Kevin Lima Quotes

When you're doing voice work, you're in a bubble where you just think about the story and the words. They record you on video while you're doing the voice work, so they capture how your face is moving and the gestures you make.

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.

When Tim and I first discussed the part in 2003, he told me, 'I'd love for you to play five Oompas.' But five Oompas quickly turned into 165 - and they're not computerized; I did each one individually myself.

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.

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

It's a different way of getting across an emotion. You're trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.

Games are another place to find work, not only the voice stuff but in the motion capture stuff. It's exciting work.

When you do a voice in an animated film, you don't see the finished product at all. You're not animating. You're not doing the voice on the finished product. You're doing the voice long before.

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it.

You have to always physicalize, when you do animation recording. Otherwise, you won't get the performance right.

And because performing for a game involves real acting. The way they create a game is very similar now to how they create a film. I've always wanted to stretch my acting skills, and the timing being what it is, I couldn't say no.

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?

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

That's the thing with animated films - I often feel that puppets get the better parts compared to us normal actresses.

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.

Acting is a plum gig, and then animation is an even more plum gig.

When you are in a live-action movie, you have so many more options to express yourself. You can use your body and your gestures and facial expressions. When you are doing an animated movie, you really only have your voice.

'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.

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.

The difference between 'Resident Evil: Damnation' and 'Resident Evil 6' is in 'Resident Evil 6' we did facial mo-cap, along with the voice over. We had these little reflectors glued to our faces and these head pieces in this room filled with light with about 40 cameras.

One of the things that motion capture and/or voice acting does is allow you to continue your career, change it, or bring a new aspect to it.

I won't say which one, but one shot on 'Kubo' took two months to get the expression right. It's ridiculous on some level.

The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

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!"

I did the voice of Cyclops on 'Shrek the Third'. I don't know how I got that. They said they wanted a Michael Chiklis type, and apparently it came down to me and Michael Chiklis, so how they gave it to me, I don't know.