'Polar Express' technology frees actors from their bodies

LOS ANGELES -- Tom Hanks used experimental technology to morph into a little boy, a train conductor, a hobo and Santa Claus for the new Christmas adventure "The Polar Express."\nThis is how he was able to co-star with himself: The two-time Oscar-winner climbed into something like a black wetsuit lined with neon-blue streaks and a tight cap, and had hundreds of glistening white specks on his face. Computers recorded his movements and expressions, which were then transposed onto his various characters.\nWith just a few more technological evolutions, "The Polar Express" might change the way people consider performance -- actors would no longer be constrained by their own bodies.\nHarrison Ford could be 80 and still playing a young "Indiana Jones." Sean Connery could play himself circa "Dr. No" in a new James Bond movie. Jack Nicholson could star as a 16-year old and Haley Joel Osment could play a geriatric.\nActors could swap and trade digital bodies: Tom Cruise could perform as Humphrey Bogart; Julia Roberts could try Rita Hayworth; or Eddie Murphy could easily play every character in a film -- old, young, heavy, skinny, white, black, male, female -- without any makeup or prosthetics.\n"The Polar Express" director, Robert Zemeckis, renowned for using state-of-the-art effects in his films like the "Back to the Future" trilogy, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "Cast Away," said the breakthrough came about four years ago when Hanks sent him a copy of the slim, beloved 1985 children's book by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg.\nThe actor wanted to see if it could be made into a film.\n"I looked at these beautiful paintings and said, 'It's great, but how are we going to do a movie like this?'" Zemeckis said. "We thought about it and thought about it and realized the emotion of the book was in the paintings. The story was really interesting but the paintings are what made that book so popular.\n"We never thought it was appropriate for 'The Polar Express' to be an animated cartoon," Zemeckis added. "And to do it live action would not be absolutely true to the emotion of the book. So we came up with this process that we called 'performance capture.' It's digitally rendered, but there's no animation."\nBy that method, he said, they were able to create the soft pastel imagery of Van Allsburg's book through computer technology but the characters were not manipulated by animators to coincide with the actors' voices, as in such films as "The Incredibles" and "Shrek."\nHanks was familiar with that kind of work from playing Woody the cowboy in the "Toy Story" movies: He recorded lines, then left the body to animators.\n"This is not one of those movies," Hanks said. "Everything you see (in 'The Polar Express') performed by a human being was performed by a human being on a soundstage."\nThe sensors on Hanks' suit and face were recorded as he moved around a mostly vacant room, and those gestures and expressions were layered with a digital skin that moved in relation to the actor.\n"There's no reason to do a movie like 'Mystic River' this way," Zemeckis said, referring to last year's effects-free, gritty drama that won Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. "But there is the chance now to let imagination run wild."\nMotion capture computerization became familiar to most moviegoers when actor Andy Serkis controlled the movements of Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings," and it's a common technique used on sports figures like Tiger Woods to animate their own moves in video games.\n"The Polar Express" pushed the technology into a new dimension by mapping the areas of Hanks' face with 152 sensors, so his instinctual movements control the faces of his characters.\n"Believe it or not, the information would extend to a computer so you could tell the difference between a frown and a smile, eyes wide open, essentially every nuance that the human face can go through," Hanks said.\nOccasionally one of the BB-sized sensors would fall off, Hanks said, which the computers rendered as if Santa's cheek or eyebrow suddenly stretched down to touch the floor..\n"The visual aspect of movies is beyond imagination," Hanks said, "but the sound is pretty much the same as in (Al) Jolson's time"