Forum Overview :: Rants :: Re: my thoughts (spoilers duh)

[quote name="ToutSuite"][quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="veronica"]4. Smeagol/Gollum was great. He stole the show. I felt thousands of actors shudder as they feared for their jobs in a few years; who's going to put up with their whiney asses when the producers can just go hire Pixar? [/quote] Uh, you know that Gollum was played by an actor, right? That's why he looks so awesome. The computer generated stuff is layered over his performance in a pretty complicated way. I understand he had to act each scene twice: once with the other actors, once in the studio with those little reflective pads all over the place like Marshal Faulk for Madden 2003.[/quote] A lot of the performance was indeed motion-captured, but there was quite a bit of keyframed animation (ie. by hand) as well. The animators at WETA are top-notch, you'd have to be pretty savvy to discern what was keyframed and what was mo-capped. Most disappointing was that they shot a great "origin of" for Smeagol's transformation into the Gollum, which they then decided later to put in the third film instead. You can even tell when the cut was supposed to happen in Two Towers, and it's letdown when they don't go to it. Actor replacement is a lot more subtle. For example, most of the stunts in "xXx" were performed by stuntmen or extreme sports professionals. In post-production, their heads were replaced with Vin Diesel's. The battle will not be whether or not actors are hired, but what the value of their physical appearance is. For example, if you hire Tom Cruise for Minority Report 2: Majority Report, and you only shoot a 3D scan of his head for a few days, having him make various facial expressions and phonemes, then later animate and composite that over a stuntman who is on the set for the full 60-day shoot, does Cruise still get $20 million? Short answer: yes, because no one is going to go see Joe Stuntman in Minority Report 2, and at least three people are going to go see Tom Cruise in it. And two of them are Tom and Penelope. In practical terms, I'm going to guess that most of what we'll see in Matrix 2 and 3 will be a digital replacement of Keanu Reeves.[/quote]