New TinTin trailer online!

[Roberto Lequeux]

From a trailer you can't tell who the characters will be. Once you meet Tintin and the loopy band you won't think of them as live people; more of a caricature (I hope).

Then you'll be less willing to see them as humans than you are now. Your dot in the plot will move away from the valley of death.

It is a long time till Christmas to run our calculations...

 

[Tom Lowe]

I will reserve judgement until I see it. Not having read the books, the story might be great for me.

I was just giving my first impression of the format and look.

Let's see what Mr. Speilberg can do!

 

[Jan Reiff]

in 1080p and fullscreen it is really great. i think the best work so far in motion "comic" CGI - animation, although, the characters and mimic still suffer under this coldness of CGI. but it´s a huge step for this technique in my eyes, and the storytelling and visual genuis of spielberg makes this a must seen movie.
the lightning sceneries are amazing .

but spielberg should take this combination :w00t:

 

[Tom Lowe]

When the Belgian animator Hergé died in 1983, he left behind one last, unfinished Tintin adventure. Entitled Tintin and Alph-Art, the story hinged on an evil scheme to abduct Tintin and encase him in liquid polyester. The gallant boy reporter would therefore become a "living sculpture", beautiful but dead. "Your corpse will be displayed in a museum," the villain (according to Hergé's notes) would cackle. "And no one will suspect that the work constitutes the last resting place of Tintin."

Three decades on, this dastardly plot may just have been completed. Out of the blocks comes The Adventures of Tintin, a rip-snorting Indiana Jones-style romp from director Steven Spielberg, darting from the cobbled streets of Paris to the bazaars and hill towns of north Africa in search of buried treasure. On the face of it, all is well. But look closely at the film's protagonists, with their strange vestigial features and blank, marbled gaze, and one comes to suspect that here, at last, is the version of Alph-Art we assumed would never see the light of day.

....

while the big set pieces are often exuberantly handled, the human details are sorely wanting. How curious that Hergé achieved more expression with his use of ink-spot eyes and humble line drawings than a bank of computers and an army of animators were able to achieve. On this evidence, the film's pioneering "performance capture" technique is still too crude and unrefined. In capturing the butterfly, it kills it too. What emerges is an array of characters (puffy, moribund Haddock; opaque, inexpressive Tintin) that may as well be pinned on to boards and protected by glass.

Viewed from a distance, The Adventures of Tintin stands proud as freewheeling, high-spirited entertainment. But those close-ups are painful, a twist of the knife. There on the screen we see Hergé's old and cherished protagonists, raised like Lazarus and made to scamper anew. But the spark is gone, their eyes are dusty, and watching their antics is like partying with ghosts. Turn away; don't meet their gaze. When we stare into the void, the void stares back at us.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/16/tintin-adventures-secret-of-unicorn

Just as I suspected, reviewers are slamming the film, mostly for its use of performance capture CGI rather than real human actors.

IMO, at this point, CGI performance cap should be used for non-human characters such as aliens, animals, monsters, etc. Humans should play humans.

Where things get a bit trickier is when you talk about characters like Hobbits and Elves and Dwarves, which are very stylized humanoids. I had argued previously here against using so many human actors in "The Hobbit," and most people disagreed with me here. I also think the environment makes a difference. "Tintin" takes place in the real, recently modern world. Very easy to build sets and shoot. LOTR or "Avatar", on the other hand, take place in magical lands, where much of the environment needs to be CGI anyway. In such cases, why not go further and integrate perf-cap non-human CGI characters into the film as well? In the case of "TinTin" they are spending huge, massive amounts of money to create CGI environments that could be filmed much less expensively as real, practical sets. The reason Indiana Jones worked so well is that it was shot with real humans and real stuntpeople in real environments. A CGI Indiana Jones would SUCK.

 

[Erich Ocean]

Just as I suspected, reviewers are slamming the film, mostly for its use of performance capture CGI rather than real human actors.

IMO, at this point, CGI performance cap should be used for non-human characters such as aliens, animals, monsters, etc. Humans should play humans.

So, I have a little experience in this area (heh heh heh). I just wanted to correct a terminology issue, in that CGI humans today are performance animated, not performance captured. It addition, only the body movement is performance animated; the face is actually hand animated based on reference footage, with an initial assist from facial tracking markers. The final CGI facial animation is supposed to reflect the performance of the actor, vs. what Pixar does where the animator creates the CGI performance out of whole cloth.

True performance capture digitally captures a performance in 3D, and then plays it back. Performance animation captures parts of a performance (e.g. tracking markers on a body) and uses the captured parts to animated a different character's 3D model. (It's still performance animation when the other 3D model looks "the same" as the original actor if tracking markers are used to transfer the animation.) The partial transfer of the performance, where the tracking markers are used to drive the CGI animation, is why human CGI doesn't look quite right.

