A Quote by John Knoll
When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting.
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Motion-capture is not a genre. Motion-capture is a tool and technique and what we tried to do was to really use both motion-capture and traditional animation to build a system.
I don't ever want to do a movie where you shoot it on a motion capture stage. I just don't like taking the reality out of it. I like being on the set in real environments. I don't like shooting on green screen. I think it gives the actors so much more to play with when there's real stuff happening on the set.
If you're in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared - it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.
'Mars Needs Moms' was motion capture, where you walk into a space that's essentially a black box with cameras everywhere. It was so technical. You have these mandibles with cameras on your face and a helmet, and you have to hit certain marks. You couldn't shoot this stuff without the green-screen aspect.
When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.
Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.
Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.
Motion capture is amazing. I prefer it. You wear a 'Power Ranger'-esque suit, you have tape balls on you, you have 60 cameras around you capturing your every movement and there's no hair, no makeup.
I'd been working on more traditional movie sets and TV shows at Universal. All of a sudden, here we're on location in Animal House, and it's down and dirty and quick. It was the way the new commercial world was shooting; the way the indie world was shooting. These were lighter, faster cameras. It was a generational change.
Once you're on the set and shooting, it's all just cinema. You have actors and cameras.
Tim Miller's idea of Colossus was to be bigger and stronger than everyone else, so for the motion capture, they needed an extremely tall man. I'm 6-foot-4, but he wanted Colossus to be over 7 feet, so they used a stunt double to recreate his height, and he did very good job there.
I didn't so much think I needed to address the shooting need. What we needed was somebody who could come in and play the two-three (shooting guard-small forward) spot. If he could've been a pure shooter, great. But if not, we still needed somebody to give us minutes there. I like the guys we've got.
I like using snapshot cameras because they're idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I'm no good at focusing big cameras.
The lighting is so important. One thing that makes me nuts about the lighting now is that they spend an enormous amount of time lighting the set, the background. But the most important thing in the scene is the actor.
One thing that is very different technically is that you don't get a lot of coverage in television. Not like you do on a film. I know we don't have time for separate set-ups, so I will design a scene where I'm hiding multiple cameras within that set-up. That way, if I don't have time to do five set-ups, I can do four cameras in one set-up. It's a different kind of approach for that. For the most part, a lot of television, in a visual sense, lacks time for the atmosphere and putting you in a place.
I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film.
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