Movies
Computer magic plus live action put movies on fast track to future

By Jeff Shannon
Special to The Seattle Times

WARNER BROS. PICTURES Performance capture allows physical movements to be captured as digital data, via hundreds of reflective sensors attached to an actor's body, such as on Tom Hanks, left. The data are then used to animate digital characters such as the conductor in "The Polar Express."

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Animovies? Cinemation?

Whatever you call them, they're coming soon to a multiplex near you.

With the current release of Pixar's "The Incredibles" and this week's holiday adventure "The Polar Express," computer animation and live action continue to merge and cross-pollinate with startling results. Consider "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" a kind of dress rehearsal, as 2004 marks a milestone in the emergence of a "hybrid cinema," in which the line between reality and artifice has all but disappeared.

As digital technology revolutionizes the way movies are made, a lot of intriguing questions arise. Why call it a "film" when no film was used during its production? Are actors expendable when their performances are stored on a hard drive? Why hire a camera operator when your "camera" is a computer program?

"It's a medium in search of a name," says "Polar Express" producer Steve Starkey, whose long-standing partnership with tech-savvy director Robert Zemeckis (on such films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" "Forrest Gump" and "Contact") puts him on the innovative fast track. "We've opened the door to a new cinematic form that takes advantage of real actors' performances while exploiting the computer's ability to render anything we want in three dimensions."

Starkey is referring to the use in "The Polar Express" of motion capture, the now-common procedure that allows physical movements to be "captured" as digital data, via hundreds of reflective sensors attached to an actor's body, and then repeated to "animate" digital characters in a computer. Motion capture enabled actor Andy Serkis to "play" Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, even though his performance was entirely replaced by the all-digital Gollum during post-production.

	PARAMOUNT PICTURES Dr. Totenkopf's mechanized army in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," which, with the exception of the main actors, was mostly created on computers.

For "The Polar Express," motion capture evolved into "performance capture," using more and better sensors to record more subtle nuances of body movement and facial expression, enabling actors to "perform" a potentially infinite variety of all-digital characters. For "Polar Express" star Tom Hanks — who never physically appears on screen — that meant the freedom to play five different computer-generated characters for the film based on Chris Van Allsburg's popular children's book. These and other characters were then placed into digitally rendered sets or locations, and filmed with a free-floating "virtual camera" from any imaginable distance or angle.

The movie's jovial train conductor may be a kind of digital doppelganger, but the physical essence of his performance (and his voice) is pure Tom Hanks. Now that the merging of real actors and digital "synthespians" is possible, the implications are staggering to consider.

An eerie, not-quite-lifelike quality still lingers in the humans who ride "The Polar Express," but digital rendering has evolved well beyond the failure of 2001's "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." Photo-realistic digital performers, potentially including the revival of dead actors (and not just their archival remnants, like Laurence Olivier's cameo in "Sky Captain"), are just around the corner.

	WALT DISNEY PICTURES / PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS The goal in Pixar's new "The Incredibles," says supervising technical director Rick Sayre, was to make the human characters move convincingly but retain qualities of caricature.

Because performance capture allows anyone to be digitally transformed into anyone else, adult actors unrestricted by child-labor laws (like Hanks' former "Bosom Buddies" co-star, Peter Scolari) could be cast to play the digitally-rendered children in "The Polar Express." Starkey foresees a similar scenario in which the same actor could play himself from infancy to old age, with performance capture providing a visually consistent digital model for stories that span a character's lifetime. And because "perf-cap" techniques are rapidly improving, it will soon be possible to simultaneously capture an entire cast and then drop them into digital settings created during post-production — yet another stage of filmmaking that's undergoing rapid transformation.

"I think we have to come up with a new definition of what this moving-image making is, or we're going to be stuck with these categories that don't quite fit anymore," says John Canemaker, a respected animation historian, award-winning animator and director of animation studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "Animation starts from scratch, whereas 'The Polar Express' uses a pre-existing form of performance, and they put another form over it. It's a strange melding of techniques, and right now there's no proper way to categorize it."

For director Brad Bird and the creators of "The Incredibles," photo-realism was avoided altogether. It clashed with their concept of a cartoon family of discredited human superheroes, shunned into suburban obscurity until they "out" themselves to save the world.

	COLUMBIA PICTURES / SQUARE PICTURES Digital rendering has evolved well beyond early attempts such as 2001's "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within."

The aim, according to supervising technical director Rick Sayre, was to "rig the human characters with accurate anatomy and make them move convincingly while retaining the qualities of caricature and control that we needed to have, while allowing the animators to add 'squash and stretch' and other techniques of traditional animation."

Regardless of stylistic approach or advancing technology, it's clear that "hybrid cinema" will continue to evolve in fascinating directions. Pixar's planned 2005 release, "Cars" — with its animated cast of trucks, coupes, NASCAR racers and hot rods — presents its own set of digital challenges. The film's early preview trailer is eliciting typically enthusiastic response. And Sony Imageworks — the wizards who rendered "The Polar Express" — are already at work on "Monster House," a Zemeckis/Starkey motion-capture project also slated for release next year.

"The future is going to be all about choices and the integration of techniques," says Canemaker, who predicts a wave of independent films involving animation (like Richard Linklater's "Waking Life"), ongoing advancements in interactivity and the continuing success of traditional animation, as evident in recent masterpieces like "Spirited Away" and "The Triplets of Belleville."

Whatever name it's given, "hybrid cinema" is here to stay. For the creators of "The Polar Express," it allowed swooping, soaring camera moves that would have been impossible in reality, with three-dimensional characters roaming freely within epic-scale settings built entirely in the computer. For "The Incredibles," it meant the application of real-world physics to the caricatured world of computer-animated superheroes. In both cases, reality and artifice melded to create hyper-realities dictated by creative decisions and the stories being told.

Where all of this innovation ultimately leads is anybody's guess. Can digital characters convey a sense of soul? Why bother with costly reality when you can economically fake it? Is the day coming when you will be able to make a movie with a cast of thousands ... all played by the same actor?

As we race toward the next stage of digital innovation, these and other questions remain. You can bet a lot of tech-savvy image-makers will be avidly seeking answers.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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