Disney's A Christmas Carol

Over Thanksgiving break I watched the movie, Disney's A Christmas Carol, for the first time. I thought is was very interesting how they took real actors like Jim Carrey and turned him into animation. This process is called Motion Capture or MoCap. I wanted to learn more on how they made these actors look so animated but real at the same time. Plus Jim Carrey plays multiple characters and you can't even tell when you watch it. This is a very fascinating process. It must be challenging for the actors to act this way because MoCap has each actor wear multiple dots on their face to get the motion and you're not in the real setting. I posted a few videos below with a little inside scoop on how this movie was made.





I also read this article on the movie about the making of the animation and it had a video that went along with it. You can click on the link above to go to the page and watch the video.

Pat O'Neill

If you happen to be in LA, one of the things you should check out is the calendar of events of the Academy. After all what else is there in LA?

For example, in a couple of days Pat O'Neill, an experimental filmmaker and optical effects artist whose first 35mm feature, "Water and Power," won a Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990 will screen a restored print and hold an onstage conversation.

O'Neill, a graduate of UCLA (and later a teacher at CalArts), makes extensive use of optical printing, time lapse, motion control and other techniques, interweaving these materials into complex, sometimes humorous and surrealist montages.

He has worked extensively in the feature film industry, on such films as "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), "Dragonslayer" (1981), "Return of the Jedi" (1983), "RoboCop" (1987), "Dances With Wolves" (1990), "Tank Girl" (1995) and "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" (1997) as an optical effects artist/technician.

This is a snippet of "Water and Power," which was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2008. Remember it is an optical print process, pre-digital.