| Robert Zemeckis Motion Capture |
| Thursday, 17 March 2011 23:00 |
Robert Zemeckis defends motion-capture technologyBy Bob Thompson,
With a subtext pulled from Fox News, computer-animated adventure Mars Needs Moms is a tale about overthrowing tyrrany.Photograph by: Handout, DisneyLOS ANGELES - Robert Zemeckis promises to continue his special- effects mission in movies. Too bad his much anticipated 3-D, performance-capture version of The Beatles 1968 Yellow Submarine flick seems to be stalled. The Zemeckis movie was in pre-production to re-work the original, and include most of The Beatles tunes from the experimental picture, All You Need Is Love and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, among them. Now that project may not set sail any time soon. But he still has a busy future. The 59-year-old is overseeing the post-effects for the Shawn Levy-directed sci-fi flick, Real Steel, featuring Hugh Jackman as a former boxer battling cyber-pugilists. And Zemeckis continues to defend his obsession with his latest computer- generated, motion-capture picture, Mars Needs Moms, which opened March 11. Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning American cartoonist Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County), the family comedy is co-written and directed by Zemeckis's protege, Simon Wells. Previously, Wells worked as a designer for Zemeckis on his second and third Back to the Future films, and was the supervising animator on the groundbreaking, half live-action, half animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Mars Needs Moms is all animated. In it, a middle-class mother (voiced by Joan Cusack) gets kidnapped by Martians who are desperate for "mom-ness". However, nine-year-old son Milo (motion capture by Seth Green, voice by Seth Dusky) sneaks aboard the spaceship just before it takes off. Then he finds himself underground at the alien planet, trying to escape the fearless leader (Mindy Sterling) and her Martian henchwomen. Still, Milo is determined to free his mother. With help from a high-tech geek named Gribble (Dan Fogler) and a Martian girl called Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), the earthling tries to free his mother before the Martians drain the motherhood from her. "It was a great challenge to have this small story and flesh out a movie idea," says Zemeckis, promoting the movie at a Beverly Hills Hotel. "It's a family film, but I thought the story had an interesting subtext, and emotional moments that you don't really find in children's books or family fare. " The film, of course, has lots of 3-D motion capture, which the producer maintains is even more refined than the digital effects used by James Cameron in his record-setting Avatar. "This is the pinnacle of 3-D moviemaking," says Zemeckis of Mars Needs Moms. "It gets more powerful every minute of every day." Seth Green agrees. And how else could a 37-year-old pretend to be a nine- year-old boy? It's Green's first motion-capture performance, and once he got used to the blank sound stage and the motion-capture suite with sensors, he relished the challenge. Comparing The Polar Express with Mars Needs Moms technology, Green says, "is like comparing the suitcase phone of 1985 to an iPhone 4G." The performance-capture style doesn't come without controversy. Zemeckis's first foray into that sort of animation, The Polar Express, had some critics carping over the "dead eyes" of the characters, when it was released in 2004. Still, the film grossed more than $306 million US worldwide, while last year's Imax Polar Express reissue had some pundits reassessing. "Major critics have gone back with the 3-D reissue and said, 'I kind of like the movie now.'" Certainly, Zemeckis has mixed commerce, craft and his special-effects compulsion wisely. Since his Back to the Future series, the writer, director and producer has been at the forefront of digital development in motion pictures, especially underscored by the techniques in 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Even his Academy-Award winning Forrest Gump in 1994 managed some first-ever technical achievements. Since The Polar Express, he continued to improve on the motion-capture technique with the re-telling of the adventure fable, Beowulf, in 2007, and the 2009 computer-animated version of the classic Charles Dickens yarn, A Christmas Carol, featuring Jim Carrey in multiple roles. As it is, Green says he was told by a Zemeckis technical crew member "that the most flawlessly rendered shot on A Christmas Carol couldn't hold a candle to the worst shot on Mars Needs Moms." All of those films have performed with varying degrees of success at the box office and with critics. Zemeckis insists he will persevere in the development of motion capture, despite the nagging about the austere presentation "and the disturbing eyes". "I'll answer that with the answer I've been giving for the last 10 years," he says of his defence of performance capture. "I always go back to music. We have the capability in the digital world to create any sound that an instrument can make. "We've been able to do this for 15 years. We haven't replaced a single musician. When we talk about replacing actors or creating an artificial actor, that's not what performance capture is. "This is digital makeup," insists Zemeckis, "and that's what this has always been." |