| rise of the apes |
| Monday, 27 June 2011 22:42 |
Film wizards used latest performance capture technology for 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'BY ETHAN SACKS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
The ape revolution begins on a soundstage inside Vancouver's aptly named Mammoth Studios amid a crash of laboratory equipment and primal screeching. Upon closer inspection, the cacophony isn't coming from real apes gathered for the filming of a scene from the upcoming movie " Rise of the Planet of the Apes," but from band of actors of various sizes in tight gray unitards with LED markers pasted all over. The actors' faces, freckled with green dots, are continuously being filmed by head-mounted camera rigs while they trash the animal testing cages in the fictional bio medical company Genesys. It's a technique called performance capture and actor Andy Serkis is a master. Loping around on arm extensions, Serkis - who has made a career out of performance-capture work since he played Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy - really does move like a real long-armed ape. And once the computer animators are done working with all the digital information from his markers, he'll look like a real chimpanzee, too. "We've arrived at a stage where other actors who are playing live-action characters are not fazed by it in the slightest," says Serkis, who plays Caesar, a chimpanzee turned into an evolutionary revolutionary by the well-meaning, but misguided experiments of scientist Will Rodman (James Franco).  Performance-capture (involving Andy Serkis) is a big factor in 'Rise… (20th Century Fox)
"They can just see a performance going on and say okay, 'So we don't look the same but I think it would be equally as strange to act against someone in a chimp suit.' " Franco's name will be on the top of the marquee when the movie opens on Aug . 5, but just as important to the film are the behind-the-scenes performance-capture specialists from W eta, Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based special effects company. "Our goal was to give the appearance that Caesar was in front of the camera when all these scenes were being shot," says Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at W eta and winner of four Academy Awards. It sure beats reacting with a tennis ball that would later be replaced by computer animation, says Franco. This way, two actors are actually feeding off each other. "The imagination just kind of takes over, just like you meet someone and the next day they are playing your mother," Franco says. "You kind of roll with it if the scene is working. Andy was so good with the chimp behavior that it was actually pretty easy to fall into that kind of relationship." |
