“This are the censors that create a virtual skeleton of Karl’s body, and these are the lumpy man tits that keep him from getting proper acting roles.”

Classically-trained British thespian Andy Serkis is famous for being the man pretending to be a chimp learning to become a man who taught us all what it means to be human in Rise of Planet of the Apes, grunting and pooping in a grey leotard as many a producer hailed his performance as “So, so brave,” clapping slowly in awe, eyes welling up with tears. Serkis was so inspired by the work that he’s set up his own Imaginarium Studio, “to develop the art of motion capture in the UK.” Gollum University, I like to call it.

Thanks to heroes like Andy Serkis, we’ll never again have to see a Jurassic Park where soulless dinosaurs are moved around by puppeteers or controlled by mechanical animatronics. They’ll be given heart, soul, and emotion, by people who know how mythical creatures and extinct beasts should feel. Actors! Wearing spandex!

Anyway, Serkis’s Imaginarium announced they’d be producing a motion-capture take on George Orwell’s Animal Farm a few months back, and he recently gave BBC News a tour of his facilities.

They do important work.

Read the rest of this entry »

YOU ARE A MONKEY, DEREK!

With Oscar season about to heat up, James Franco has written an article for Deadline in which he argues that his be-ping-pong-balled co-star, Andy Serkis, deserves the same consideration for wearing a wetsuit and jumping around like a monkey that other actors get for pretending that guys in wetsuits are actual monkeys. As I’ve said before, only through a team of men drawing another man acting like an ape who became a man were we able to discover what it means to be human.

…Narratively it was always his film: I play an emotionally stilted scientist who in the process of mistakenly unleashing a lethal virus on the human race, learns to care for others; Serkis gets to play Caesar, essentially Che Guevara in chimp form.

Che Guevara as a chimp? What an innovative idea, it’s almost as if they got it

Andy Serkis is the undisputed master of the newest kind of acting called “performance capture,” and it is time that Serkis gets credit for the innovative artist that he is…

…Audiences are used to large scale effects: impossible explosion, space travel, fantastic fairytale worlds, boys in tights swinging around New York, men with Squids for faces, but there is still a disconnection that happens when a character’s outer surface is rendered in a computer like Caesar’s was. We want to forget that there is a human underneath, the effects are so  well rendered we either forget that the spark of life in it’s eyes [sic] and the life in its limbs is informed by a breathing human or we are so drawn into the ontology of the character we can’t grasp its artistic origins or exactly how it was created. What this means is that we can enjoy such a character – enjoyment testified by the response to such films as Avatar, Return of the King, and Planet of the Apes – but we don’t give artistic credit where it is due.

Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Spielberg slaps his name on a lot of random crap like Transformers and Cowboys and Aliens and Real Steel, but when it comes to movies he’s actually directed, there hasn’t been one since Indy 4 in 2008. This December, there will be two in the space of four days, with The Adventures of Tintin opening on the 21st and War Horse four days later. I’ll probably just pack some handi-snaks and watch this over and over until War Horse comes on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mo-Cap: It Gives Chimps Souls! By Vince Mancini

Rise of the Planet of the Apes opened to $54 million domestically and rave reviews over the weekend, with critics describing the motion-capture effects as “astonishingly effective,” among other things, and many calling for the guy in the digital chimp suit, Andy Serkis, to be considered a legitimate contender for supporting actor honors. In many cases, they seemed even more impressed by the film than the studio’s own marketing, which is no small feat. Assorted quotes from the making-of featurette:

“This is the first live-action film that has its main character as a thoughtful, feeling, self-aware animal.” -Rupert Wyatt, Director

“WETA brought their technology to another level for this movie to make our apes look real.” -Dylan Clark, Producer

“Andy Serkis is unlike any other actor. He can inhabit characters that don’t speak and emote in ways that you don’t often see in movies.” -Dylan Clark, Producer

“The basic usage of performance capture is that on screen you will see apes, but they’re apes which are infused with the heart and soul of an actor’s performance.” -Andy Serkis

“This film is not possible without the work of Andy Serkis.” -Producer

“Everybody’s seen chimpanzees, they’ve seen orangutans, we know how they’re supposed to look. So I think the bar in terms of needing to make photorealistic characters is really high.” -Erik Winquist, WETA VFX Supervisor

“One of the improvements in motion-capture since Avatar really have to do with detail. And the type of imagery that they’re getting out of the cameras gives us more facial information. And that subtlety is what’s going to make the apes work.” WETA Animator

“My first reaction to seeing it was, that’s Andy Serkis looking like a chimp! And that was what was so amazing, that you get to see his performance.” -Rupert Wyatt

“We’ve managed to put the soul within this character. And that comes through the actor’s performance.” -Rupert Wyatt

Wyatt isn’t the only filmmaker in town with a big boner for motion-capture right now, and rightly so (see also: Tintin). It’s the new toy. As with any new toy, you have to play around with it for a while to figure out what its strengths and limitations are. I actually liked ROTPOTA, so (for me) it certainly passed the most important test there. But the hype is starting to get nauseating, and hailing motion-capture as this revolutionary technology is a bit premature. We seem to be in the same stage of development with performance capture that we were with microwave ovens in the 60s, when people were still expecting them to bake entire, golden-brown chickens. Mo-cap certainly has its place, I just don’t think we’ve quite perfected what that is yet. And it shouldn’t become such a go-to that people forget that there are other types of effects that are pretty damned good too, types of effects that still (and may always) accomplish certain things better.

Read the rest of this entry »

20th Century Fox showed new Rise of the Planet of the Apes footage at San Diego Comic-Con and wisely put it online immediately so we wouldn’t have to post a buttcam bootleg.  The audience in Hall H saw the clip below and the ones from yesterday.  The new clip shows an army of primates attacking San Francisco, which is what I imagine a normal day on the west coast looks like.  The director explained to the Hall H crowd why they rebooted the franchise so quickly (besides “for piles and piles of money”).

“It’s never been possible to tell this story, technologically,” Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt told the audience, explaining why Fox is revisiting the franchise just a decade after Tim Burton interpreted the story about chimps that achieve humanlike levels of intelligence. “We wanted to tell our story without using live apes for any number of reasons. It would be a cruel irony to tell the story of the exploited and repressed and use live apes to do so.” [HeroComplex]

Okay, so that’s their reason for the mo-cap, and I’ll admit it’s growing on me a little.  A couple of the scenes in the clip below, particularly the end, were a bit intimidating.  You could even say these apes aren’t monkeying around. . . .  Play me off, Johnny!

What was that director guy saying about exploited animals again?  I’ve already forgotten.  Ha, funny kitty.

Read the rest of this entry »