Avatar lovers mark your calendars. The special effects team (Weta Digital) behind the most successful movie of all time has come back with a much anticipated project. On August 5th, 2011, humanity will be conquered as The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a prequel to the Planet of the Apes series from the 1960s and '70s, will be released. As with Avatar, the movie uses "mocap", the method in which a 3D movie is made by attaching reflective markers to the skin in order to identify the bony landmarks and the 3D motion of the body segments. This requires the movie cast to record each scene three times the same exact way. The movie will star the up-and-coming James Franco who in a recent interview talked about the difficulty of acting in a mocap movie:
Yeah, well, I kind of have that discussion in my head. You can rebel against it or just complain about this process or I can just go with it and understand that it's what's necessary to make this kind of movie. When Andy's there, it's great, it's akin to a regular acting experience, he's a performer and I roll with it, and then, when he's not there, I guess I justify it, you think it's the death of acting, but you know there are plenty of stage plays where you talk to no one or you are using your imagination in a similar way and you have to create an imaginary world in front of you and react to it, if its there. So not necessarily the death of acting as we know it, I tell myself. It's just physical memory and emotional memory and I try and, as an actor, the process is basically you have your motivation as a character and your reacting to the other characters. Both of those things kind of combine and that's how a scene arises and so when I'm acting with no one, I try and have that motivation still but I guess I just try and conjure him in my imagination so that I can still kind of react off him as he was behaving.
