Aright, the first entry into the year Twenty-Ten! Hell yeah! This one is a tad "late" but that doesn't bother me in the slightest.

There actually was something that I wanted to put here though. In case you've been living under a rock for the past month and a half or so, Avatar has come out. And recently, it has become the most successful film of all time, bringing in close to $1.9 BILLION. That's and insane amount of money.

The main thing, though is that there has been debate about whether or not Avatar constitutes an animated movie or live action with heavy visual effects. James Cameron has made his position clear: Avatar is not animated. He believes that because actors did not just recite lines, that the actors had to actually act on screen, that it makes Avatar live-action. And I'm not saying he's wrong. By all means, he made the movie so his opinion definitely counts. But I don't agree with him. I believe that it could and probably will be classified as an animated movie. The visual effects could be argued as animated scenes. And if you look at the behind the scenes clips all over the internet, it's obvious that the performances were done on an open sound stage.

I had a very heated debate with a good friend of mine a week ago about this, him arguing for VFX and me for animation. And I got a good idea of what each side thinks.

Visual effects proponents argue that because the overall emotion and performance of the actors were taken, it's a live action movie. The bare performance was just enhanced (greatly) by the overlay of skin and background. The amount of detail taken from the actors as reference to render the movie breaks beyond what would be acceptable for animation. And, because an animator isn't interpreting the dialogue and providing their own actions, but must conform to the actions taken by the actors, there's no freedom for expression on the animator's part, if there was an animator and not a computer automatically generating these characters.

Animation people, on the other hand, are convinced that the visual overlay and effects rendered make it much more than a live action movie. The Na'avi and the backgrounds were rendered by computers, but someone had to be there to make sure the output of each computer was correct and calibrated to fit the director's needs. Avatar was made to be more realistic than cartoony and fantastical, so it would make sense that more reference points were taken and even that the exact movements of the actors taken as actions of their characters. The amount of things on costumes, on body, on creatures that needed to be imagined up make it more animation than live action. Also, the idea that this method of motion capture was used predominantly throughout the movie biases most into thinking it as a live action. In truth, this could be used as a resource for games, for other movies, or pretty much anything CGI related for only one scene or less.

Overall, I think that there's only the one example to nitpick over and analyze and so, no definitive conclusions can be reached. There needs to be more examples of the technology in many different genres and platforms for this technology to be called animation or visual effects. All this movie does at this point in time is blur the line between these two genres of film making.

Well that's all there is about that. On a personal note, I've been sick for the past week with a tickled throat and various other cold symptoms. Classes are good and hopefully, I'll like Computer Science more than I think I will. 'Til next time I feel like ranting about something.