CMU School of Drama


Friday, March 11, 2011

Behind-the-scenes footage shows how Mars Needs Mom's motion capture crawled out of the Uncanny Valley

I09: "Disney may have burned out our earlobes with the horrific Mars Needs Moms rap, but this behind the scenes Mo-Cap adventure between Seth Green and Dan Fogler is gosh-darn adorable, and pretty impressive. Watch.

2 comments:

ZoeW said...

I have never really thought about acting in this way. It's like they are using actors like how we would use tools in the shop. Acting is just used as a tool to create the end product. Actors are just a body or just a voice. It is also interesting that they film almost the entire film with real people before making it digital. One wonders why they choose to make it animated. Is it simply because it is easier and cheaper? Little kids like cartoons much better. I guess it’s because it is a different medium that lends it's self much better to telling these stories. It also obviously gives it a different feel. I wonder if by using different mediums in theater we will ultimately get to the point where we don't have actors and we just have robots. I think that is one of the reasons that theater is so different from movies, because it is "real" but media and automations are starting to play such a big role that it seems like it is tending towards being “fake”. I guess that the author of this article was correct that by using real humans they have escaped the uncanny valley. We can connect much more to these animations because they are connected to real people. We do not fall into the graph of frightening animations. But we still don’t like things that are a mix of humans and animations.

Robert said...

This is really cool how they make these types of movies. The first movie that I saw this being used is Avatar and now it seems like there is a lot of movies that are using it. I wonder if it is because it is an easy way to get 3D to work in the animation world. The room that they are working in seems really cool with all cameras everywhere that are capturing the movements of everyone. I wonder if this room is made just for this movie that they are making or is it a standard room that they use for this type of movie. I would love to see how much work gets done in one day on this type of movie, how many minutes get in to the movie. It seems like that fooling around a lot and not doing much.