Performing for Motion Capture

A Guide for Practitioners

John Dower, Pascal Langdale

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350211285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Want to be the next Andy Serkis as Gollum in Lord of the Rings? Or Zoe Saldana in Avatar? How about Seth MacFarlane in Ted? Or do you want to star in video games such as Fortnite, Call of Duty or Halo? If so, this book will tell you everything you need to know about acting for motion capture.
This is the first book to provide an invaluable resource for the education of the next generation of performers in this exciting medium. Over the last 10 years, a revolution has occurred in digital production - video games have overtaken the film and TV industries in terms of production and revenues. Many video games derive their digital animation from human performance by means of motion and performance capture. Actors such as Andy Serkis and Troy Baker have won critical acclaim for their digital performance in games and film. The book includes contributions from practitioners working across the globe, including: actor Kezia Burrows; software developer Stéphane Dalbera; director Kate Saxon; a group of Japanese games directors; Jeremy Meunier, Head of Motion Capture at Moov studios, Montreal; Marc Morisseau, motion editor for Avatar; and a Chinese Motion Capture suit manufacturer.

1

What is motion capture?

JOHN DOWER AND PASCAL LANGDALE

To know what to do in the motion capture studio (‘the volume’) you need knowledge and understanding, just as you would if acting for the camera or the stage. Motion capture (mocap) is simply a new and unique acting medium and this book is going to give you the tools to create compelling and believable characters in the volume. We will explain what motion capture is, the similarities and differences between other performance media and how it fits into the digital production process. In doing so, we’ll look at the history and development of the medium with a brief explanation on how it works. We’ll then give a snapshot on how it is evolving and being used increasingly in video games, films, television, virtual reality and live events. We hope that you will start to appreciate that if you don’t get an understanding of this medium, there is a danger you will be left behind.

Contributors – Stéphane Dalbera (mocap supervisor, mocap consultant), Jeremy Meunier (motion capture lead at MOOV, Squeeze Animation) and Gilles Monteil (realization director, animator, movement specialist, Ubisoft Montpellier).

What made you pick up this book? What has brought students flocking to acting for mocap classes worldwide? Is this a fad, an acting medium that will soon be proved an ‘imposter’ or one that deserves its own Oscar category?

There has been much hubris and dismissal of the art of performing for motion capture from industry figures around the world. Outrageous claims of what mocap can do and what it means are often met with eyebrow raises from doubters and equally arrogant shakes of the head from evangelists.

We position ourselves in the middle of these arguments. As open-minded practitioners we are less interested in the hype but more in what this new medium actually offers and how best to work with it.

We argue in this book there are some truths about motion capture performance that are regularly ignored, foremost of which is that it is an acting medium in its own right. An acting medium that exists inside digital virtual production, which is transforming the way humans tell stories.

What is different about working in motion capture as a performer? What exactly is digital and virtual production? Our book will set out to answer these questions and many more, giving you acting advice, exercises and technical understanding from both an actor’s and a director’s perspective.

Some chapters are written by a director, some by an actor, giving you a sense of how our individual experiences have shaped our approaches. We believe that this gives the book a unique strength given that mocap demands a much greater cross discipline collaboration, as different departments can have an equal say about what is desired, or even possible, in performance. No performer’s character creation is untouched by other creators, making the director’s perspective the vital bridge between animator and performer.

There are chapters that will speak more directly to actors and performers, some that will also speak to directors wishing to get into mocap, to animators wishing to improve their directing skills and to technicians hoping to get more of a sense of how to help create good performances. We think the book will appeal to creatives working in several different areas of mocap production.

However, we also hope to give an overview, an objective sense of the medium, by demystifying and explaining the basics, drawing on the experiences and expertise of established practitioners – actors, animators, directors, technicians and wizards working in motion capture. Read this book and we think you will agree that motion capture is the performance medium of its time.

Motion capture is a medium in its own right

So, what differentiates performing in motion capture from performing on the stage, or for the camera? For Andy Serkis acting for motion capture is ‘pure acting’ because it requires huge leaps of imagination and commitment to an imagined world. In motion capture, you can play anything – a human, an ape, a monster, even a tree! Your body can drive any conceivable character or ‘rigged’ object. Your looks, skin colour, age and even sometimes gender are irrelevant because your likeness is usually not being captured – your movement, your motion, is.

