ALIENS AMONG US.(Editorial)

Animators create compelling, realistic characters that don't steal the spotlight

Despite the powerful capabilities of today's modeling and animation tools, character animation is still a perplexing proposition. Sometimes, balancing the needs of a project with a desire to create the most believable character performance possible can be even more difficult. Such was the case with "Intelligent Life," a commercial post-produced by Quiet Man in New York City for the K'nex toy company.

"Animating the faces of CG characters is still a huge challenge" says David Shirk, lead animator at Quiet Man. "But for this project, even more difficult was fulfilling the ad agency's and client's desire for characters that were interesting but not so interesting that they upstaged the toy being advertised."

To overcome the facial animation undertaking, the team used alterEGO, a new facial animation plug-in from face2face Animation. Handling the directive put forth by the ad agency, however, required a certain level of perseverance. "Animators always want to make their work look as cool as possible" Shirk says. "In this instance we had to restrain ourselves and make sure we served the purposes of the spot."

In the commercial, which began airing recently as 15- and 30-second spots throughout the US and the UK, two 3D computer-generated aliens are sent to Earth to search for signs of intelligent life. When they arrive, they ignore the children they encounter and concentrate instead on a robotic toy the children are playing with. The toy, which can be programmed to exhibit different behaviors, such as those of a guard dog or a battle robot, was built with the K'nex plastic blocks advertised in the spot. Everything in the spot is live action, except for the two CG aliens.

According to Shirk, the client requested that the aliens have human qualities. "They didn't want the characters to look whimsical. They wanted them to look sophisticated in terms of the personality they put forth," Shirk says. "They felt this would best be conveyed if they were your basic bipedal, almost human-in-a-suit characters."

Alien Speak