"Capture is approaching the power of film in its ability to record a performance."
(Pascal Langlois)
"I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation," said Spielberg, who used James Cameron's Avatar performance capture technology in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. "It's basically the actual performance of the actual actor, and what you're simply experiencing is makeup."
(Steven Spielberg)
Toronto-based actor and convergence consultant Pascal Langlois of Motives in Movement originally trained at RADA, and continues to perform in traditional forms, but also collaborates with cutting-edge facial software providers and performance capture companies. Here he demonstrates Performer, some very cool new video-based markerless facial tracking software from Dynamixyz, in a demo created in collaboration with Morro Images and the late George Orwell:
In his article "Acting in a Helmet: New tech means more to play with", Langlois describes some of the challenges that face a capture actor, including "physical discomfort, the challenge of imagining entire environments, the broken up nature of the shoot itself... [and] performing for a different morphology." (And a donkey's head is even further from human morphology than, say, Gollum or King Kong.)
"I’m interested in anything that improves the quality of actor-based animated performances, and the likelihood of an actor’s subtle behaviors and idiosyncracies making it to the screen. Everything from dramatic dialogue, to basic ranged movements (repeated behaviours – walking, crouching etc.) can benefit from actors that understand the medium they are working in, as much as they would film or theatre. It’s the small behavioral chaos that actors bring to a subjective experience of a narrative that brings nuanced drama and engagement, and it is here we’ll prove to deserve our place to be respected in the medium." ("Capturing Actors: The Future of Acting in Capture-Based Animation")