Interview with Geoff Campbell - Creature Model Supervisor
The Three Stages of Modeling Work: “On Pirates 2, we had about 18 months from preproduction to the end of the show. With modeling there's kind of three ends. The beginning is in the preproduction stage. We're really just working with assets, creating models, working with painters, working with all the fine detail that goes onto these corroded characters with their sea life. Then we're transitioning into production where we're creating facial performance shapes for the animators. Because there was no facial motion capture, everything was done in, I guess you could say, a traditional CG sense which is hand sculpting in a computer every kind of possible face shape that were given to the animators. Then we're turning those over to the animators. In the last part of the show, we're working with keeping the animation on model. We'll go back and look at things and how to get better and tighter lip sync of the characters.
I guess the lip syncing is really the kind of key to the performance and the level of detail that we're going to that takes us away from when you're dealing with animation. Like Pixar animation, you're not dealing with live action so you just don't have to go to that degree that we're going to in trying to figure out how do we get this to look like what Bill Nighy's doing or how do we translate what Bill Nighy's doing with our character? Of course we have this no nose and the whole tentacle thing happening, but the good thing was that he was not that far away from human. It wasn't like he was some sort of elephant character. That would be hard to deal with."
Breaking Down the Facial Performance: “"In dealing with facial performance, I kind of break it down into three things. The first is the emotional state that has been communicated by the actor. What are the underlying muscles doing? We're not building any muscles with our model. We're just talking about the surface, but we need to know what's going on underneath. The second part is all about syncing up your ear and what you see with air flow, suppression of air flow and the air flow. Really thinking and getting down to that level of seeing if a character is saying a W sound, are they entirely stopping that air from going through? If the animation still has the mouth slightly open in O shape and you're hearing suppressed air, your eye is going to tell you that's fake. Something's wrong.
Another thing is when we're in this early stage of creating these characters, we're looking at the actors and we're looking at how we relate certain characteristics. We're building out these various things, but we're also trying to look at when we're looking at artwork, I guess the way I put it is we have to know that the artist is under the same kind of constraints we are. He might have created something in two hours and got it approved. It's important for us not to be literalists and take that and say, 'All right, I'm going to make this faithfully look like this piece of artwork.'"
On Coming Back for Pirates 3: “Well, certainly it's a lot easier to have a character [developed already]. It felt like we were just continuing. It was almost like, 'All right, now we're into shots.' We obviously didn't have to start with the character Davy Jones. There are still shapes here and there, we're getting requests for things that animators are saying, 'Well, I really need him to do this.' Somehow we didn't get to that on the second one, so we're creating new ones.”
