ABSTRACT
Full Animation versus Visual Effects In contemporary fi lmmaking, the line between an animation project and a visual effects project has become blurred. At one time distinctions could more reasonably be made. Visual effects could be described as animation done in support of live-action plates, whereas full animation could be described as an artifi cial, created world; or, put another way, visual effects is primarily about environments and noncharacter dynamics, whereas full animation is primarily about character dynamics. But consider, for example, the Star Wars prequels. Those fi lms have animated characters in nearly all of the shots and essentially all of the environments and noncharacter dynamics are also created digitally. A fi lm like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) takes this idea even farther. These fi lms are basically photorealistic animated fi lms, with live-action plates created in support of the animation. However, a simple defi nition falls short of the meaning: • A full animation project can simply be defi ned as a project
that has absolutely no live-action component whatsoever. This distinction separates the output of Pixar, Dreamworks,
and similar animation companies from what ILM, Weta, and similar visual effects facilities generally produce. But this is a formal distinction more than a functional one. Blue Sky’s fi lm Robots (2005) is 100% CG, whereas Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) is 99% CG (there are a few live-action shots), but both are universally regarded as animated features. James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is perhaps 90% CG and Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007) is 75% CG (approximately). Both are considered live-action (albeit VFX-heavy) features. But 75% CG versus 100% CG is not a very substantial difference in terms of CG footage on screen when it comes to doing the actual production work, considering that a
full CG feature is often shorter than a visual effects-driven feature, such as the 98-minute length of WALL-E (2008) compared to the 144-minute runtime for Transformers (2007). Of course, there are differences between the two. In cases where the CG work amounts to less than 100% of the project, a live-action set still exists, but the post-production difference for the animators, TDs, editors, compositors, etc. isn’t so great.
