"Wherefore Performance Capture?"
The box office success of James Cameron’s Avatar has caused Hollywood to roll its big guns into battle position. The looming war is about the implications of performance capture technology for members of Screen Actors Guild. Avatar, the highest grossing and most expensive movie in Hollywood history, received nine Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director, but zero for its cast of actors. How could it be the best picture and have the best director unless the actors were doing noteworthy work, too? On the other hand, how much of a digital character is the actor and how much is the work of computer geniuses. Could Avatar possibly predict that actors are on their way to becoming optional in the movie-making process?
Most professional actors still do not know what to make of performance capture, even after it has been used in at least a dozen big-budget films and many hundreds of video games. None of the major drama schools are including performance capture training along with dance, voice and scene study. SAG hasn’t had a whole lot to say about it until recently when it formed a National Performance Capture Committee "to address the unique concerns and experiences of members who render performances that are recorded using 'performance capture' technology across all media. . . ." The Guild is behaving in a reactive – rather than proactive – way, which is typical. Its leaders prefer to go chase the horses after they are already out of the barn than to put a double lock on the barn in the first place.
Well, the horses are on the run, and an excellent article by Rachel Abramowitz in the February 18th LA Times is a good place to learn what the big guns on the production side of performance capture are saying. Steven Spielberg, now directing his first performance-capture movie, and James Cameron, the king of the world himself, are doing some early horse whispering. No, seriously, horse whispering. After reading their comments in Ms. Abramovitz’s article, I Googled “How to Calm a Nervous Horse”, and it appears that is the book they have been reading.
“Firstly I'd have to say that probably the most important thing to remember is to stay calm, with any horse, but especially this type of horse. With your own attitude you can show him that there's nothing to be afraid of or nervous about; you can also show him the type of attitude that you would like for him to have.” (Working with Nervous Horses, by Caryn M. Tate)
Now listen to Mr. Cameron:
"There's a learning curve for the acting community, and they're not up to speed yet… We didn't get out and proselytize with the Screen Actors Guild as we probably should have to raise awareness. Not only should they not be afraid of it (performance capture technology), they should be excited about it. There is a new set of possibilities, after a century of doing movie acting in the same way."
And now Mr. Spielberg, who is in production for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn:
“I like to think of it (performance capture) as digital makeup…It’s basically the actual performance of the actual actor, and what you’re simply experiencing is makeup….Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they’re working in live theater.”
Digital makeup? How about the way performance capture was used to create the dancing penguins in the animated movie Happy Feet? And how about Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, in which Andy Serkis donned a Lycra suit to create the big ape? And anyway, would you recognize Zoe Saldana on Sunset Blvd if you had only seen her on screen as a 10-foot tall digital blue Na’vi with big cat eyes? Makeup? Okay, but there is makeup and then there is makeup.
The real reason that performance capture is here to stay is that, once the kinks are worked out, it is going to save producers a lot of money. Again, from Ms. Abramowitz’s interview with Mr. Spielberg:
On a typical day of a live-action production, a director might complete a dozen or so scenes in which the lights, cameras, scenery and actors are repositioned. Spielberg said that on Tintin he completed 75 set-ups a day on the motion-capture stage, and finished principal photography in 30 days. That's less than half the time it would have taken to shoot a live-action version of the film.
The reason the actors in Avatar did not receive the Academy Award nod – or a SAG Award nod, for that matter – is because James Cameron wrote a weak script. The actors he cast are talented enough and did the best they could. But, as Gertrude Stein famously observed about her hometown of Oakland, California, "there is no there there." Mr. Cameron is arguably a visionary genius in the mold of Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, but the fellow seems not to have a clue how actors do what they do. Peter Jackson, by contrast, is better with actors, which is why Andy Serkis has done such excellent work for him. Andy really should have been nominated for his Gollum, by the way. Historians will acknowledge his performance as pivotal in the evolution of film. And of course Steven Spielberg is definitely an actor’s director. It will be interesting to see what he does with Tintin. He does have Andy Serkis acting in it, after all, and Peter Jackson is the producer. That is a good start.
