Thursday, March 27, 2008

Bots Over Bodies...


It's kind of ironic that another movie featuring MoCap is coming from Robert Zemeckis via the Mouse...

It seems the man has abandoned film making with actors in favor of living in a world where he only has to deal with actors for a few weeks instead of months. I'm beginning to think that what one Hollywood insider told me could be true. Zemeckis has simply gotten tired of dealing the demands and idiosyncrasies of actors. He hasn't abandoned film, but appears more and more he's abandoned actors as part of the process. At the very least he's limited his involvement with them to as little time as possible. I guess the experiences he's had over the last two decades have had him say "enough is enough".

Well, enough of my rantings...

Michael Dougherty("X2",Superman Returns") is attached to direct the performance capture sci-fi adventure "Calling All Robots" for Walt Disney Pictures and Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers production shingle. The film is described to be in the vein of the 50's Sci-Fi monster movies ala "Godzilla"... so that aspect of it could be pretty cool, but I wish they'd quit trying to create realistic representations of actors. I think this could be accomplished easily, and um... better using the real thing. It's one thing to create a creature like Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings", but to try and recreate something we see throughout our entire life, everyday is almost impossible. It's a monumental, mostly impossible task to cheat the human eye when it comes to realistic humans. Hopefully, the characters in this film will be stylised representations, not realistic depictions.

Here's hoping this is going to be good. No, scratch that. Here's hoping I'm wrong and it's great...

5 comments:

hamletprimeiro said...

This project seems very interesting.
Dougherty is a good writer. (Yes, I think that Superman Returns is great). I believe that this team can make a really good movie.

Rogério,
São Paulo, Brazil

Anonymous said...

You think Superman Returns is great??? Discredited right there.

Some nice shots. A few scenes that worked. As a full movie? Boring. I was so looking forward to Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor and he was blaaaah. If Bryan Singer wants to know how to do a Superman movie he should go talk to Bruce Timm.

BC Morris said...

If Zemeckis really didn't want to work with actors anymore, he'd pull a George Lucas and work with animators most of the time.

Instead, he keeps doing MoCap work with plenty of actors. Big name actors too! Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, etc.

It's not that he doesn't like actors. It's that he doesn't like the physical limitations of sets. Watch Contact again, and just pay attention to how often the camera moves independently of where walls should be.

Anonymous said...

With the MoCap he only has to deal with actors for weeks instead of months. Mr. Zemeckis is known to have said that after he captures their performance he can get on with making "his" movie and not have to deal with the crap he's had to from actors on the sets.

Anonymous said...

I'd have to agree with "BC's" comments above. This is probably more to do with limitations of sets and uncontrolability of environments on-location.
Although, he could probably do green screen type stuff and have the best of both worlds (a la "Sin City" "300" etc.) So maybe there is some credence to the "doesn't like working with actors" theory.
I think Motion Capture might be the way to go with this particular movie however, so maybe its just the "type" of movie he'd like MoCap for.