar suggest that James Cameron & co. did quite a bit better at not making the characters look like blind zombies. I still hold up the Appleseed movies as good examples of using mocap CGI for a fully animated movie.

I agree that the technique is a flavor-of-the-month and I really don't think it will ever fully replace full-animation or full-live-action (if nothing else because actors like to see their real faces projected 50 feet high on a screen, not covered in a layer of digital makeup ;)), but I think it does have its place. I think that place is more in movies like Lord of the Rings and the new Pirates movies, where you want to place a weird, fantastic creature next to live human beings believably, so I'd be happiest if they just did mocap CGI for the Bones and got actors to do the human characters. Barring that, I'd also be happier if someone in Hollywood actually watched the Appleseed movies to get clues on how to make mocap CGI human characters more believable (hint: "believable" != "realistic").

It's also worth stating right now that Disney may have blamed the failures of their movies on 2-D in the past, but the current regime is not because John Lasseter is still the chief creative officer of feature animation and he understands that technology does not make good movies by itself. He has said so on numerous occasions, even after the box office disappointment of The Princess and the Frog. It seems that there are changes going on across the board in Disney's feature film division, including feature animation, but some of the news has CGI movies getting killed along with the rumored hand-drawn ones, so I really don't think that Disney is blaming the medium the way they did in the past. However, it's all rumor and scuttlebutt at the moment, so I don't know how much of that is real or not, and how much of it is fallout from the much larger decisions being made at much higher levels.
 
I'm led to believe that the Bone animated feature will probably premiere the day after Duke Nukem Forever is released. Like DNF, the Bone movie has been talked about for years, but seems to be perpetually plagued with issues.
 
Well, there is an update (but not much of one) about the movie from Jeff Smith's Comic-Con panel today (plus a new Bone comic and novel).

Good to know it hasn't entered development hell (yet). Next year is the 20th anniversary of Bone, so hopefully WB uses the opportunity to announce a release date for the movie or something.
 
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