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Homebrew
Transforming Brad Pitt into an old man
Two lauded, innovative and influential filmmakers are currently facing a similar challenge: how to get credible, emotive performances out of digitally created characters and integrate them seamlessly with the environment and other characters. James Cameron's Avatar and David Fincher's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button couldn't be more dissimilar pictures, but both are heavily reliant on CGI performance.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, CGI characters became increasingly sophisticated, with such landmarks as Cameron's Terminator 2 (1991) and Pixar's Toy Story (1995). After Toy Story, however, the path forked. CGI characters created through hand animation - by which we mean the manipulation of digital models with a mouse - developed along one route (as expounded by Pixar), while CGI characters created using motion capture developed along another (as expounded by Robert Zemeckis in The Polar Express, Monster House and Beowulf).
Motion capture (aka mocap) and performance capture are techniques that involve digitally recording the movements of a performer, then using that data as the basis of a CGI character. A debate rages about whether it can even be considered animation, but such distinctions look set to become moot thanks to Cameron's Avatar, his first fiction feature since 1997's Titanic. Avatar uses revolutionary technologies involving the blending of actors, CGI characters and CGI environments.
Homebrew | Digital performers
A science-fiction action adventure about conflict, and love between the human colonists of a distant planet and its primitive humanoid natives, the $195 million film will be shown in 3D. Cameron wrote a treatment for the project back in 1995, but he had to wait for the technology to catch up, saying, in 2006, "The film requires me to create an entirely new alien culture and language, and for that I want 'photo-real' CGI characters. Sophisticated enough 'performance-capture' animation technology is only coming on stream now." The digital work is being handled by Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, where the trailblazing partial mocap entity Gollum was born.
Cameron describes the techniques they've developed as "a live action, real-time, director-centric performance-capture process. In other words, as the actors perform, I'm able to see in the monitor not only what they might look like as their CG character, but in the CG environment we've created, and direct them accordingly." He hopes that, in the resulting film, the CG elements and CG performances will be indistinguishable from the real.
It's similar to what Fincher is trying to achieve with Benjamin Button. This project involves the title character, played by Brad Pitt, being born an old man and then ageing backwards. To achieve the various versions of Benjamin, from gnomish geriatric to fresh-faced youth, Fincher has used technology that promises to be the next evolutionary step on from performance capture.
Where older performance capture characters - in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or The Polar Express - were somewhat wooden, and lacking in fully expressive faces, the technology used by Fincher offers greater detail and realism. Fincher said, "Instead of grabbing points on a face, you will be able to capture the entire skin. You're going to get all of the enormous detail and the quirks of human expression that you can't plan for." Which is ultimately what it's all about with any on-screen character, be they flesh and blood, animated or the results of performance capture: they have to have the emotional credibility to articulate the story.
Cameron may be a technology pioneer, but as he says, "Filmmaking is not about sprockets. It's about ideas, it's about images, it's about imagination and it's about storytelling."
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