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The Future of Films
11/28/2007
Aside from it's absurd and unneeded penis hiding (I'll talk about that in another post) I was really impressed with Beowulf. Will and I caught it last weekend as I was watching it I couldn't quite figure out how it was made. It looks wholly realistic at some moments and very cgi-contrived at other, and it had familiar actors faces. What was going on?
The answer is fascinating. Ain't It Cool has a good write up on the process:
Let's start with capturing the performance... There were no cameras involved, with the exception of those that read the data from the mo-cap signals attached to the performer. They captured audio and their movements only. Since there is no camera that means there was no set-up, no framing, no stopping to get a different angle. The performers, I was told, treated it much like a play. They ran through whole scenes without stopping, their movements and voices being recorded.
So, after the story has been acted out what happens is the smart tech people take the mo-cap information and lay over a sort of rudimentary animation.
So the characters in the movie were stylized versions of actors. How stylized? I wondered. I'd never heard of the lead actor Ray Winstone so I looked him up online. In an article called "How did Ray Winstone lose 30 years and 70 pounds?" I found this jarring comparison:
Wow! That's pretty amazing. It certainly drives one to ask what will happen when these cgi creations become indistinguishable from the real thing. Who'll need a Brad Pitt or Angelina Joliet when extreme beauty can be rendered from a hard drive? What if favorite actors like Sean Connery and Harrison Ford could remain youthful and energetic on screen for as long as the live? Even after their death couldn't they be replaced by a talented actor who might not look anything like them? And, of course, what about virtual porn?
We're seeing an odd convergence of the animated becoming more realistic (Beowulf, Sky Captain, etc.) and the realistic become more stylized (300). It's going to be fascinating when they finally meet each other in the middle.
11/28/2007 | Permanent Link