So, where do we start our training? Just as we would not expect a stage actor to start immediately working on a stage, or a film actor in front of a camera, we always start with our students in a rehearsal room so they can absorb what mocap requires of them – for it truly is an acting medium in its own right.

For mocap supervisor Stéphane Dalbera, the definition of the performance in mocap is ‘to respect the dynamic of motion’. For Jeremy Meunier, mocap is ‘a way to express feelings through body and facial language’. Purely technically, mocap is the capture of human-derived movement for analysis and use in digital production. So, how does it work? How does it record the performer’s movement? What is preserved? What is discarded? By the end of this chapter, you will have a clear idea of what mocap is, how it works, why you need to consider taking it further and what this book will offer you.

So, hold on to your hats! We will be deconstructing and redefining what acting is. Actors often define themselves by the medium they tend to work in and though there is a certain amount of movement between stage and screen, many actors specialize in one area and define themselves as such. Moreover, we live in a social media dominated world that often defines performers, animators, directors and other creatives by their appearance, thus creating a known brand for their work. Actors get cast for body type, by gender, race, age, looks. However, mocap looks past almost all of that and allows the actor to inhabit completely different characters from themselves. Let’s go back in the history of acting to see what we can take as inspiration for our approach to performing for mocap.

A long time ago, the body was accepted as a vessel to communicate with the Gods. The Greeks and Romans invented mime and played it for centuries in big arenas, where the talking was done by the ‘choir’. However, as religions progressed in the West, the body began to be increasingly seen as taboo. An exception can be seen in a form such as pantomime, which appeared when actors who were performing caricatures were forbidden to speak on stage. When silent movies came about, physical bodily expression was briefly the paramount skill required until the talkies arrived in the 1930s and the voice took precedence. Only in animation, born at the same time as cinema, did the body survive as a main vessel of expression. In acting, the knowledge and understanding of body movement technique – at least in the West – was long constrained by religious belief in the weakness, immodesty and untrustworthiness of the flesh, and later its subservient position to the higher value of mind and psychology.

Figure 1.1 Physical transformation has existed since we began telling stories. Masks have been used for centuries as a way of creating character in theatre. Complementary physicality is essential. (Dogon dance mask from Mali, Noh Theatre, Japan, Commedia Dell’ Arte and Greek Theatre mask. Artwork by Eden Bø Dower.)

However, it was only ever possible to push it away into the margins. While Noh Theatre has been performed along the same physical rules for hundreds of years, Europe had the chaotic improvised physical archetypes of Commedia. That style persisted into, for example, Molière plays and then found an explosion of opportunity in silent movies.

As an example, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to have a competition to see who could make a movie with the fewest expository and speech cards. This was because they prided themselves on being able to effectively tell a complete story through physicality and facial expression of all the characters on the screen.¹ The advent of sound in films changed all that, so acting became more inward, or what we might call ‘inside-out’. Head of animation at Ubisoft and movement expert, Gilles Monteil points out that, then:

The talkies prioritised text at the expense of action. When the silent era was replaced by the introduction of sound, the technological change completely changed acting technique. However, the tradition of movement was kept alive by animators. With the advent of motion capture, there is a new era of actors finding the importance of actions in acting. The tradition and knowledge exist, but there remains no acting school for motion capture actors. Many actors do not have the tools, teaching or precedents to know how to perform in it.

Our challenge is to inspire and educate a new generation of digital performers, to be part of a movement which proves to actors that acting for mocap is real acting and takes great skill, ability and dedication to achieve.

Digital and virtual production

Motion capture technology has developed to what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is motion capture?
• 2 The body
• 3 Imaginary environments
• 4 Mocap is an animated medium
• 5 Building a character in motion capture
• 6 Video game locomotion
• 7 Cinematics
• 8 Direction and the lack of it
• 9 The industry – finding your place in a new medium
• 10 What will the landscape be in ten years’ time? A low wager bet between professional futurists …
• Appendix: Chapter by Chapter Summary
• Index
• Copyright