The Passing of a Great Studio
Posted August 9th, 2011 - Most visitors to this site will already be aware that our studio, ImageMovers Digital, was shut down last year by Disney; the fallout of core changes to the upper management of our parent studio and a shifting vision for where Disney wanted to focus its resources. I've been delinquent in updating this site, as I turned my attention to other work, but wanted to acknowledge this change, and offer a little insight into what I believe was a rare and great creative effort.
The team at ImageMovers Digital was exceptionally talented; and for our part, was making tremendous headway in our efforts to raise the art of performance capture to a level that did full justice to the actor's work we sought to bring into the digital realm.
Despite the misguided assumptions of some critics, our mission had nothing to do with shortcuts–if anything is was a more difficult path. It was about the marriage of great acting and skilled animation, and the visual freedom of shooting within digital worlds. While most will never know the strides we made in this arena, we were in fact building and refining new methods from scratch. We payed close attention to the work of those who had pioneered this art form before us, building on what worked and rethinking what we believed had fallen short.
We knew we could do this better than what had come before, and aimed our efforts at preserving the actor's art (in the transition from actor to character space), while working to enable the animators in their ability to help this process succed. Key was our understanding that technology was only a stepping stone on a journey that only an artist's craftsmanship could complete.
I am unbelievably proud of the work that our teams succeeded in creating, and equally saddened that our work was cut short before we could show the world the full promise of our efforts. I remain forever grateful to Robert Zemeckis, Steve Starkey, Jack Rapke and Doug Chiang for inviting me along on this adventure and allowing me to contribute.
-GM
