The first actor cast for ‘Ted’, coming to theaters on June 29, was the same one helming the film. Doing quadruple duty on set, director Seth MacFarlane realized the character of Ted through the combination of the vocal and physical performance. This was coordinated by MacFarlane wearing a motion-capture suit and the postproduction work of the visual effects team headed by VFX producer Jenny Fulle of The Creative-Cartel and VFX supervisor Blair Clark.

MacFarlane explains the process: “It was necessary to have the suit there every day and for me to do a lot of the directing work with it on. So it had to be something that was comfortable. [Producer] Jason Clark found this company that had a unique technology called Moven, and there are straps that go over your everyday clothes. There were days when I had to have it on the entire day, so it had to be something that was going to capture the data that we needed but wasn’t going to be constrictive or distracting.”

The filmmakers’ primary focus was to give each scene the feel of two live actors working in the same environment. Often the voices for CG characters have to be done weeks before or weeks after the scene is shot, and the result is that it doesn’t quite connect with the actors who are on screen. “To get spontaneity, Seth was on the set in his suit working directly with the actors so it’s not dubbed over later,” explains producer John Jacobs. “It’s like a live performance between him and the other actors. He was able to trade riffs with Mark [Wahlberg] or Mila [Kunis] or Joel [McHale]. It makes a big difference, especially for comedy and for the improv that occurs during filming.”

“In a perfect world, the performance of Ted is the same as everyone else’s performance,” states MacFarlane. “It’s the same level of reality. ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ is a great film and many of the techniques utilized in that movie are utilized in this one, but we didn’t want to create the scenario in which there are the people and there are the cartoons. We wanted them all to be people, one of whom happens to have the body of a teddy bear. The trick was to treat Ted the same way as we treated everyone else. We avoided anything that would remind you that he’s just not another person, like having anyone have to lift him up to get to a high place.

“The guy I look to as the epitome of doing that right was Jim Henson,” continues the director. “The Muppets were real people; in that world it was normal for Muppets to be walking around. In ‘The Great Muppet Caper’, Kermit and Fozzie work at a newspaper and Jack Warden is their boss. They have the same relationship that newspapermen and their boss have in any movie, they just happen to be puppets. That was what we wanted.”

Producer Scott Stuber agrees with his director. He says: “The movie doesn’t work if you don’t believe that bear is real and has a personality and dimension next to John. That was the big overcome. So once that worked, we knew that movie would work. Seth spent a lot of time on the animation, on the reality of the voice and on the reality of the movements. That helped all of the actors who worked against Ted.”

So what was the inspiration for Ted’s voice? “I’m from New England,” MacFarlane notes, “and a lot of my family is from the Boston area so I grew up with plenty of Bostonians and Rhode Islanders. Ted’s voice is a melting pot of voices, but deliberately more real sounding than, say, Peter’s, Brian’s or Stewie’s in “Family Guy.””

When Ted is a young talking cub, he is played by actor Zane Cowans, who also plays the chief bully that gives young John such a hard time early in the film. What was good for MacFarlane was good for the young actor, and Cowans also performed the dialogue live while strapped into the Moven suit.

Image Courtesy of  Ted

The article Seth MacFarlane Gets ‘Moven’, Suits Up for ‘Ted’ appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Most first-time director’s efforts are not complicated by performing in their film or coordinating the appearance of a character that would be computer generated and layered in during postproduction. But director of new comedy ‘Ted’, Seth MacFarlane, did not find the added tasks especially daunting. “I come from 15 years of animation, so there was a preexisting comfort level,” he notes. “Yes, the CG-3D animation is a little different from my background in 2D animation, so there was a bit of a learning curve at first, but it was pleasantly surprising how easy it was to turn the dial and adapt my brain to that kind of thinking.

“I’ve got a phenomenal team that was unbelievably innovative and continued to be innovative into postproduction,” he continues. “We’ve asked them to do something that in a comedy is relatively untried: Forget everything you know about Pixar or DreamWorks-style animation, and make this character move with human gestures the same as everyone else—not a lot of squash and stretch, not a lot of cartoony stylizing in the actions.”

