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At the vanguard of directors championing the digital image, Robert Zemeckis gets animated over A Christmas Carol. FOCUS listens in.
As well as you might know the story of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol it's fair to say you have never seen it told in quite the way Robert Zemeckis manages in his latest film.
This is in part due to the Hollywood director's grasp of the motion capture technology he successfully deployed on previous films The Polar Express and Beowulf. Now combined with Disney's RealD 3D process it brings Dickens' story to life as never before.
“One of the things that I found very interesting about reading the story when I was very young was the descriptive imagery that Dickens puts in his writing,” Zemeckis explains. “And it has never been truly realised in the way I think that he might have imagined it.
“We've really never had the tools to do such a large rendition of it. Even the characters are, I think, stylised in an interesting way. They're a bit surreal in the way they're described. Now we have a tool to bring an illustrated version of it to life.”
This technology is not just a toy for the director to play with, it also offers fresh opportunities for actors.
“The wonderful thing about this digital process,” Jim Carrey notes, “is that I can be cast in films I would never ordinarily be cast in. If I have it in my soul to play the character it doesn't matter what my face looks like, or what my age is. So it's really liberating.”
So it is that Carrey can play Scrooge in childhood, teens, adult life, middle and old age as well as portraying the three spirits who visit the curmudgeon one Christmas eve.
Performance is achieved by the cast acting out their roles dressed not in their Victorian period costumes but the figure hugging, ego crushing jumpsuits that make the motion capture process possible.
Covered in sensors they enable the camera to record a digital image through 360 degrees of movement, giving the actor full control over how their character reacts and interacts with his environment.
It then allows the director to render the image within a digitally created environment, styling the characters in different ways as he does so. In this regard it is a high end, highly sophisticated form of animation and definitely not a cartoon.
Above all else the actors actually act within it, rather than simply voicing characters created by animators. “The press continually use the ‘voice performance' description,” Zemeckis sighs wearily, “but it couldn't be further from the truth. We have a complete performance from the actors here.”
Ever since making his name with the Back To The Future series, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Oscar winning Forrest Gump the director's fascination with technology – on screen and behind the scenes – has been clear. But he speaks of digital cinema with the passion of an evangelist.
“The thing I love the most about it is that you're only limited by your imagination,” he explains. “You're not restricted by the physical laws of nature. You don't have to worry about physically moving a 50lb camera through space, or worry about shadows or rigging or things like that.
“Digital cinema, for me, is a giant liberation and that's why I'm so passionate about it, because I get to have the magnificent accidents that performers produce when they do something wonderful in a role. They do a turn in a part and that becomes the magic.
“But I also get complete control, I don't have to beat my cast up trying to bend them into pretzels shapes so I can get a specific type of shot, I can put the camera in as I please. That's why I love this art form so much.”
Yet for all the star laden acting, computer power and Hollywood glitz that Zemeckis and his team can bring to the project a major part of the appeal lies in the story itself.
That such a cutting edge movie should be based upon words first published in 1843 is a pleasing irony, but as a fan Zemeckis was intent on ensuring that Dickens' work did not get lost in a blizzard of technological challenges.
“I had only one mindset when I started on this,” he adds, “which was to be as faithful to the original book as I possibly could be. At first the most daunting thing was adapting the dialogue, but then it turned out to be the most fun. Once I got into it, it was really wonderful to be able to be immersed in the way those characters spoke in that period of time.
“It was about keeping the essence of the dialogue and shortening it, because characters don't speak in five or six sentences any more. That was the key, but I always wanted to be true to the original piece.”
ANWAR BRETT
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