Just an interesting thought I had....... Would any of you guys liked if they used Motion-Capture for the future TF Films?
I don't know. It could cheaper as they have to use less animators or more expensive as they have to use real actors.
Pretty sure they've already done it to a degree. The battle between Bumblebee & Barricade in TF1 was all taken from stunt men flipping around at each using motion capture suits - as seen in the special features of the DVD. So naturally one could assume they've used it quite a bit in ROTF & DOTM as well.
Those weren't motion capture suits. They were just filming the guys fighting to get a reference of how to animate the transformers in battle.
Really? I could have sworn they were covered in little dots & sensors. Hmm, I'm gonna have to watch it again.
I'm all for it. The method could give us some really impressive fight scenes if professional martial artists are used.
Motion capture was used to an extent in the films. In disc 2 of TF1 there is a featurette where they show how it was done. Not all movement of the Cybertronians was done through motion capture, but thre was certainly an amount of the process in the films.
Depending on the details of who and what and how, I'd be for it. I think that depending on how they designed the faces and even the bodies to a certain extent, highly emotive mo-cap faces could be marvellous. They could also be awful, so as I said, it all depends on many factors. Budget, time, the VFX company, and what the characters even do. There's a lot of "ifs", "ands" and "buts" that go with a question like this. It would provide a nice contrast of methods though. As a VFX buff, I'd die of a heart attack if if I got to see ILM's not-mo cap VFX with designs approved by Bay compared with say, motion-captured VFX by Weta under the supervision of James Cameron. Or whoever. Same concepts, different methods, different people. It's like comparing how Two-Face was portrayed in Batman Forever and The Dark Knight. Same character, different means. I find that stuff fascinating.
Sometimes it just looks out of place. I suppose it would depend if they used mocap as a starting base and than an animator added to it.
One of the reasons Bay picked ILM is because they could produce what was being looked for WITHOUT Mo-cap. And what scene could have been improved by it, really? At no point was I watching one of the movies and thought to myself "Oh, man, that was some terrible animation, I wish they had mo-capped it."
