Great points Kevin. It’s been many years since Grim passed away.

Regarding the answer to the question “… I had certain tricks to put the personality of the character across… a gesture, the raising of an eyebrow, a bit of acting… How do you do that sort of thing with your computer?,” I think the silence in the room was out of respect for Grim’s accomplishments, and I think the answer that was given was based on the technology available at that time (Grim died 21 years ago, in 1990, and R&H was only founded in 1987). His visit would have happened before there had ever been a fully animated CG character in a feature film, and ‘Tin Toy’ and ‘Luxo Jr.’ would have been the pinnacle of CG animated acting.

The answer today would be, “Well, Grim, we do it the same way you did. We observe people around us, we observe ourselves, we study great actors giving moving performances, and we consider the needs of the scene and the script and the storyboards. We debate our ideas with other animators, we draw thumbnails, and we get in front of a mirror or a video camera and we act it out. Out of that, we come up with some ideas, and we try to distrust the first ideas we get so that we come up with a gesture that is not only authentic and clear, but also interesting and new. And then we animate, and we observe our results, and often we throw the work out and animate it a few more times. When we’re happy with it, we show it to our supervisors and directors, and we often end up going through the whole process again, until we’re happy with it. The only difference in our process and your process is that you use a pencil to draw a series of poses that define a gesture, and we use a computer to pose our character frame-by-frame.”

If not, I’d love to hear if you know anything more about this production company.