Peter Jackson Quotes

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

Motion capture is amazing. I prefer it. You wear a 'Power Ranger'-esque suit, you have tape balls on you, you have 60 cameras around you capturing your every movement and there's no hair, no makeup.

Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?

I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.

I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.

Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.

There was actually a camera on your face. I don't know so much about the animation process but the camera was in our face so it could get expressions from our faces that would eventually arrive on the gnomes. It almost felt like you were cheating at times because it was a wee bit too much fun. You were in that box on your own. Kelly [Asbury] was in Toronto, I was in LA, so I was just on my own. I thought: "I can't be getting paid for this as well!"

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

Performance capture is a tool that young actors will need in the next 10, 20 years. It's on the increase, as you say. It's not going away.

What we do sometimes when we're in the sessions recording the dialogue is we'll set up a video camera and we'll video the whole session. So then the animator, if he wants, can draw upon those tapes to pull expressions, mouth shapes, maybe some gesturing that happens.

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

I'm sticking my tongue out in scenes to try to make that work in 3D. I'm thinking I'll try to get my tongue all the way out to the second row of the audience.

I learned how to do stop-frame animation and I experimented with that a lot, and pretty much that was my mode of animating through high school.

For this game, we shot it just like it as if it was a film so there wasn't that much different from doing a film other than some technical things for the costume that had to be done so they could transfer the footage later and make it look animated.

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

It's hard, the green screen; it's a different way of working.

When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.

I was molded, spent my time underneath a lot of goo. And then the bits and pieces were sculpted. It took probably 10 days to create each character after all those camera tests.

I remember feeling that technology was like trying to draw with your foot. In a ski boot. It was the most indirect way to work imaginable, but the potential had us all excited. I started in stop motion.