Rendered by artists and actors

FILMMAKERS have been experimenting with blending live action and animation from the earliest days of cinema.

Winsor McKay scored a great success with his “Gertie the Dinosaur” silent animated shorts. And long before he met Mickey Mouse, the young Walt Disney produced a series of popular animated-live action “Alice” shorts in the 1920s.

“But it was very obvious to the audience there was something real and something not real up there on the screen,” says Andrew Maltz, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Science and Technology Council. “I think in those days you had to really rely on a suspension of disbelief in order for it to work. Today it is no different. You have to have a good story and good characters for it all to work, but you no longer have to really trust that the audience is going to take that extra leap, because of the technology.”

“The big thing technology has done over the last 10 years is that it has brought animation into worlds that one normally didn’t associate with animation,” says Barry Weiss, senior vice president of animation for Imageworks.

“Animation is an art form,” Weiss says. “It’s a tool, and because of technology it is used in the broad spectrum of filming. The concept of having a photorealistic mouse like Stuart Little interacting with Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie and the audience buying the concept of it being a real mouse.... You couldn’t have done that 15 years ago.”

The advances in animation and their effects on live action will be explored in “The Animated Performance: Animation Invades Live Action,” Tuesday at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

A presentation of the Science and Technology Council, the evening will feature discussions with such special-effects experts as Oscar-winners John Dykstra and Ken Ralston, director Rob Minkoff and actors Alfred Molina, Jonathan Lipnicki, Bruno Kirby and Chris Coppola. Weiss will serve as moderator.

The presentation will also feature clips from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Mary Poppins,” “The Hulk” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”

One panel will explore “Stuart Little,” which features 3-D animated mice interacting with real actors. Lipnicki, says Weiss, will discuss what it was like to act with a nonexistent costar; Kirby will chat about what it’s like to do a voice without seeing the live action you are interacting with.

The second part of the evening will explore the creation of the “Spider-Man 2” villain Doc Ock, which combined Molina’s live action performance and computer graphics animation. Molina and the animators at Imageworks, says Weiss, “had to create one seamless performance that looked and performed like Alfred. The animated performance doesn’t work unless there is an understanding between Alfred and the animation director on who is Doc Ock and how does he act?”

Unlike with traditional 2-D animation, says Maltz, animators who work in the 3-D realm “have to deal with the tools [software] and make the tools perform and do what they want them to do in order to get a believable performance up there.”

The seminar concludes with a look at performance-capture animation, which was used on “The Polar Express.”

In performance capture, each actor is outfitted in a tight rubber suit and a headpiece that resembles a bike helmet. Their bodies and faces are dotted with tiny markers, enabling numerous video cameras to record their movements.

“There are no lights, no film cameras,” Weiss says. “It’s basically you and the director and that’s it. It’s almost like doing theater in the round.”

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The Animated Performance: Animation Invades Live Action

Where: Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $3 to $5

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or www.oscars.org