Tony de Peltrie

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Movie
Original title Tony de Peltrie
Country of production Canada
original language English
Publishing year 1985
length 8 minutes
Rod
Director Pierre Lachapelle ,
Philippe Bergeron ,
Pierre Robidoux ,
Daniel Langlois
production Pierre Lachapelle
music Marie Bastien

Tony de Peltrie is a Canadian computer animation film from 1985. The short film shows the first computer- animated human character in which emotions were represented by facial expressions and gestures , thus addressing the feelings of the viewer. The film was produced from 1982 at the French-speaking University of Montreal . The four members of the team, Pierre Lachapelle (also production), Philippe Bergeron, Pierre Robidoux and Daniel Langlois, are named equally as directors .

action

Philippe Bergeron described the character animation with the words: “ (...) Tony de Peltrie, about a piano player who is recollecting his glory days (...) Tony is not all that life-like in appearance, but the animation is so realistic that by the end of the short, you are really feeling for him. "

“ (…) Tony de Peltrie is a pianist who remembers his glory days (…) Tony is not that lifelike in appearance, but the animation is so realistic that at the end of the short story you really feel empathy for him. "

The film portrays the last moments of his career from the perspective of the pianist. Now left alone and dreaming nostalgically, Tony lets the past come back to life in his own way before he dissolves. The palette of his feelings ranges from melancholy to happy memories to the sad end .

production

The four co-directors were young programmers and created the computer animation themselves. Daniel Langlois trained as a designer and computer animator for films and was an artist and programmer on the team.

The face and the body were shaped by Langlois as clay models and re-modeled according to the desired emotional expression. Each time the face was given a new network of black lines with control points that were necessary for animation .

For software development and interactive creation, the team worked with the 3-D interactive graphics program TAARNA and the mainframe computers CDC CYBER 835, 855. The animation film is 8 minutes long. It took five minutes to compute an image with the mainframe . A RASTER TECHNOLOGIES ONE / 25S screen with a card of 24, which had a palette of 16 million color tones, was the work monitor. The image resolution of the monitor was 512 × 512 points. The images were calculated with a resolution that was four times higher so that there was no stair-step effect . A GRADICON digitizer was used to convert the face and body from analog to digital. A BOLEX 16 mm and an ANIMATION OXBERRY 35 mm camera were used for the test and film recordings.

publication

Philippe Bergeron and Pierre Lachapelle presented the film for the first time at the 12th SIGGRAPH Film & Video Show in San Francisco in July 1985. Bergeron gave the talk Controlling Facial Expressions and Body Movements in the Computer-Generated Animated Short Tony De Peltrie at the conference .

reception

Critics and audiences alike loved the film Tony de Peltrie . He has received over 20 awards worldwide and has appeared in hundreds of magazines. The week after the screening in San Francisco, Time Magazine closed a two-page article about the festival by saying:

"But the biggest ovations last week were reserved for Tony de Peltrie. Created by a design team from the University of Montreal, it depicts a once famous musician, tickling the keys and tapping his white leather shoes to the beat of his memories. De Peltrie looks and acts human; His fingers and facial expressions are soft, lifelike and wonderfully appealing. In creating De Peltrie, the Montreal team may have achieved a breakthrough: a digitized character with whom a human audience can identify. "

- Phillip Elmer-DeWitt : Time Magazine, August 5, 1985

“But the biggest ovation of the past week was Tony de Peltrie. Created by a design team from the University of Montreal, it shows a once famous musician caressing the keys and tapping to the beat of his memories in his white leather shoes. De Peltrie looks and acts human; his fingers and facial expressions are soft, lifelike and wonderfully appealing. With the creation of De Peltrie, the Montreal team may have achieved a breakthrough: a digitized character that a human audience can identify with. "

- Phillip Elmer-DeWitt : Time Magazine, August 5, 1985

Economic success

Typically, the success of a film is measured in dollars that are paid for by the audience at the box office. The film, which was not produced for profit at the box office, showed its success a few years later. The film is one of the factors that made Montreal one of the world's centers of the computer game industry .

