#MOTION CAPTURE MOVIE#

Much of the movie action surrounds a community of 2000 apes, living in a rainforest-like environment. It’s a complicated business and has historically taken place in a studio or, at the most extreme, a small and contained outdoor area, where lighting, shadows, and reflections that could impede the tracking of the markers can be carefully controlled.īut the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, being released into theaters on 11 July took motion capture into the wild, with more than 85 percent of the movie shot outside the studio, in forests near Vancouver and in various outdoor locations near New Orleans. Animators later adjust the movements to better match them to ape physiology. Later, animators correlate the data about the marker locations with the same points on virtual characters-like shoulders, knees, and feet.Īfter it is imported into the computer system, the data about the movement of the markers becomes a connect-the-dots representation of how the human actor moved that drives the digital characters. A motion capture movie set also uses a handful of regular high resolution video cameras to record the overall scene for the director and others involved in the production to use as reference. The technology uses a network of carefully calibrated monochrome cameras that track the movements of reflective markers attached to key spots on the bodies of actors and then use built-in processors to extract the precise coordinates of the markers. It has also let moviemakers digitally tweak human characters, aging Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Motion capture enables moviemakers to create realistic non-human characters-including Gollum in Lord the Rings, the Na’vis of Avatar, and the intelligent chimpanzees and orangutans of Rise of the Planet the Apes. And, for the first time in my knowledge, it's the performances of the motion capture actors, not the regular actors portraying humans, that are getting all the good reviews from critics there is even talk of the first best-actor Oscar nomination for a motion-capture performance. That's because his performance in the woods (actually, forests near Vancouver, not San Francisco) wasn't fillmed traditionally, it was motion captured, and used as a framework for a computer-created realistic digital ape, Caesar. In fact, if you passed the leading man of Dawn- Andy Serkis-on the street, you wouldn't recognize his face at all, for you never see it on the screen. And long enough that moviemakers no longer need to give a recognizable Hollywood star top billing to bring in audiences.

Long enough to create computer graphics gear robust enough to take out of the studio and deep into a real forest.

In the world of motion picture technology, though, that's an eternity. But in real time, it's been just three years since the Rise movie. The tension between the two societies drives the action-packed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the 2011 Rise of the Planet the Apes that starred James Franco.Īs this sequel begins, Franco's character has been dead for a decade, and the apes have had plenty of time to create their version of civilization. The men and women who survived a deadly virus that wiped out much of earth's human population hunker down amidst the ruins of San Francisco meanwhile, a growing ape population has built a lovely and thriving community outside of San Francisco in Muir Woods.