The Erasure of Ahmed Best

 First, I just want to check that Jar Jar Binks would look kinder with the eyes of a furious Gollum...

... than with the goats' willies he was given...

  

 Yep okay, he never stood a chance. Why am I writing about Jar Jar Binks at two o'clock in the morning? Because the Vulture's list of "a hundred sequences that shaped animation" which I linked to on Sunday had one serious but typical omission: While Gollum obviously made it on because he's extraordinary, the performance providing the script for all motion-capture software programmed in the last two decades was not Andy Serkis' in The Two Towers, but Ahmed Best's in The Phantom Menace. And it's not clear from the behind-the-scenes pictures of the actor in a rubber suit, taken back in the day when green screens were still blue...

... but Best would return to perform Jar Jar in a motion-capture suit months after principal photography, and it was this work which would go into programming not only cinema's first ever completely computer-generated lead character, but every single motion-capture computer-generated character since, Gollum included. Ahmed Best wasn't just the Neil Armstrong of mo-cap CGI, he was the Adam and Eve, which isn't nothing, whatever you think of CGI.

 (A brief tangent: Look at Han idly fingering that stucco - 

 

 That's what happens when you put an actor on a set!) 

 

 Back to the CGI: I only learnt about Best's contribution to the history of animation this June when he appeared on Nicole Byer and Lauren Lapkus's podcast "Newcomers", and I remember thinking I must remember him. He has anecdotes to rival Peter Serafinowicz's too - of his first audition at Skywalker Ranch, for example, crawling across the floor like a salamander in a baffling scuba-suit covered in ping-pong balls, or of Michael Jackson's jealousy when he finally landed the role. You can listen to it here. He soundd like he's doing well. It was only researching him later that I found out that this was, pretty famously, not always the case.

 

 But he seems to be doing well now, as I say. I'm just posting this because I find his contribution exciting: I still don't like Jar Jar of course - Look at those eyes -

 

But Ahmed Best should be on our lists.