Motion Capture Sets Realistic Bar for Planet of the Apes
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- June 6, 2014
By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)
There’s a nifty little featurette that shows how director Matt Reeves transformed the talents of actors into the intelligent simian characters for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And the computer generated imagery of the motion capture data is so good, you’d think that these apes have really gained the kind of intelligence to take over Planet Earth. And of course, being motion capture, Andy Serkis is right in the middle of it.
The video is down below and the fact is, that the state-of-the-art has come so incredibly far. I remember watching similar featurettes for motion capture technology on films like 2009′s A Christmas Carol, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and Tron: Legacy starring Jeff Bridges. And of course, Serkis’ stellar work in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and now with Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. At the beginning, the technology started out as rather cartoonish. Better suited for a 3D animated feature rather than live action. For Tron, it got a little better but still fake looking. But the real advancements came as Serkis’ work in TLOR looked better as the movies progressed.
But now, with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there are shots where I am hard pressed to really know that the apes are fake (especially that Orangutan shot, man!). The state of the art just keeps getting better and better, and looking in the eyes of the animated CGI character, you are now starting to actually see the “digital life” behind them. Frankly, we have a long way to go on human CGI characters. The realism just isn’t there. But in the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, you really start to see Serkis’ Caesar, and the other apes, as characters, and not just CGI overlays.
And it got me thinking about another movie that involved apes … Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that, we saw actors in ape costumes, and I believe to this day the quality of their acting really holds up, even if the special effects are a bit dated. Imagine if Kubrick had had MoCap … it would’ve been incredible. Where’s it going from here? Well, Lucasfilm is doing amazing work in real time motion capture encoding. So who knows? But it’s getting better and better.
Hat Tip – Screen Rant
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