![]() Animators like to say that they’re actors but they’re not really. “Which is why I say it’s acting, not you know, you’re not an animator. Because it’s all about the close-up at the end of the day, which is what it’s like to act on screen as a live action actor. That’s why it goes back to the difference between researching and doing monkey movements or mimicking an ape which is what people think performance capture is. Well, not doing nothing, when I’m internalising everything as opposed to demonstrating. What separates Caesar, the moments of Caesar that you really connect with are when he’s doing nothing. “It does, it offers limitless possibilities in terms of playing characters and embodying that but actually the more I do the more I realise that the stillness is everything and actually Caesar is a case in point. Maybe not my best review, then, but what’s the benefit of performance capture? It felt as though it offered a great feeling of freedom. As an experiment I can see the value, when I first did it as Gollum I thought wow you can move your arm and Gollum does the same, but really it’s just like playing Kinect or Nintendo Wii.” You’re standing up there, you’d be trying to puppeteer yourself in a rather external way to see that what you’re doing is registering on the puppet rather than completely internalising what it is to feel something. You’re only looking at the physical performance. “I think what you were doing yesterday is good but it’s inaccurate. ![]() I asked Andy Serkis if motion capture meant the usual directorial tip that less is more just didn’t apply. Playback revealed my ape was rather more, er, sedate and restrained than the movies required, but hey, it was my first go. Along with movement there was even room for acting, jumping on to a car, waving my simian arms and screaming in triumph. The gift of the volume’s special effect is that on playback I looked miraculously like a chimp, although a rather clumsy one. And, boy, is it tiring? After ten minutes I was sweating and exhausted. While the Weta actors on hand could saunter with their hips square, rolling their shoulders and even grunting evocatively, I rarely gathered enough courage to step out convincingly. These are essential: you can touch the ground while still staying nearly upright.ĭespite some coaching, the ape walk was a challenge. To make up for the fact that human and aped physical shapes differ, pairs of small crutches lie waiting to be used. Look at the screen and it’s the Golden Gate Bridge, with, get this, me as an ape. ![]() Look at the room and there are dull carpets, wooden slopes and rostra. Then into the volume itself, an expansive room dotted with infra-red sensors ready to plot my movements. Sadly, that was the generic human shape they programme in, the suit wasn’t that unforgiving. A quick look round at an animated me on the monitor and I looked pretty good – tall, buff and muscular. Then I stood on a platform where infra-red cameras captured my every gesture, as I tried one uncomfortable posture after another. I was poured into a form-fitting suit (“The tighter the better,” Weta’s all-knowing wardrobe master laughed) and scores of tiny white tags were Velcroed to every extremity. Each actor has around 50 dots painted on his or her face and a helmet-mounted camera pointing at every facial movement. This wasn’t quite the full experience Andy Serkis and the stunt actors who played the other apes went through, but it was close. But they weren’t realistic – the RSC show was Peter Pan – so this would be different.įirst, the mocap suit, shot in the special effects hall called the Volume. So even if we can't find the first episode of Turn-On, its fingerprints are pretty much everywhere else.I’ve played animals before, since you ask: a seagull in a kids’ show called The Selfish Shellfish and an Ostrich and a feral wolf at the RSC. The Tinkertoys held in place potentiometers, which picked up signs of movement that were then controlled by a nearby computer.Īccording to a 1998 Medialab article from IEEE, Harrison's technology won a 1972 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences award, was involved in building the slick animated TV logos of the 1970s, and helped inspire the much more advanced technology that followed-which is in pretty much every Hollywood movie. It relies on a technology called Scanimate, a "data suit" that a developer named Lee Harrison III first built in 1960s. Here's the crazy part about this: It looks like it's fake, but it's totally real. The shot shows a Turn-On dancer wearing a very primitive motion capture system that's controlling a character Pixar would never touch, but if you look closer, you'll notice that the motion capture system is built from Tinkertoys.
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