By Roland Piquepaille
You'll have to wait until 2005 to watch the next Robert Zemeckis movie, "The Polar Express."He will use many new special effects for his future film. For example, he plans to create a younger version of Tom Hanks, who will be in this movie.
P.J. Huffstutter reports from Hollywood.
All of the scenes in "The Polar Express" will be shot with digital cameras in front of a blank screen, with sets to be filled in later by computers. The actors will be covered in motion-capture sensors so that each move of an arm, each flicker of an eyelid and each wrinkle of a lip will be stored on a computer and used as guide for the digital animators who will create the actual movie footage.
Expected to hit theaters in 2004 or 2005 with Hanks again in a starring role, "The Polar Express" is creating a buzz among technophiles, who are fascinated by Zemeckis' grand vision. It's also raising eyebrows among the entertainment industry's labor unions, which are concerned that an all-digital production may cut their members out of the process.
The film, which is about a boy who believes in Santa Claus, will feature many children.
Some of those roles will be filled by actual child actors. But others will be completely virtual, including one who represents Hanks' conductor character as a boy. The crew has spent nearly a year experimenting on ways to map Hanks' current facial and muscle structure. They plan to mix that data with photographs of the actor in his youth and backward engineer a virtual child that will resemble the adult Hanks.
"This is an ambitious, exciting project for us," said Martin Shafer, chairman and chief executive of Castle Rock Entertainment, the studio behind the movie. "We've seen the early tests, and it's like nothing I've ever seen."
These new special effects won't come cheap.
Studio executives say the budget is set around $150 million.
But some project insiders and technology experts insist that this is a low-ball figure, and that the sums involved could easily grow to rival the likes of "Titantic," [Note: This is really what is written in the article.] "Pearl Harbor" and "Waterworld," turning "The Polar Express" into one of the most expensive movies ever made. One of the reasons for that is, with shooting scheduled to begin in less than three months, some of the high-tech tools needed to make the film are still being developed.
So don't buy your seat yet!
Source: P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2002 (Free registration required)
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