Meh, color me a cynical skeptic, but this reeks of innovation for innovation's sake, like a artist who paints photorealistic portraits using only the bodily fluids of the subject,
Ok, got to say that this is honestly so wild and harsh a take to have, actually crazy (at least comparing it to using
bodily fluids, I mean what the fuck). Because;
i.e.: yeah, it's cool, but how have you actually moved the medium forward and/or improved it?
I mean, it frees up the, what I can only imagine as, incredibly taxing work of actually puppeting the face and allows the puppeteer to focus solely on moving the body of the puppet while the computer handles the tricky bit with the face.
EDIT: to clarify, it does indeed look cool, but how is it any better than what basic CGI has been giving us for decades? Just feels like a lot of thought and effort to arrive at "looks like CGI."
"looks like CGI"
Now, even I admit, that these were low fruit to whack, especially since CGI movies have always impressed me...when they're good (like The Incredibles/Wall-E, or even the latest Puss In Boots movie), but I still just like the little peaks behind the curtain to the man pulling all the levers in movies and things, you know? People taking the time to 2D animate something (like Klaus on Netflix), doing real stunts and effects in action movies, or even go full masochist on themselves and go full stop motion hand animated like Laika or Aardman Studios. Hell, even seeing film grain (real film grain) is still nice to me as a reminder that for all the advancements, this is still just a really long, tiny strip of still pictures moving really quickly over a light, because that's real (man-made) magic right there.
Because, honestly, at the end of the day, there really is a difference, however small, between computer generating something, and actually just filming a real thing doing something. I mean, go back and watch that first Iron Giant scene again, there's a moment where the puppeteer nods puppets head, and a little bit of it's mussy hair just naturally falls over one eyebrow, completely unplanned (the puppeteer may have set it up though with that little head scratch lead in though, but still, this is why they need their hands free to work the puppet)
And again,
that's a real object doing that, you can just, go and drive out to wherever this is and ask (I don't know, not my puppet, not my studio), and they can let you touch and hold it, and watch as it actually just...does that. It's the difference between all of Lucas' prequel/green-screen nonsense versus the actual puppets of Yoda or Grogu. But that's also kind of the problem, and something your post pretty much explains and why;
Holy crap, how come we haven't seen movies with this yet? Seems like it would be much faster and cheaper then 3d.
Because at the end of the day, it's still a puppet, for all the problems that entails. First of all, you need someone specifically trained to work puppets (or why even bother really), and then you still need to actually film the puppets, which means real, if small scale sets, that can both hide and even fit the puppeteer in such a way as to minimize post-production editing (it's why the above's first video is like that, I imagine that it's simply a quick black scale set with the puppeteer literally right behind the puppet with a sheet over them). This is even before that this specific tech is probably proprietary to the studio developing it. It's still a ton of time and effort, even with a computer running the face rig, and one most are not willing to bear the cost of.
www.wasteloop.org
