One of the most memorable portrayals to have come out of Hollywood in the past few years was undoubtedly that of Gollum, the sinewy, grizzly little creature who crawled all over
The Lord of the Rings. He certainly gave Ian McKellen a run for his money in terms of sheer screen presence, but, despite a (no doubt unintentional) resemblance to Vladimir Putin, there was nothing human about Gollum — at least, not on the surface.
In fact, the creature was a product of the marriage of real-life performance and computer technology. The body part was played by an actor, Andy Serkis, using motion capture (mocap), for which he wore a special suit wired up with reflector dots. His movements could then be digitally recorded as he “acted” the role. The results were fed into a computer, the head was added separately, and the result was a virtuoso performance courtesy of virtual reality.
Until this year, the technique had never been applied to “fully” human characters. But in The Polar Express, directed by Robert Zemeckis and opening in America next month, remarkable ground has been broken in the presentation of virtual characterisation, with wide-reaching implications both for actors and the movie- making process itself. As if to make the point, although the movie “stars” Tom Hanks, the Oscar-winning actor does not once appear in physical form on screen.
An adaptation of the popular children’s story written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express is about a little boy who has lost faith in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, he is whisked off on a mysterious steam locomotive, full of children, that arrives outside his house. They are all taken to the North Pole, where they see Father Christmas and his helper elves, and belief is restored.
It might seem like the perfect material for a Disney treatment, but this was not how Zemeckis envisaged it. “I couldn’t imagine what the movie would look like if it was traditional animation — it would just be flat and gaudy,” he says. We meet at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where Zemeckis is putting the finishing touches to the film amid northern Californian countryside so picture-perfect, it could have been created on a computer. “And I couldn’t imagine how in God’s name you could even think about doing the movie in live action,” he adds.
In coming up with a way forward that would remain faithful to Van Allsburg’s distinctive painterly illustrations, the production team at Sony Pictures Imageworks tested a new, integrated version of mocap called performance capture. This allows not just an actor’s body movements, but their whole performance — their unique facial expressions — to be reproduced in computer- generated figures.
Just as with mocap, a cyber-scan of Hanks (and all the other actors in the film) was first entered into the computer. But then — and this is the nub of the breakthrough — along with the reflector dots attached to his body, Hanks’s face was also covered with about 150 such markers. Digital cameras could thus capture every nuance of his facial performance as he acted in an almost bare studio. This could then be fed onto the virtual Hanks. The technique also meant that he could inhabit the bodies and faces of other computerised figures. In fact, he plays five roles, ranging from the conductor of the Polar Express, who is recognisably him, through to the little boy at the centre of the film.
The detailed look of the movie is extraordinary — from beads of sweat on a forehead through to Hot Chocolate, an intricate song- and-dance number that, in keeping with the process, was first choreographed and performed in the studio by real tap-dancers and Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Van Allsburg’s warm, lush pictures are brought to life, and though the figures certainly couldn’t pass for human — Zemeckis was, after all, reproducing stylised illustrations — the overall effect is still like watching a new, hybrid form of cinema, one that feels sometimes animated, sometimes disarmingly real. The film could deliver the same kind of cinematic shock of the new that movie-goers felt on seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the computer-generated Woody in Toy Story.
“It’s like it was when I was a kid and I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time,” says Zemeckis. “It was, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this, I don’t know how it’s done, but it’s magnificent’.”
Zemeckis is no slouch when it comes to testing the boundaries of what film can do. He directed the successful live-action and cartoon mix of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and seamlessly placed Hanks in the same frame as JFK in Forrest Gump. Now performance capture is out of the bag, where does he see it going? “Well, the next thing — and we’re very close to it — is for this to be absolutely photo-real,” he says. “We had situations where we had to shut detail off because it was too photo-real and didn’t look like the paintings (in the book). You could see pores in the skin, you could see every eyelash. The real test will be when you have a two-dimensional, photo-recorded actor and the virtual photo-real actor in the same frame, and you can’t tell them apart.”
With every advance in technology have come warnings that actors will soon be superfluous to the movie-making process. But they should take comfort from the fact that with performance capture, the actor is still of fundamental importance to the process. In some roles, they could even be freed up: Jim Carrey could play the Grinch without the need to wear so much restrictive make-up.
However, what it could also mean is that Brad Pitt at 60 could still “act” Brad Pitt at a virtual, eternal 25 — which could result in huge savings on plastic surgery and personal trainers, if nothing else. And there is the theoretical possibility that a living actor could once again breathe life into the movie legends — Jude Law could bring back Montgomery Clift from the grave. “Or you could have Anthony Hopkins play Nixon, and he could look exactly like Nixon,” says Zemeckis. “You wouldn’t even see any of Anthony Hopkins, other than the emotions of his performance.”
The implications for the movie-making process are also immense. With performance capture, the bulk of the work is done in what is known as the postproduction phase. This means that the director has complete control and nothing is left to chance.
“You make a traditional movie and you’ve spent 80% of your money before you know what’s coming back,” says Zemeckis. “In this situation, you spend 20% of your money, you see what the performances are going to be, you see how the movie lays out. You see the timing, the pacing, the editing, the storytelling, the logic — all those things are in front of you. Then you push the button and spend the big money.” What might be lost in terms of spontaneity could be more than made up for by the obliteration of disappointing directorial errors of judgment.
So, in performance capture, do we have a kind of third way for movie-making? “I think it’s an additional art form,” says Zemeckis. “It’s another way of doing stories that shouldn’t be animated and can’t be done as live action.” With the Hot Chocolate number in mind, I suggest that musicals might be ripe for the treatment. “Absolutely. This is perfect for a Broadway musical. You can do the performance live, in real time, in front of an audience, and then make it cinema. So you get the best of both worlds,” he says. “Cats would be the perfect performance-capture movie.”
