Sunday, January 8, 2012

Open Letter to Deadline Hollywood

To Whom It May Concern,


Recently, you ran this post from James Franco:


That's cool. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I applaud Mr. Franco for supporting the use of performance capture while admitting that it can be a scary technology for actors. I also applaud his vocal support of a fellow actor.


However, I do not support the fact that someone at http://www.deadline.com/ has deleted a comment I made anonymously to the article. Maybe it was an accident, so I reposted it. Here's a screengrab of post #2, in case it accidentally gets deleted again:





Maybe I don't understand your posting rules of "don't impersonate anyone." In that case, I apologize to "Not Convinced" and "Afraid of the Truth," which were the names I used and possibly the 2 people I impersonated.


Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to post it anonymously, let alone twice. Surely, I do not shy away from this topic of conversation. With that in mind, I am posting it here, where you can't delete it and where everyone knows who wrote it:

Disagree completely. Look at these 2 “Andy Serkis/Caesar Morphs” that Andy has been promoting on his Facebook page:

Now look at this animation demo reel:

This very talented animator’s shot breakdown notes that in Caesars’s Goodbye (link 1 above), “Everything (from 0:00 to 0:17) was keyframe animated, except for the character’s spine where mocap data was used & polished.” Also, at 0:44, he notes that the very same shot from link 2 above was animated entirely by hand.

So really, whose performance deserves recognition?

If you could let your readers, or even Mr Franco, know about this, I would greatly appreciate it. I would love to finally start an actual dialogue between animators and actors regarding this topic, instead of just trading tweets and blog posts about it.

Sincerely,

Tim Borrelli


PS: An update (1/11/12): Facebook apparently considers the direct link to this blog post to be spam! Here is proof to go along with Lamar Hunt's comment below- my wife tested this claim and we found it to be true!: