Acting and Animation

There's a great write-up by Scott Squires at the Effects Corner about the current hoopla regarding performance capture, animation and acting in general.

The real process
Some actors talk or write about motion capture and 3D animation as ‘painting’ in the image. Painting? Really? That would make sense if you took a time machine back 100 years before computers and tried to explain it I suppose. But these days it makes as much sense as saying Michelangelo ‘doodled’ the David sculpture.

Short form: The performance of the actor is recorded and applied in some form to a Computer Graphic (CG) animated character.

Much much more can be read here.