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Seven years ago, writer-director Moshe Mahler became interested in using motion-capture technology to explore the world of Bill Shannon, a performance artist who was born with a degenerative hip condition. The result is a captivating animated short titled The Art of Weightlessness, which won the Best in Show prize at this year’s SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival.
“I have spent my career working at the intersection of research, production, art and tech,” says Mahler, an artist and teacher whose work has been featured in attractions at Disney Parks and Resorts, who once led the creative technology team at Disney Research and currently teaches at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. “Once I saw Bill’s performance art, I was immediately interested in collaborating with him. We eventually began discussing the evolution of his crutches, skateboarding and breakdancing, so a documentary format quickly became the target for the piece. I first captured the documentary footage and audio in 2017, and when I finished the film in 2023, my son pointed out that this film took his whole life to make!”
Mahler says he values how animators can make things move to best serve the story being told. “Bill makes incredible, large swooshing arcs with his crutches,” he explains. “So, initially, I was interested in doing something much more abstract, as homage to that specific principle of animation. But as we talked, I became more interested in the narrative aspects of his evolution, which also lent itself to fantastical and less literal imagery. So, the film features motion capture, handcrafted keyframe animation, roto, motion graphics, simulation and some hand-drawn elements. My goal was to tie the visual complexity to the evolution of Bill’s skill and his ability as a dancer, and animation presents the perfect medium to do this.”
Elements of Style
The short’s production pipeline used Maya, ZBrush, Houdini and Adobe’s Substance suite. “We also needed to create some custom pipelines around the motion-capture workflow to transfer the data to an animation-rig space,” says Mahler. “This allowed our animators to dial in the performance, clean up the data or create a handcrafted sequence from scratch using the same asset. We captured Bill’s movements at the Motion Capture Lab at Carnegie Mellon, which uses an optical-based Vicon system.”
According to the director, the production was quite modest. “I strongly believe in paying artists for their work, so I got some funding through my department, the Entertainment Technology Center, and applied for grants through the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry,” he adds. “Beyond myself, I had the help of 10 Carnegie Mellon students. This was extremely helpful in keeping the project moving forward over the six- to seven-year period, and I genuinely appreciate the talent and hard work our students brought to the project.”
The director is quick to mention the importance of the role of music, especially “A Drum Thing” by the John Coltrane Quartet. “This is a seven-minute piece of jazz that starts off with a fairly basic drum beat, but the drumming becomes more complex and impressive as the track progresses,” he explains. “At the beginning of the film, the colors are muted. The first time you see the crutches, they are alone, moving through white space. The soundtrack begins with a simple drum beat almost anyone could play. This simplicity matches Bill’s awkwardness on the crutches when he first uses them as a child. By the film’s end, Bill performs amazing breakdance moves on his crutches. The colors are vibrant. The drums are now as complex as Bill’s dancing and as skillful as his athleticism on his crutches, a rhythm that would take a lifetime to master. These elements came together in a way that I was really happy with, much to Bill’s credit, as well as our sound designer, Strollo Sound, and our drummer, Leland Scott Davis.”
When asked about his animation influences, Mahler brings up James Duesing. “Studying with him opened my eyes to animation’s possibilities as a medium,” he says. “I pay some homage to Jim in the sequence where Bill goes to the doctor as a child — the room constructs around Bill as he walks through the door. Jim was doing shots like this over 25 years ago, using 3D morphing of environments in films like Law of Averages and Tender Bodies.”
Seeing Chris Landreth’s award-winning short Ryan was another pivotal experience. “I remember watching Ryan at SIGGRAPH in 2004 and being blown away by its emotional impact,” he recalls. “Too often, we think of animation as a genre, not a medium. Ryan showed that animation is not only an expressive medium but also capable of serious documentary storytelling — which, of course, was influential in taking on this project.”
Now that The Art of Weightlessness is getting wider exposure, Mahler hopes his work will convey an important message to audiences. “We all have challenges or adversity in life, some more serious than others, but we all have challenges nonetheless,” he says. “Bill’s circumstances led to his evolution, which resulted in a very tangible and beautiful expression of art and movement. So, I hope audiences take away that this is not about overcoming adversity; there is no overcoming a degenerative hip condition, for example. But instead, understanding that we should strive to evolve throughout our lives.”
The Art of Weightlessness screens at SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theater this month. For more info, visit momahler.com. The film is currently available to watch in the ACM’s Digital Library.
