Robert Zemeckis may just be the father of the performance-capture, 3-D mania sweeping through Hollywood.
His "Polar Express" inspired DreamWorks animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg to declare, "It was the most exciting experience I'd had in a movie theater."
Before adapting the beloved children's book in 2004, Zemeckis had such diverse films to his credit as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the Tom Hanks tours de force, "Forrest Gump" and "Cast Away."
Then came "The Polar Express," which incorporated Hanks into multiple roles, the animated epic "Beowulf" and now "A Christmas Carol," in theaters.
Through the magic of performance-capture, Jim Carrey is rendered as eight characters, including perhaps the most portrayed and parodied Dickens character of all, Ebenezer Scrooge.
Zemeckis told a Comic-Con International audience in San Diego that not everything works in this format that he has worked so feverishly to perfect. For instance, in confirming that a sequel to "Roger Rabbit" was afoot, he said that the cartoon characters would continue along a 2-D path (although the humans might meet a computer-generated fate).
"A Christmas Carol," though, was a perfect fit, he said.
"If you read the actual novel, it's really very trippy. It's really surreal, and it's really cool, and it's very cinematic. I actually thought that we finally now have the filmmaking tools to realize what Dickens actually wrote, so I thought a re-visioning of it would be really fun to do."
Zemeckis was the first featured speaker at a Disney 3-D panel at the July convention, where he discussed the process with comedian and moderator Patton Oswalt (the voice of Remy in "Ratatouille").
Oswalt kept the discussion fanboy-friendly, pointing out that Carrey is now tied with Alec Guinness ("Kind Hearts and Coronets") for most roles by a single actor in a film.
Here's some of Oswalt's back-and-forth with Zemeckis:
Oswalt, pointing to a screen where the characters Carrey plays are displayed: "That is amaz ... that's Jim Carrey as a little kid. Oh my God! That's just freaky. So let's just get your reaction to the phrase 'dead eyes and the uncanny valley.' Let's get that over with right now."
R.Z.: "'The uncanny valley' is a term that was coined for robots, for mechanical people, for animatronic dolls. I don't think it was ever intended to be used for cinema. I see a lot of uncanny valley in your everyday movie. I see it when you have a kind of a mediocre actor ..."
P.O.: "Hey!" (Audience laughter)
R.Z.: "... and you can see him trying to remember his lines, and it takes you out of the movie? That's pretty uncanny valley. Prosthetics -- which is the only tool we had until the invention of digital cinema to take an actor to turn him into a character or creature or age him -- I think you're looking at that and going it's kind of real, but not quite. So in the illusion of cinema, the uncanny valley is an artistry thing. It has nothing to do with technique. It has nothing to do with the art form that we're birthing here, so let's not strangle the baby in the crib."
P.O.: "Yeah, just 'cause the technology isn't completely perfect the first time out, then you shouldn't go, 'Well, we're just not going to do it.' ... You're basically making the path by walking it."
R.Z.: "When guys started painting with oils, there were a lot of artists who ... avoided having to paint the eyes. Until a guy like Rembrandt came around, and he did it pretty well. ...
"I think we've gotten very close to perfecting this. And it comes from artistry. It has nothing to do with the technology. We've learned how to light these eyes; we've learned how to put reflections in; we've learned how to paint the highlights. And we have the technology now to learn how to read the movement of the retina perfectly. So it's actually really happening."
The collision of technology and artistry brings to mind several references to Scrooge's "altered spirit" in this new version of "A Christmas Carol." Filmmakers like Zemeckis are on the cutting edge of altering reality and molding it to their vision.
The rest is in the eye of the moviegoer.
(Sharon Eberson can be reached at seberson(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Post new comment