LO – 05

    The 2004 film, The Polar Express, is a film I am very fond of. It is a film I have watched every year over the holidays since it was released. It brings back memories of when I was younger, the biggest being how I thought it was so cool that they animated the characters after actors, like Tom Hanks as the Conductor (among other characters) and Josh Hutcherson as the Hero Boy (although he didn’t voice him). I didn’t know what it was called at the time, I just remember my older siblings telling me they made the characters look like the voice actors. I know the term now to be called motion-capture (mo-cap), which digitally captures actors movements, features, emotions, etc., with a computerized camera to help develop virtual characters . Director Robert Zemeckis brought on the Sony ImageWorks team to insert actors like Tom Hanks into a CGI environment, called Performance Capture. Performance Capture is an improvement of mo-cap that uses digital cameras with a 360-range to help simultaneously record multiple actors’ facial expressions and body movement. Jerome Chen’s was the visual effects supervisor of ImageWorks who initially worked on the advancement of mo-cap, that was later called Performance Capture (as mentioned above). Along with the mo-cap aspect, there was a lot of time put into the rest of the animations (like the train, etc.). However, the biggest thing that stood out to me when I was younger were the characters. Zemeckis really wanted to articulate the emotion of each character, and with too small a budget to do live action, he turned to mo-cap and created a world that is hard not to love as it gets played every holiday season. To check out more information about the production of this film check out the link below:

Performance Capture CGI Technique In ‘The Polar Express’: An Advance For Animation

And check out the trailer if you’ve never seen The Polar Express: