Motion Capture scene is in the can!
That's Eric Furie helping me apply the facial markers to my actor, Frank, prior to shooting my scene last week. Here's what it's been like in my head leading up to this.
Wow, this is totally rad. I am going to love this!
I've had famous people teach or guest on classes here before, but Robert Zemeckis ranks very highly on my list of inspiring, helpful instructors. Aside from the cool rush of actually getting to pitch the story I wanted to shoot to him, he gave some of the best story/script feedback I've ever gotten from a teacher here, and it improves the final scene tremendously. That said, he and Eric have also been very patiently helping us re-train our brains. There are a lot of things about motion capture that are closer to theater than film, which is awesome for me because I spent my formative years very heavily involved in theater. So this mode of thinking is very natural for me and something I feel more instinctively suited for than traditional film production.
Oh geez, we're shooting WHEN?!! I don't know how to use the system yet! I don't have actors! I'm going SECOND?!! We don't know what we're doing yet! I'm SCREWED.
And we did come in a little hot. But fortunately, I've been getting some really good lessons in scoping myself down this year. And I wrote a scene that makes good use of the technology but isn't going to ruin my life. My scene is probably one of the more subtle ones in terms of content in the class, but my interests in the technology are very close to Bob's: I'm very interested to see how close we are to getting subtle, human performaces -> so my scene is written and the shoot was set up to get really clean facial data and was rehearsed heavily to coax a natural but energetic performance out of the scene. I approached it totally theatrically. I got myself the best, most expressive actors I knew who can do all kinds of great things with their face and body language, and we treated it like a stage performance.
My experiment: I think that slight amount of over-acting that you do for the people in the balcony of a theater is what you want to shoot for using the current technology. A little exaggeration seems to make a big difference. Definitely what we saw of Beowulf so far leads me to believe that film acting is too subtle to really translate well.
I think it worked. Also, I want to make movies this way.
I'll blog about this more, but shooting this - the scene is one of the best I've ever done. Great actors did a lot, a script I'm proud of helped, but technically, the way we make motion capture overcomes many of the limitations I have personally as a filmmaker. It went really well. More soon.