![]() Interestingly, the use of MoCap as a technique for animation dwindled after these early efforts, giving way to a prevailing use of the technology for creating CG characters within otherwise live-action films. The Polar Express was criticised as a prime example of the uncanny valley at work in CGI, described by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone as “a failed and lifeless experiment.” 9 Despite this, the technique of producing an animated film through MoCap was once again used in Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007) to graft a serpentine tail onto an otherwise human-appearing Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s Mother, as well as in the production of The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011). In 2004, Robert Zemeckis’s Christmas-themed film The Polar Express transliterated actors such as Tom Hanks into an animated feature where all characters were created through motion capture. ![]() 8 In the years following the appearance of Gollum – the second virtual character to be created through digital MoCap, following the much-detested Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) – numerous films made use of MoCap with varied and at times inauspicious outcomes. Hollywood’s experiments with digital motion capture techniques began in the early 1990s, among them a failed attempt to use nascent MoCap to animate Arnold Schwarzenegger as an x-rayed skeleton in Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and to successfully light a priest on fire in a single shot of Lawnmower Man (Brett Leonard, 1992). Production still from Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, 1953) Adjacent to cinema, MoCap is commonly used in the production of video games, a practice beginning with The Prince of Persia in 1989. 6 Today, MoCap has a range of applications beyond cinema, including in orthopaedic medicine and mechanical engineering. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, experiments in motion capture for applications in cinema and beyond were undertaken in laboratories around the world, including the development of a “graphical marionette” by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Architecture Machine Group in 1983. 5 Rotoscoping remained a part of animation production for several decades and was used in many Disney productions such as Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, 1953). Sometime later, the analog predecessor of digital MoCap as a cinematic special effect emerged in the early 20 th century with rotoscoping, a laborious animation technique invented by Betty Boop creator Max Fleischer in 1915 that involved tracing human movement by hand, frame by frame, from a film strip into drawing. 4 Marey’s experiments bear striking resemblance to data-tracking images gleaned by MoCap today. 3 Slightly later, using a circular photographic plate with a trigger and lens mounted on a gun, Marey captured the continuity of a body in movement across the unified space of a single image, rendered as reflective panels and markers illuminating the movement of a subject’s skeleton through space. ![]() Rigging up to 24 cameras with electrically triggered shutters, Muybridge conducted studies of the movement of horses, birds, and men from 1878 onwards, according to which gestures were fragmented into sequential parts in individual images. The creation of any MoCap character involves various forms of intensive technical, artistic, and computational labour.ĭemonstrating that the preoccupation with anatomy and movement has long been at the heart of the persistent entwinement between cinema and scientific enquiry, the history of motion capture predates that of cinema itself, beginning with the proto-cinematic experiments of figures such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, well-known pioneers of the method of chronophotography. 2 MoCap characters like Gollum signify a convergence of analog and digital modes, a grafting together of a human body that has moved through tangible space, and an algorithmic body that has been fleshed out through code. In the twenty years since Gollum appeared on screen, the first time a virtual character was “filmed” on location, motion capture (“MoCap”) has become one of the central techniques of CGI, and, it can be argued, one of the distinctive aesthetics of post-Millennial Hollywood film making. Gollum signified a pioneering development in computer generated imaging in the cinema, in terms of both technological innovation and the opening-up of new formal possibilities. Production still showing Andy Serkis in MoCap suit as Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) ![]()
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