James Cameron and Peter Jackson are the kings of the CGI world. Cameron, of course, directed Titanic, the highest-grossing movie of all time—which he says he’d make with no ship if he were filming today. Jackson was the guy behind bringing Middle-earth to the big screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now they are back with Avatar and The Lovely Bones, two of the most-hyped films of the holiday season. Newsweek asked them about their new films and how technology is changing Hollywood. An excerpt of the transcript is printed below:
Director James Cameron had many reasons to be happy the morning that this year’s Oscar nominations were announced: His blockbuster movie “Avatar” tied for the most with nine, including best picture and best director. But he was dismayed that his cast, including stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver, was shut out.
When we think about the first films to convince directors that visual effects created with computer graphics could open their imaginations, two films immediately come to mind: James Cameron’s The Abyss, in which a transparent CG character communicated with an actor, and Cameron’s Terminator 2, which starred a digital, liquid terminator and is lauded as the first movie to show the power of a digital pipeline. Both films won visual effects Oscars, as did Cameron’s Alien before, and Titanic after. Titanic, released in 1997, still holds the record for the largest box-office revenue: $1.8 billion. It was the last feature film Cameron had made. Until now.
The director of Terminator and Titanic explains how movies will be transformed by motion-tracking and 3D technology
Three-time Academy Award-winning director James Cameron is a pioneer in the field of motion capture. In the mid-’90s he used the nascent technology to create the massive crowd scenes and stunts in his blockbuster Titanic. These days he’s still at the cutting edge of the technology, but he prefers to call motion capture “performance capture” because, as he points out, “actors don’t do motion, they do emotion.”
Cameron is in the midst of his latest film project, Avatar, which is his most technologically innovative film to date. The futuristic movie about an ex-Marine will be released in 2009 simultaneously with a massive, multiplayer, video game based on the film.
Eighteen months ago, Guillermo del Toro had a 10-year-plan. His life was mapped out, and it had nothing to do with JRR Tolkien’s lovingly rendered cartography of Middle-earth.
“I was calmly laying out the next decade of my life when The Hobbit appeared,” he laughs. “I was preparing all these things and all of a sudden The Hobbit shows up and takes over my life.”
Make no mistake: The Hobbit is his precious. Del Toro knows more than anyone that this diptych could – should – define his career.
In this initial feature for the launch of SIGGRAPH Quarterly’s online magazine, Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Rob Engle and Rob Bredow discuss the subject of stereoscopic 3D film production and presentation, and offer their ideas as to where this increasingly important technology may be heading in the future.
Article author: Eden Ashley Umble
All images courtesy of Sony Pictures Imagesworks unless otherwise stated
Andy Serkis is the reigning master of performance for motion-capture — the recording of an actor’s every move and facial nuance for use by animators to enliven CG characters. In his acclaimed star turns as the ring-addicted Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the noble mega-ape in King Kong, 43-year-old Serkis invested his digital roles with the power of old-school stagecraft at its best. The London-based actor has also recently ported his skills to the gaming world, appearing in the new PlayStation 3 title Heavenly Sword, which he co-produced. Now that even Angelina Jolie is getting in on the sensors-and-greenscreen action — for Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming take on Beowulf — Wired spoke to Serkis about digital acting, the future of mo-cap, and why Gollum didn’t score an Oscar.
In this article, I’m getting right at the meat of what technologies are, getting us closer to that goal, and what this really means for the future of not only motion capture filmmaking, which Steve Perlman of Mova (www.mova.com), refers to as volumetric cinematography, but also the impact it will have on live-action films and mixed media films, like James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar. Mocap is finally coming of age, but the future will be even more exciting.
In the simplest terms, the future of mocap will be a seamlessly integrated motion capture experience where the limitations imposed by current technologies are overcome and the mocap process blends into the background. This will allow us to capture full body and facial motion data, as well as capture the movement and texture of real clothing, skin, props, and environments, while permitting realtime compositing or superimposing with live-action elements.
Motion capture, or mocap as it is often referred to, is one of the great new frontiers in the world of movie making, and although it has had its resistance in the film community, it is becoming a crucial tool in complex digital effects. And, as it develops, it has become a completely different medium in which to capture entire feature films.
Robert Zemeckis has produced three films entirely using mocap: Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have also used the technology in their productions.
Several years ago, I got to spend some quality time alone with Ray Harryhausen. It was only about half an hour, but I count it as a career highlight. Although I don’t recall his exact words, Harryhausen told me that he always had a deep commitment to the animated performance, believing that a great one was as engaging and emotionally telling as life itself… or at least a great human performance. The thing that convinced me was his work on Mighty Joe Young. I know that he’s right – it’s not just movement; it’s performance.
In today’s moviemaking, the creative work that takes place on a computer can be as important as what goes on in front of the camera. In the big-screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s historical graphic novel 300 (above), the future Spartan King Leonidas fends off a wolf. On set, visual-effects supervisor Chris Watts tried using a robotic wolf (top) for the scene, but it was eventually covered up by a computer-generated version of the animal (shown midrender, below).
Digital effects such as 300’s virtual wolf are remarkable not because they are groundbreaking — the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in cinema dates back to the 2D pixel-vision of a robotic Yul Brynner in 1973’s Westworld — but because this technology is now a standard part of the moviemaking toolkit. The impact of digital technology on Hollywood has been gradual but all-encompassing. Today, a movie can be shot, edited and distributed — from camera to theater and beyond — without involving a single frame of film. The transformation is at least as sweeping as the introduction of sound or color in the early 20th century, and it is changing both the business and the art form of cinema. Cinematographers, long resistant to digital image recording, are starting to embrace the use of digital cameras, shooting clean-looking footage that’s easier to manipulate than film. Commonly available software allows small special effects shops such as Hybride to render entire virtual worlds and blend them seamlessly with live-action shots. Scenes that would have required elaborate sets 25 years ago can now be shot against a blue or green screen, and the setting can be filled in later — and then tweaked until the director is satisfied.
James Cameron and Peter Jackson are the kings of the CGI world. Cameron, of course, directed Titanic, the highest-grossing movie of all time—which he says he’d make with no ship if he were filming today. Jackson was the guy behind bringing Middle-earth to the big screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now they are back with Avatar and The Lovely Bones, two of the most-hyped films of the holiday season. Newsweek asked them about their new films and how technology is changing Hollywood. An excerpt of the transcript is printed below:
In this article, I’m getting right at the meat of what technologies are, getting us closer to that goal, and what this really means for the future of not only motion capture filmmaking, which Steve Perlman of Mova (www.mova.com), refers to as volumetric cinematography, but also the impact it will have on live-action films and mixed media films, like James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar. Mocap is finally coming of age, but the future will be even more exciting.
Motion capture, or mocap as it is often referred to, is one of the great new frontiers in the world of movie making, and although it has had its resistance in the film community, it is becoming a crucial tool in complex digital effects. And, as it develops, it has become a completely different medium in which to capture entire feature films.
