THE POLAR EXPRESS, TOM HANKS AND 21st CENTURY CINEMA SUPER-DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
In these photos released by Warner Bros. Pictures, Oscar winning actor Tom Hanks is shown wearing digital sensors on his head, hands and face in the left image, as he performs a scene from Warner Bros. Pictures "Polar Express." The image at right is the final digital rendering of Hanks' character in the digitally animated film.
Tom Hanks used experimental technology to morph into a little boy, a train conductor, a hobo and Santa Claus for the new Christmas adventure The Polar Express. This is how he was able to co-star with himself: the two-time Oscar-winner climbed into something like a black wetsuit lined with neon-blue streaks and a tight cap, and had hundreds of glistening white specks on his face. Computers recorded his movements and expressions, which were then transposed onto his various characters. With just a few more technological evolutions, The Polar Express may change the way people consider performance -- actors would no longer constrained by their own bodies. Harrison Ford could be 80 and still playing a young Indiana Jones. Sean Connery could play himself circa Dr. No in a new James Bond movie. Jack Nicholson could star as a 16-year-old, and Haley Joel Osment could play a geriatric. Actors could swap and trade digital bodies: Tom Cruise could perform as Humphrey Bogart; Julia Roberts could try Rita Hayworth.
Photo: A scene from The Polar Express.
Or Eddie Murphy could easy play every character in a film -- old, young, heavy, skinny, white, black, male, female -- without any makeup or prosthetics. The Polar Express director Robert Zemeckis, renowned for using state-of-the-art effects in his films like the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cast Away, said he got the idea to use the technology about four years ago when Hanks sent him a copy of the beloved 1985 children's book by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg. The actor wanted to see if it could be made into a film, but the problem was that the emotion of the book was in the paintings; that more than the story Van Allsburg's illustrations were what made the book popular. "I looked at these beautiful paintings and said, 'It's great but how are we going to do a movie like this?'" Zemeckis said. "We never thought it was appropriate for The Polar Express to be an animated cartoon. And to do it live action would not be absolutely true to the emotion of the book. So we came up with this process that we called performance capture. It's digitally rendered, but there's no animation." By that method they were able to create the soft pastel imagery of Van Allsburg's book through computer technology but the characters were not manipulated by animators to coincide with the actors' voices.
"Everything
you see (in The Polar Express) performed by a human being was performed by a
human being on a soundstage," says Hanks. The sensors on Hanks' suit and face
were recorded as he moved around a mostly vacant room, and those gestures and
expressions were layered with a digital skin that moved in relation to the
actor. "There's no reason to do a movie like Mystic River this way," Zemeckis
said. "But there is the chance now to let imagination run wild." Motion
capture computerization became familiar to most moviegoers when actor Andy
Serkis controlled the movements of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and it's a
common technique used on sports figures like Tiger Woods to animate their own
moves in video games. But the subtleties of human expression are so delicate
that most eye, mouth and face movement traditionally have been left to
animators, who frequently work from tapes of the actors. The Polar Express
pushed the technology into a new dimension by mapping the areas of Hanks' face
with 152 sensors, so his instinctual movements control the faces of his
characters. "Believe it or not, the information would extend to a computer so
you could tell the difference between a frown and a smile, eyes wide open,
essentially every nuance that the human face can go through," Hanks said.
Occasionally one of the BB-sized sensors would fall off, Hanks said, which the
computers rendered as if Santa's cheek or eyebrow suddenly stretching down to
touch the floor. Computer animators did come into the scene, however, to "take
what we did and turn it into a little boy outside with snow falling down,"
Hanks said Three other adults play children in the movie -- Hanks' Bosom
Buddies co-star Peter Scolari, The Matrix Reloaded actress Nona Gaye and Eddie
Deezen, the nerdy character actor who was Eugene in Grease. "It was ridiculous
amounts of fun," Hanks said. "You just kind of have to forget an awful lot of
stuff that you know as an adult and take part, literally, in the recess
atmosphere." Some movie critics have complained that the human characters in
The Polar Express continue to have a plastic, lifeless quality compared to
actual flesh and blood performance -- which suggests filmmakers still have a
way to go before pure imagination acting becomes practical. One sticking point
in the process that couldn't be fixed in The Polar Express was Hanks' voice.
While Deezen and Gaye supply their young characters' voices, Hanks and Scolari
are dubbed by child actors. Zemeckis said he tried digitally altering the
pitch and tone of Hanks' voice to play the boy, but couldn't make him sound
like a believable child.It's Hanks' movements and expressions, but Daryl
Sabara -- the curly haired star of Spy Kids -- supplied the voice. "The visual
aspect of movies is beyond imagination," Hanks said, "but the sound is pretty
much the same as in (Al) Jolson's time." AP
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