Footnote #15 - Motion Capture

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with a new podcast episode on the form and function of motion capture as mode of computerised performance in an era of digital mediation. For Episode 15, topics for this quickfire discussion include motion capture as a mode of digital puppetry and links to both the theatrical tradition of performing objects and the Rotoscope; discourses of control that feed into the creativity of ‘mo-cap’ technologies; industry narratives, labour hierarchies, and the question of who performs the digital image; ambivalent connections between voice and body in motion captured characters; and what happens when human physicality is transcribed via digital processing.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Suggested Readings

• Bell John. 2008. American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Mihailova, Mihaela. 2016. "Collaboration without Representation: Labor Issues in Motion and Performance Capture.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11, no. 1 (March): 40-58.

• Tillis, Steve. 1992. Towards an Aesthetics of the Puppet: Puppetry as Theatrical Art. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

• Tillis, Steven. 1999. “The Art of Puppetry in the Age of Media Production,” The Drama Review 43, no. 3, (Autumn): 182-195.