© 2004 by John Varley; all rights reserved

There are some truly amazing advantages to this technology. Tom Hanks was able to play three characters, sometimes with himself. He plays a child (someone else did the voice), and in fact all the child stars are played by adults. But from a technical standpoint there was something else even more amazing. All the sets were bare-bones, no detail at all, with wire frames representing walls and many objects, sort of like a low-budget theatrical performance. Actors wore motion-capture suits including 150 tiny sensors on their faces. And they could play out a scene in its entirety. You may not realize just how revolutionary this is. If you’ve ever been on a set, you know that 90% of the time, maybe even 95%, is spent setting up the camera and lighting the scene. And you have to do it multiple times for most scenes: establishing shots, two-shots, close-ups, dolly shots, usually all of the above for each scene. And each shot has to be lit differently.

With wireframe scenery and capture suits, you don’t need any of that. The position of every sensor, both stationary and moving, is recorded to the millimeter by a computer. The human “frames” are then covered with “skins,” then the scenery is filled in. No lights at all are needed on the set; the lighting sources are established within the computer. If you don’t like one set-up, you can tinker with it later. Then you simply play the scene, just as you’d do it on a theater stage. And you can have any camera angle you want! Do the scene right just once, and the whole scene is in the can. And if you happen to get it perfect in rehearsal ... you can use that! The “cameras” are always running, because there really is no camera. Just computer memory that will be elaborated later. You can improvise to your heart’s delight. None of this “Lights! Camera! Action!” and a clickboard to synchronize the sound. That’s all gone. Just, “Okay, folks, take your positions again and run through it once more.” If you need an acrobatic stunt (and from the trailer, Polar has a bunch) just put the actor on wires, and you don’t even have to go back and remove them. The wire simply isn’t there to the computer, because there are no sensors on it.

I’m just scratching the surface of the possibilities here. Think about it for just a few minutes and I’m sure you’ll see dozens of others.

I have to add something here. A good friend of mine was alarmed at the announcement of Sky Captain. He was worried that a lot of skilled professionals were going to be thrown out of work. I see his point, but I don’t see any reason to be alarmed. I mean, it’s not like this all-blue-screen idea sneaked up on us. All big blockbusters these days have many, many minutes that are entirely CGI. Some skilled pros have already been made obsolete, many years ago ... or, more accurately, had to find something else to do. I’m thinking of glass-shot painters, like my friend Albert Whitlock. From the days of Melies the glass shot has been a cheap way to make a grand scene grander. Say you want to build a street in Victorian London. You build the first floor false fronts, fill the streets with costumed actors, carriages, and horses, and you set the camera up behind a big piece of plate glass. Someone like Albert paints in the upper stories, the sky, distant buildings, curls of smoke. Saved a bundle. But you couldn’t move the camera. Now it’s standard to put that stuff in by computer, and you can move anywhere you want.

So what’s the problem? Most movies are still going to be made with real sets and un-CGIed actors. The creative people will still have plenty of work: somebody had to draw those sets that will be blue-screened in later, they don’t draw themselves. I assume Albert Whitlock did that for a while (he died in ’99).

And this sort of thing has sure happened before. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but sometime in the ‘80s or ‘90s really big-name stars began voicing animated features. A Shark Tale stars Robert de Niro, Renee Zellwegger, Will Smith, and (no kidding) Martin Scorsese as a blowfish. Pretty much all the new animation features do that now. And you know, there used to be a whole bunch of people who made their living voicing cartoons. People you may have heard of, like Mel Blanc, Hans Conried, Sterling Holloway, and Stan Freberg, and lesser known but very talented people like June Foray, Dawes Butler, Peter Leeds, Paul Frees, and Jesse White. Somehow it just doesn’t seem fair that rich, beautiful people who have made it already by being attractive have now taken away jobs from people whose voices were all they had.

But that’s life.

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