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GDC 2003 Visual Arts Keynote: Bill Kroyer's "Fooling All of the People All of the Time" Rhythm & Hues Studios' Bill Kroyer delivered the Visual Arts keynote address Friday afternoon to a packed room of artists and animators at the Game Developers Conference. As senior animation director at Rhythm & Hues, Kroyer has recently been involved in such projects as the Scooby Doo movie, Cats & Dogs, and many well-known TV spots. Before joining Rhythm & Hues, Kroyer cut his chops doing classical animation at Disney, where he first made the leap to the then-brand-new field of computer animation with the 1982 cyber paean Tron, the very mention of which drew gleeful whoops from the crowd in attendance. Kroyer's presentation centered around the relationship between illusion and believability as it applies to computer-generated animation, with his firm belief that it is indeed possible to fool all of the people all of the time through CG effects; in fact, we're pretty much already there. "Film has always been the art of make-believe," he said. With CG, "we can make you believe anything." With the unrelenting pace of advancement in CG effects and animation, "the line between real and imaginary has not been blurred, it has been erased." Given that Kroyer was addressing a largely visual crowd, of course his presentation was liberally appointed with videos to illustrate some of the latest CG film effects, many of which could have escaped the notice of even this audience's critical eyes as being CG, such as several sequences from The Sum of All Fears showing CG smoke effects, complex vehicles, fluid, and even entire scenes that effortlessly suggested reality. Animating nonliving things is one matter, but a huge challenge for animators and CG artists remains creating realistic humans and other believable life forms - the hardest part of fooling all of the people all of the time. Kroyer reminded the audience that animation is the art of movement. He cited Tron as an instance where the creators wanted to "remind you of something you'd never seen before," and indeed the Disney animators involved relied heavily on their classical animation training even for something seemingly so far removed from Snow White as Tron was. Kroyer then discussed dimensionality in animating characters, the new challenges that animators faced when bringing 2D animation techniques and applying them to 3D characters. Still the charge is the same: animators must create characters that the audience both believes in and cares about. The complexity of building these characters, in terms of realistically modeling and animating bones, muscles, skin, hair and fur, and props, all moving differently but in dependent ways, requires new ways of considering what realism looks like. "Sometimes you have to exaggerate reality to make it look real," Kroyer said, perhaps not unlike stage actors exaggerating expressions and gestures for the people in the back row of the theater. Kroyer concluded his presentation by sharing his own set of secrets for success for the audience, which included these tips:
Kroyer's
final advice to the creative-minded crowd was to share advice he had learned
and used over the years: "Do what pleases you." He then
added his own corollary: "Do what pleases you; and if it doesn't
please the audience, find another profession." Because ultimately
all art is defined by that interaction between artist and audience - in
the entertainment business, be it film or games, it's what the audience
comes for, and is what will keep them coming back.
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