The animated film Tony de Peltrie was created with mainframe computers. At that time it was still very time-consuming because every change had to be programmed again. In a video in 2012, Philippe Bergeron told how arduous and frustrating this work was. He talks about the fact that Daniel Langlois saw it that way and already spoke of wanting to change that. After the completion of the film, Langlois therefore programmed a new program together with two programmers and founded the company Softimage in Montreal, Quebec. The Softimage | 3D program and its further developments advanced to become an industry standard in the 1990s.

George Borshukov, responsible for the special effects of the film Matrix , said: “ Without SOFTIMAGE | 3D and mental ray, specifically, those phenomenal bullet time backgrounds just wouldn't have been possible. "(Translation:" Without SOFTIMAGE | 3D and Mental Ray, especially those phenomenal Bullet Time backgrounds would simply not have been possible. ")

The special effects for blockbusters like Jurassic Park or Matrix and many other films were produced with it. Manufacturers of computer games also use and continue to use Softimage programs. One of the reasons for Ubisoft to establish its North American headquarters in Montreal in 1997 was that Softimage was based in the city and French and English are spoken there. Ubisoft Montreal started in 1997 with 50 employees and in 2015 is the world's largest studio for the development and production of computer games. In 2014 more than 2,700 people were employed. In mid-2015, a list of 52 small and large companies in Montreal that work in the field of PC games can be found on gamedevmap . Since then, the city of Montreal has benefited from the small animated film Tony de Peltrie by the Francophone Quebecers team .

Awards (selection)

Tony de Peltrie won several international awards and prizes:

  • 1985: Special Mention for Technical Innovation , International Film Festival, Canada.
  • 1985: Grand Prize for Animation , Eurographics, France .
  • 1985: First Prize Computer Animation , First Los Angeles Animation Celebration, USA .
  • 1985: First Prize OG'85 Supreme Award , On Live International Computer, Animation Film Festival, England .
  • 1985: First Prize , SIGGRAPH, International Computer Graphics Association, Video Gala, USA.
  • 1986: Prix ​​Pixel-INA , Imagina, Monaco .
  • 1997: Scientific and Engineering Award , Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, USA.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Philippe Bergeron, Pierre Robidoux, Pierre Lachapelle and Daniel Langlois: Tony de Peltrie (1985) , on the website The Daniel Langlois Foundation: Image du Futur collection .
  2. ↑ a b Infographie et cinéma numérique , on the website of the Faculté des arts et des sciences. Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationelle of the Université de Montreal (PDF 437 KB).
  3. ↑ a b c Canada switch point in the network (catalog), Network Art. Barke Verlag, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-926167-00-9 , p. 35.
  4. ↑ a b c d e ICE, scripting and other tech stuff about Softimage , on the eX-SI website .
  5. ^ Philippe Bergeron: Controlling facial expressions and body movements in the computer-generated animated short Tony de Peltrie. ( Memento of the original from April 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Tutorial for SIGGRAPH 1985 (PDF 69 KB). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / design.osu.edu
  6. ↑ CDC-CYBER 170. Models 825, 835, and 855. Computer Systems General Description. Control Data Corporation , July 1982 (PDF 20, 71 MB).
  7. ^ David Sturman: The State of Computer Animation. In: ACM SIGGRAPH. Volume 32, No. 1 (February 1998).
  8. ↑ Tony Sito: Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation. In: Time Magazine. ISBN 978-0-262-01909-5 , p. 69.
  9. ↑ Adventures in Animation 3D. Creating the Stars of Tomorrow.
  10. ↑ Philippe Bergeron on Animating "Tony de Peltrie" on YouTube on May 21, 2012 found.
  11. ^ Daniel Langlois. Biography on the website of the Fondation Daniel Langlois pour l'art, la science et la technologie .
  12. ↑ Manex shines in "The Matrix".
  13. ^ Mathew Kumar: The French-Canadian Connection. A Q&A with Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft Montreal. In: Gamasutra .
  14. ^ Video Game Companies, Montreal
  15. ↑ Sylvianne Pilon and Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay: The Geography of cluster: The Case of the video games cluster in Montreal and Los Angeles. In: Urban Studies 2015.