Motion Capture Quotes

When Tim and I first discussed the part in 2003, he told me, 'I'd love for you to play five Oompas.' But five Oompas quickly turned into 165 - and they're not computerized; I did each one individually myself.

I would love to do some motion capture work just to be able to challenge myself.

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

What we do sometimes when we're in the sessions recording the dialogue is we'll set up a video camera and we'll video the whole session. So then the animator, if he wants, can draw upon those tapes to pull expressions, mouth shapes, maybe some gesturing that happens.

My respect for animation has gone way up. It's a truckload of work. I have to sit with my animators the same way I'd sit with my actors and cast them.

I punch a lot of guys on set. It's much easier than in real life as your hands don't hurt afterwards. The key is that you miss.

'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

I'm an actor. Whether I'm on stage, in front of a camera or a microphone, what I do is the same - although with videogames it requires a lot of imagination.

The difference between 'Resident Evil: Damnation' and 'Resident Evil 6' is in 'Resident Evil 6' we did facial mo-cap, along with the voice over. We had these little reflectors glued to our faces and these head pieces in this room filled with light with about 40 cameras.

In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.

Working with Scorsese was an absolute dream, and one of my favourite ever jobs was 'Beowulf' because it was just pure acting. Your imagination explodes as you try to imagine you're fighting a dragon or whatever.

Mo-cap work is less technical than you'd expect. Once you have it all set up you're free to do the whole scene in one take rather than doing a lot of different shots and different takes like you do in a movie. You've got that one go at it and you've got a lot of freedom. You can really express yourself - more like doing theatre than doing a movie.

Andy Serkis is one of the best actors I have ever worked with. He might be the best actor I have ever worked with.

A live action movie is work, and an animated movie is you showing up in your pajamas once every three months, or in my case, just a splash of baby powder. It's not any kind of heavy lifting.

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.

Are we blasphemous in saying that 2-D is largely a thing of the past, and computer-generated animation is the present and future? It's all about creating a better experience for the viewer - and that includes 3-D.

Originally, I thought, 'Gollum's such a fantastic character, why are you doing him CG? Surely you need to be able to humanise him as much as possible - he's so full of pathos and real emotion.'

With the advanced editing technologies, it's not difficult to play double roles these days. It can be done easily.

In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.

We're always striving to make Avatar look like a cinematic, live-action movie.

What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies.

I think it's the most extraordinary studio around. I would love to do my next project with Pixar.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

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.