Mocap production begins on Happy Feet 2

Director George Miller announced the beginning of production for Happy Feet 2 in Sydney, adding that NSW and Australia have been ‘lazy’ but that situation is changing, particularly with the state’s production attraction activities and the opening of a new state-of-the-art motion capture facility at CarriageWorks in Sydney.

Miller said that what New Zealand – and Wellington in particular – have achieved should be an inspiration for Australia.

“The Australian film industry has been complacent for about 20 years. There’s been moments of brilliance, but those moments have been unsustained. There’s a fantastic talent and infrastructure, but no productions to really keep it going,” he said.

“In NSW and Australia we were too lazy and we let others steal the march, but now it’s changing, and this is a brilliant time.”

Happy Feet 2 will use technologies similar to those employed by James Cameron in Avatar, allowing Miller to visualise actors as their penguin counterparts in real time, moving in a virtual environment, instead of seeing them with their motion capture suits in front of a green screen.

“The film industry is moving to that intersection of technology and art, that’s where Avatar is showing us the road, that’s where the guys in New Zealand are showing us the way, and there’s no reason why we can’t have that in this country. It’s happening; now we have the most advanced motion capture studio in the world at CarriageWorks, it’s huge.”

The director said he did not foresee any scheduling conflicts between Happy Feet and the upcoming Mad Max sequel Fury Road, and admitted that he has no certainty about repeating the success of the first penguin film – which earned U$384.3m worldwide.

Miller declined to announce more details about the voice cast, other than confirming that US actors Elijah Wood, Robin Williams and Hank Azaria are currently in Sydney. They will be recording their performances at Trackdown, in the Entertainment Quarter, over the next two weeks.

“We have the old cast, and a lot of new cast members too,” he said.

One of the dancers – who also worked on the first Happy Feet – told Encore that the final dancing cast has not been selected yet, and he did not expect motion capture of the dancing portion of the film to take place until at least the second half of 2010.

Happy Feet 2 is expected to create more than 500 jobs over its three-year production period, according to information released by NSW Premier Kristina Keneally.

Oscar snubs "Avatar's" motion-capture actors

Zoe Saldana and James Worthington failed to earn nominations Tuesday for their motion-capture work in the sci-fi spectacular.

"People confuse what we have done with animation," director James Cameron said at the recent Producers Guild Awards, where he and fellow producer Jon Landau lost to "The Hurt Locker."

"It's nothing like animation. The creator here is the actor, not the unseen hand of an animator," he added.

The Oscars snub is "a disappointment," said Landau, "but I blame ourselves for not educating people in the right way."

Landau explained that they needed to make clear that the system they used represents a new way to use "motion capture" photography, or as Landau puts it, "emotion capture."

A key breakthrough in "Avatar" involves photographing facial features of the actors with a tiny camera suspended from a skull cap in front of the performer's face that caught every twitch and muscle movement, all faithfully reproduced onscreen.

"We made a commitment to our actors that what they would see up on the screen were their performances," Landau said, "not somebody else's interpretation of what their performance might or might not be."

The issue of what makes an actor an actor first surfaced when Andy Serkis did Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings," but skepticism remains over whether it is the same as live-action acting.

"What an actor is doing when acting is not just looking like something but expressing something going on inside," says James Lipton, host of Bravo's "Inside the Actor's Studio." "I'm not sure that motion capture, while it captures the flicker of an eyebrow, the twist of a mouth, a gesture of a hand, equally captures emotion."

Critic Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor tended to agree." On one hand, it is a performance, but on the other, it is so aided by technology," he said. "If I were 'King of the World,' I would create a separate category."

Film professor Richard Brown doesn't agree. "This is very much the first film of the 21st century," Brown said. "What we need to do is expand our concept of what the word actor means. It's unfair to take performances as good as these and not designate them as actors."

James Cameron Planning an Avatar Trilogy

Published by Jeff Leins

Once Avatar started setting box office records, it was inevitable talk of a sequel would emerge.  The science fiction epic is up to $1.4 billion worldwide (just $400 million shy of Titanic), and this weekend it will pass Star Wars to become the third highest-grossing movie of all-time at the domestic box office.

Rumors of a second adventure on Pandora circulated until James Cameron himself attended a Variety-hosted screening and Q&A in Hollywood.  The director confirmed “there’ll be another” and said the plan was always to make a trilogy of films, according to an account on Ain’t It Cool News.

The new issue of Entertainment Weekly confirmed the trilogy concept with a quote from Cameron.  “I’ve had a storyline in mind from the start — there are even scenes in Avatar that I kept in because they lead to the sequel,” Cameron said. “It just makes sense to think of it as a two or three film arc, in terms of the business plan. The CG plants and trees and creatures and the musculo-skeletal rigging of the main characters — that all takes an enormous amount of time to create. It’d be a waste not to use it again.” Any thoughts on what scenes set up a sequel?

As usual with high-profile blockbusters, Sam Worthington is signed for an eventual sequel and a new adventure as Jake Sully.  Stephen Lang even joked about returning to the series as the scarred Col. Quaritch.  “Nothing’s over so long as they’ve got my DNA.” Cameron is expected to return as the director.

As for a potential plot line, you might remember Pandora is just one of many moons orbiting the planet Polyphemus.  Cameron has said he has story ideas on how to branch out onto the other surfaces in the solar system.  Oh great, more planets that will make people depressed upon learning they aren’t real.

The original took over a decade in conception and four years in actual production, so if we’re lucky we could see Avatar 2 by maybe 2014?  I have to believe he’ll be able to turn a sequel around much quicker than that, especially if he’s already hatched an arc to the stories and developed the 3-D performance capture technology.  That’s the hope any way.