Recently I’ve been watching lots of Nickelodeon with my daughter (it’s the holidays, right?) and seeing frequent commercials for an upcoming CG movie called ‘Rango’, starring Johnny Depp.  The commercials show an unusual blend of live action and CG, not the usual actor in a voice-recording booth but not quite full motion capture of Avatar either.  Over at the LATimes, they have an article about how this new breed of CG films is emerging that still using full CG animation with a heavy live-action influence under the expertise of traditional filmmakers.

The team spent hours watching spaghetti westerns such as “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” to absorb director Sergio Leone’s style, including how he filmed campfire and desert scenes. Verbinski revisited the town in Mexico, Real de Catorce, where he filmed “The Mexican” for ideas on how the fictional town of Dirt should look.

Knoll and his team then created a three-dimensional computer model of Dirt  and used a motion-capture stage at ILM that was equipped with a monitor called a virtual camera that allowed Verbinski to view the town from different angles and then frame the best shots and angles to guide the animators. “We were using a lot of the same visual shorthand that we developed during the ‘Pirates’ pictures,” Knoll said.

My big question is still “Why is it CG?”  If all of the scenes were physically acted by Depp et. al, then why do it in CG instead of making a Live Action movie?  I guess we’ll have to wait until March to find out.

via Lines blurring between animated, live action films – latimes.com.

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