robert zemeckis polar express

'The Polar Express' arrives at the cinemas, a new way to do cinema, capturing the performance, from the body and the face of real actors, obtaining a spectacular result. Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, with the help of Ken Ralston and all his team, have made a new step in the world of the animation.

The past June we had the opportunity to visit the studios used by Robert Zemeckis to capture the performance of Tom Hanks and the rest of actors who gave life to all the characters of 'The Polar Express'. Our friend Robert Moutal, who we want to congratulate from here for his four Emmys, made the visit.

After seeing the process of motion capture, that we have already explained to you in past articles, we had the opportunity to speak with Robert Zemeckis, the director, Ken Ralston, the Visual Effects Supervisor, and Steve Starkey, the producer of the film. Next you will find this fantastic interview made with companions of other media.

El Portal del 3D y la Animación - Has this been done before?

Ken Ralston - Actually what Lord of The Rings did is, they did motion capture on the actor but mainly for his body.

The facial stuff they animated it. It was kind of a mixed bag of whatever seemed to work at the time.

Robert Zemekis - So what we have with this technology that we have, is we have a perfect blend of cinema and CGI because you don’t have to key frame-animate everything the actors can perform uninhibited and you can take that raw information and you’re unlimited how you present the story.

What Tom did, what you saw in the room, he did that in real time. Like he was performing in the theater.

And I chose to cover it… to film it for lack of a better word, the way I decided later, where I put my cameras and how I edited it. But if I decided to I could have chosen to do that whole scene in one shot or I could have done it in a thousand shots.

Ken Ralston - Basically all the sets and the actors exist in a virtual world. All the sets are in the computer. What you see there is what we call “chicken wire sets” very minimalistic because we couldn’t block the camera basically taking the motion capture information off of Tom and all the other actors, so we didn’t want any occlusion, which is a word we learned to hate on the shoot.

And once it’s in the computer, you can get any angle you want so Bob could choose any possible… anything he wanted to do, he could do later in, I’ll call it “post” but it really isn’t post at all.

Robert Zemekis - So when you saw the first scene of the movie you’re probably looking at the kid saying “Wow that kid is pretty good”, well, yeah cause I got the greatest actor in the world generating, the emotion and the performance, so I can take that performance and I can make it into a creature, I can make it into a talking car, a talking phone, I can do anything, or I can make it any actor who I decide to scan and wrap his skin around.

3DA - How many characters did he play in the movie?

Robert Zemeckis - 4.

Ken Ralston - What’s interesting in the movie is that all of the main characters are all portrayed by adults. And that’s pretty interesting to then transform that into a child’s performance within the computer and then create a different scale and a different attitude.

Robert Zemekis - We did it in the tradition of Children’s Theater where we get the adult interpretation of what a kid would do. So you have an adult actor who brings a whole lifetime of experience and performance wisdom. It’s like Peter Pan in stage performances where adults play all the children in a wonderful experience that no one ever questions that they are not kids.

3DA - Is there a lot of tweaking after the motion capture involved, especially to make it look like a kid?

Ken Ralston - Actually not. Luckily we have actors that really understood, the mood that they were in and Tom is brilliant no matter what he does, so somehow he’s got the right body language, there’s probably a small amount of tweaking to sort of finesse things. But basically what we got from everything that every one did was a fantastic a great starting point.

Steve Starkey - Even when you saw those dancers, we brought real tap dancers, choreographed it just like we were doing a musical number, and they did every one of those moves, we didn’t have them pour three cups of hot chocolate at once, that’s where Ken helped, but everything else, all the flips, all the jumping up on the table, going up and down everything was done whit real dancers.

3DA - What about the animals?

Steve Starkey - Highly trained motion capture animals. (laughs)

No, that stuff is keyframed by… We have some great animators here...

Robert Zemeckis - (About the sensors) They look and they find all the muscle points of where your face moves basically, and what they do is they do this elaborate grid of the muscular structure of the actor’s face, and they decide where the hinge points are, so you saw on his eyebrows, eyes and eyelids. So wherever he moves his face, whatever he does you’ll see.

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