Tony de Peltrie
| Tony de Peltrie | |
|---|---|
| Directed by |
Pierre Lachapelle, Philippe Bergeron, Pierre Robidoux, Daniel Langlois |
| Produced by | Pierre Lachapelle |
| Music by | Marie Bastien |
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Release date
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Running time
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8 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
Tony de Peltrie is a Canadian computer-animated short film from 1985. The short shows the first animated human character to express emotion through facial expressions and body movements, which touched the feelings of the audience. The film was produced from 1982 to 1985 at the French-speaking University of Montreal, Quebec, and Canada.
The four team members, Pierre Lachapelle (including production), Philippe Bergeron, Pierre Robidoux and Daniel Langlois, are all credited as directors.
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.“
The film portrays the last part of Tony's career, as seen from his own perspective. Now alone and nostalgic, he recollects his past in a dreamlike state before it all fades away. The emotions of the story range in a melancholy way from joyful memories to the sad ending.
The four co-directors were young programmers and started the computer animation on their own. Daniel Langlois had trained as a designer and computer animator for movies and was an artist and programmer in the team. The face and body were sculpted by Langlois in clay and re-modeled according to the desired feeling of the expressions. Every time a new network of black lines with control points was drawn on the faces, which were required for the animation.
For the software development and interactive creation, the team worked with the 3-D interactive graphics program Taarna and the mainframe computers CDC CYBER 835, 855. To calculate an image with the mainframe computers then, took five minutes. The computer monitor was a GRID TECHNOLOGIES ONE / 25S screen with a 24er card that had a range of 16 million colors. The image resolution of the monitor was 512 x 512 pixels. The images were calculated with four times the resolution so that no staircase effect emerged. For conversion of the face and body from analog to digital, a GRADICON digitizer was used, and for the rehearsal and filming a Bolex 16 mm and an Animation Oxberry 35 mm camera.
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