Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies, 8th edition

Animation

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Among the most celebrated movie examples

using performance capture are Andy Serkis’s

Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings:

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and James

Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the highest grossing

film of all time. Here, the Na’vi, inhabitants

of Pandora, are seven-foot CG fantasies yet

capturing human motion and emotion with an

amazingly heightened sense of reality.

At one time during the making of Avatar

the New Zealand visual eff ects company Weta

Digital employed 900 people, an indicator of

the prodigious scale and expense of Cameron’s

innovative enterprise.

Motion capture animation has also become

familiar in projects for TV, an example in the

UK being Headcases (2008), a satirical current

aff airs show created by Henry Naylor for ITV,

using 3D animation in the style of Spitting Image

(ITV, 1984–96).

In November 1928 Walt Disney (1901–66)

presented Mortimer, later Mickey Mouse, to the

world using synchronous sound, in Steamboat

Willie, along with his Skeleton Dance (1929), one

of the true classics of animation fi lm. Th e labo-

riousness of producing thousands of drawings

for fi lming was dramatically altered in the 1980s

by the introduction to animated fi lm-making of

computer graphics.

Cel (handdrawn) animation was generally

displaced by computer-generated (CG) anima-

tion, increasingly in the fi lm industry in 3D (see

three-dimensional (3D). Live action using

actors is integrated by CG imaging, blending the

real with the synthetic. What has been termed

motion capture (extensively used in video games)

records actor movement to activate digital char-

acter models. When facial expression and fi nger

movement are included, the process becomes

performance capture.

Andersch, Staats and Bostrom’s model of communication, 1969