Ashley Jensen Quotes

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.

Everybody thinks performance capture is about thrashing around and doing a lots of movement, but it's actually about being able to contain and think and be believed in a close-up, as much as anything else.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

Animated program was definitely a different process but it was fun though, it had elements of doing my podcast where we were all in a booth with microphones joking around and stuff. It was definitely a fun process.

I love doing voice-overs; I wish I could do more of them. It's a lot of fun to see how they take the voice and animate it and try to capture your own expressions and features. It's fascinating.

Motion-capture is not a genre. Motion-capture is a tool and technique and what we tried to do was to really use both motion-capture and traditional animation to build a system.

Nothing's occurring in animation - you manufacture everything.

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.

What stop-motion does best is present real objects magically brought to life in a very imperfect situation; the hand of the artist is there, the electricity of someone touching, massaging and torturing themselves to get life out of an inanimate object.

I had a lot of fun with my costume designer.

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.

My respect for animation has gone way up. It's a truckload of work. I have to sit with my animators the same way I'd sit with my actors and cast them.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

As an actor, I always wondered what it would be like to watch an animated character with your voice behind it and see if it seems seamless or if it seems like your voice is isolated from the animation.

One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.

With my own cartoon, it was just me being goofy by myself, but when it comes to an animated film, you're working with 45 animators and assistant animators. It's a whole different ballgame.

Mo-cap work is less technical than you'd expect. Once you have it all set up you're free to do the whole scene in one take rather than doing a lot of different shots and different takes like you do in a movie. You've got that one go at it and you've got a lot of freedom. You can really express yourself - more like doing theatre than doing a movie.

The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

'Resident Evil: Damnation' was physically mo-capped and recorded with the mo-cap actors first, so there wasn't a whole lot of flexibility with timing, so it was more stringent. We had to go in individually.

The amazing thing about motion capture is everything translates. Your slightest emotions translate through the suit and into the character.

Making the visuals photo-realistic lets us do things we were never able to do before. The voice acting, the facial expressions, are all that much deeper.