Strapped into his Moven suit (motion capture technology) just off set, MacFarlane performed Ted’s dialogue and gesticulations in scenes between the bear and the other main characters. “But there are many cases that the gestures were not and could not be mine,” the director notes, “because when all the big action is taking place, it’s impractical to do that on a mo-cap stage; you have to animate it. Since a lot of Ted is mo-cap that incorporates my gestures, the challenge for the VFX team was to make everything seem just as realistic. It’s the hardest thing in the world for animators to play it subtle and play it real. I’ve spent years trying to get my guys at “Family Guy” to get there, and when you add the 3D element, it’s a whole other animal. I was very comfortable with their talent and their ability to pull this off, and they were enthusiastic about it.”

Producer Jason Clark describes how the bear was filmed and ultimately created for the screen: “Since Ted doesn’t actually show up until postproduction when we rendered him, we had to create a series of ‘passes’ as we filmed each scene to record the information. First, we did a ‘stuffy pass,’ which required placing a stuffed bear in Ted’s position in a scene to give the actors an indication of where the bear would be. This helped them to understand what their characters are seeing and where their eye line should be.

“After that, we recorded our ‘eyeline pass,’ placing into the scene an eyeline reference tool [basically a stick with two dots representing Ted’s eyes] so the actors would look at the correct place where Ted would eventually be rendered,” the producer continues. “At that time, Seth was off camera in a Moven suit that tracked his body movements by transmitting, via radio frequencies, the location of each of the sensors placed on him, instead of requiring a volume of cameras to film it. He was miked traditionally, and his voice was recorded in the same space and time as the actors so that the result was authentic and immediate and dialogue could overlap.”

Clark describes how a third on-set “pass” was filmed with Creative-Cartel’s Civetta camera. He shares: “It’s a new technology that allows you to take 360-degree photographs of the set and create a digital reference of the lighting scheme and 3D geography around you. We used that intensely on every shot in which the bear appears. It’s a two-minute recording of the actorless set that allowed us to obtain a record for the teams of animators creating the bear’s performance to have as a reference of the lighting in the scene. This allowed them to create seamless lighting on the bear.”

This allowed Ted to “physically” interact with the environment. For example, if MacFarlane needed Ted to sit on the couch, the pillows were depressed. If he needed the bear to run across a bed, they created depressions in the bedclothes where his footsteps would go. This interactive environment created less separation between the CG character and the live-action role.

Production designer Stephen Lineweaver was also tasked with reinforcing the notion that Ted is just like everybody else in his world. He emphasizes that carried over into the set design: “One thing that we were conscious of was organically building different levels for Ted to be able to appear at others’ heights at any given point—unless he’s supposed to be imposed upon by somebody, then he was on the floor. In order for him to appear on the same level, should Seth want to film a two-shot with another character, there were nooks and crannies in the apartment to which he can climb. That was an interesting design problem that I hadn’t dealt with before.”

Naturally, MacFarlane’s actors found sharing the screen with a bear that wasn’t there to be a challenge. Shares Mark Wahlberg, who had to train for weeks with a stuntman to capture the moves needed in his motel fight with Ted: “It took a little while to get used to, but once we got into the swing of things, I started feeling very comfortable with the idea of just acting opposite the stuffed bear or the little stick with the eyes on it. Of course, having Seth in the room doing the voice was also very helpful.”

“You act against nothing,” echoes Mila Kunis. “If you’re lucky, the first take you get a stuffy ‘pass,’ but then they pull the stuffy away and you’re literally acting against air.”

“It’s just you with a stand,” adds Giovanni Ribisi. “There is a fascination with the idea of making a movie almost in the way of doing theater, where it’s just you using your imagination.”

Image Courtesy of  Ted

The article ‘Acting Against Nothing’ – Making ‘Ted’ Come Alive appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.