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MillimeterAnimated Performance
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Sony Pictures Imageworks goes for a more live-action style in motion capture.
Advanced fire simulation was essential for illuminating the motion-captured world of Beowulf.
“A lot of technology had to be created in advance.” This comment from Jerome Chen, the senior visual effects supervisor on Paramount Pictures' Beowulf, is the ultimate understatement. The digital epic, directed by Robert Zemeckis, pushed Sony Pictures Imageworks technology far beyond what had been done for Zemeckis' previous performance-capture productions, The Polar Express and Monster House. Unlike those fancifully animated family films, Beowulf called for mayhem to be visualized at an unprecedented level of realism. And that meant advancing the technology for both facial performance capture and the simulation of several kinds of effects.
Chen, who had worked with Zemeckis on The Polar Express, says Beowulf had more of a live-action aesthetic. “In The Polar Express, we did a lot of cutting and pasting of motion-captured performances, and that turned out to be more distracting than helpful,” Chen says. To some degree, that was unavoidable, he admits, because actor Tom Hanks had to be motion-captured playing multiple roles. “But for Beowulf, Bob decided we'd go on set and capture the actors' motions and not go on to the next setup until that scene was correct. He wanted to avoid cutting and pasting.”
Once the cloud of data points that described each actor's performance were applied to digital puppets and given to Zemeckis, the director then freely chose his various camera angles for the scene. Chen says he thinks such freedom is one of the biggest advantages of such a modular production. “Bob could focus on each step of filmmaking discretely,” he says.