I'd very surprised if any of you have seen performance capture of a human done, especially the face. At my company Fohr, that's one of the technologies we've developed, and it's unbelievably amazing and (IMO at least) will revolutionize how films are shot in the future.


I totally agree that humans should play humans, and with the exact facial performance capture we do at Fohr, that's precisely what happens.

 

[Tom Lowe]

So, I have a little experience in this area (heh heh heh). I just wanted to correct a terminology issue, in that CGI humans today are performance animated, not performance captured. It addition, only the body movement is performance animated; the face is actually hand animated based on reference footage, with an initial assist from facial tracking markers. The final CGI facial animation is supposed to reflect the performance of the actor, vs. what Pixar does where the animator creates the CGI performance out of whole cloth.

True performance capture digitally captures a performance in 3D, and then plays it back. Performance animation captures parts of a performance (e.g. tracking markers on a body) and uses the captured parts to animated a different character's 3D model. (It's still performance animation when the other 3D model looks "the same" as the original actor if tracking markers are used to transfer the animation.) The partial transfer of the performance, where the tracking markers are used to drive the CGI animation, is why human CGI doesn't look quite right.

I'd very surprised if any of you have seen performance capture of a human done, especially the face.

I'm pretty sure 99% of us here have seen it, in the behind-the-scenes videos of the making of AVATAR. The same performance capture techniques were use for TINTIN I believe.

 

[Erik Bien]

I'd very surprised if any of you have seen performance capture of a human done, especially the face.

I don't know precisely where an expert would place it on the capture — animation continuum, but Tron Legacy kind of tried this and IMHO fell straight to the bottom of uncanny valley. Despite being a relatively recent, big budget film set mostly in 'synthetic environments,' and with no shortage of visual references for what Jeff Bridges looked like as a young man, the Clu character was about as convincing as a kid with his face shot full of Botox wearing a rubber mask.

In that case, looking like a character from a first-person shooter game kind-of, sort-of worked for the story, but I personally found it distracting enough to interfere with my suspension of disbelief, and I couldn't empathize with the character. It seems to me just as the human mind enjoys 'anthropomorphizing' obviously non-human animated characters, it also nags when presented with near-humans that something "isn't quite right."

 

[Erich Ocean]

I'm pretty sure 99% of us here have seen it, in the behind-the-scenes videos of the making of AVATAR. The same performance capture techniques were use for TINTIN I believe.

I'm fully aware of how Weta does things. Avatar, TinTin and Rise of the Planet of the Apes were all done with facial performance animation + hand animation based on reference footage, as I explained in my post. Unless you're privy to R&D being done under NDA, you've never seen actual facial performance capture. It's a totally different beast (although the capture hardware looks similar, except there are no "dots" on the face).

To respond to the next poster, the problems you saw in Tron were either (a) deliberate, or (b) caused by poor hand animation. All CGI faces for "hero" characters are hand animated in feature films today, full stop. I agree that the facial animation was weird, and it also took me out of the action.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Tron was a real head scratcher when you watch the behind the scenes video. Jeff bridges' performance and the animation are so completely different that no animation sup should have let the shots out of the door. One can only assume that they got hammered on budget/schedule and just had to turn out half-finished shots.

Alternately, Planet of the Apes delivered spectacular animation. How much was hand finessed vs how much is just the product of Weta's more refined performance capture pipeline would have to be a discussion driven by those who actually worked on it. But I don't think it's a case of "people" vs "almost-people" so much as time and attention to detail.

And as always we have Davie Jones which is still the high water mark (which is somewhat ironic since ILM is one of the last companies I think of when it comes to quality character animation, something they've really turned around as of late e.g. Rango.).

 

[Luc Bouvrette]

I was raised on Tintin. Had the whole album collection, must have read them at least 20 times each (still do). Saw the 60s animated version (nice effort, considering the period), even read the psychoanalytical review of Hergé's work (he was into Carl Jung) where male nose size is pretty much proportionate to the character's *ahem* masculinity and where Castafiore / castration go hand in hand.

I'm no spring chicken but when I saw that trailer I had the biggest grin I had in years (except of course when I learned Scarlet was coming out N3). From the reviews I read the script is very tight and doesn't miss a beat, and from the trailer it seems like THE version I've been waiting for (like Nolan's Batman). The colors are fantastic and I like the balance of natural looking motion capture and cartoonish dynamics. It fits the original books very well, where characters weren't THAT unnatural looking to begin with (such as in Asterix, where everything feels more like a caricature - limbs stretched beyond natural, over the top expressions, etc.). Just enough elasticity, the right palette, bunch of action and lots of humor. Exudes quality and looks fantastic.