From Polar Express Production Notes, Warner Brothers Studios
Description of the Motion Capture Setup
Not only would a live action film of such far-reaching landscapes be staggeringly impractical if not impossible, it would lack the luminous texture the filmmakers were committed to recreating. Another possible option – animation – had its own limitations. “The problem with traditional animation for a project like this,” says Zemeckis, who isn’t averse to employing the technique in its rightful place, “is that it falls short in depicting authentic human characters. With exaggerated images, fantasies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or cartoons, it’s great. But I was looking for something more realistically alive.”
Zemeckis presented his unique challenge to visual effects wizard Ken Ralston, a multiple Academy Award-winner for his work and currently a senior visual effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, an industry leader in digital production. Ralston dates his creative collaboration with Zemeckis back to the 1985 sci fi comedy adventure Back to the Future, a film remembered as much for its heart and deft storytelling as for its dazzling special effects.
Raltson proposed motion capture, a process by which an actor’s live performance is digitally captured by computerized cameras and becomes a human blueprint for creating virtual characters. Zemeckis was familiar with the technique but would not have expected it to serve his purposes for The Polar Express, based on applications he had seen. But this was no ordinary mo-cap his friend had in mind. It would have to be a giant step beyond current standards in order to achieve the depth and visual complexity Zemeckis required.
Coincidentally, Ralston and his Imageworks colleague, visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen, had been doing preliminary work on just such an advanced process, to be the next generation of mo-cap, far more sophisticated than anything ever seen before.
Beyond mere motion, this highly developed system was designed to capture every discernable movement and the subtlety of human expression from an actor’s performance, down to the slightest nuance or flutter of an eyelid. Additionally, unlike existing mo-cap systems that are limited in range, it could simultaneously record 3-dimensional, high-fidelity facial and body movements from multiple actors, through a system of digital cameras providing a full 360 degrees of coverage.
Working together, the Polar and Imageworks teams ran a practical test of the process, using Tom Hanks as their first subject.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” Zemeckis says of the groundbreaking process, which they ultimately – and appropriately – christened Performance Capture. “When we did the test and the results came back, it turned out to be the perfect way to do The Polar Express. “In fact,” he admits, “if this hadn’t been possible, or hadn’t evolved to this degree, I likely would not have moved forward with the project.”
Here was a way – the only way – to achieve the oil painting imagery from Van Allsburg’s drawings onscreen while maintaining the immediacy of real human performances.
As Ralston describes it, “Performance Capture offers a vivid rendering of the Van Allsburg world while infusing a sense of heightened realism into the performances. It’s like putting the soul of a live person into a virtual character.”
The process not only exponentially increases the amount of live material that can be captured and interpreted digitally, it also provides unparalleled versatility in the director’s storytelling choices. While traditional film editing is dependent upon the range of coverage or angles from which scenes are photographed during production, Performance Capture technology offered full, limitless coverage that allowed Zemeckis to literally create custom shots during the editing process. He could select from a range of depths and perspectives and move characters in relationship to their cyber surroundings to emphasize nuances of expression or other details, all with natural camera movements.
The oil painting effect, so essential to Zemeckis, would be enhanced in layers during the post-performance phase, through state-of-the-art CG rendering.
The Polar Express is the first feature film to be shot entirely in Performance Capture.
Those who have seen the final footage attest that it defies easy categorization. Familiar comparisons fall short of the mark. Often it’s described in terms of what it is not – as in not traditional animation, not merely motion capture and not strictly live action. An art form in its own right, Performance Capture effectively breaks new ground to offer images like nothing seen before.
Never one to introduce a new technique on screen for its own sake, Zemeckis can look back upon a filmmaking career marked by many striking innovations, secure in the knowledge that each and every time he broke creative ground it was in service to a story.
In Forrest Gump, for example, Tom Hanks as the fictional Gump casually and seamlessly turns up in authentic archival footage where he is seen interacting with historic figures such as President Kennedy. Recalling that startling effect, Zemeckis now says, matter-of-factly, “Well, we had a story about a guy who had met presidents. It was in the script. It was assumed that he would be on film at these meetings so we took news footage of real presidential appearances and then figured out a way, with the computer, to do it.
“It’s easy to do that kind of thing now,” he admits. “But then, it was tough.”
Prior to Forrest Gump, Zemeckis charmed audiences with a lively blend of live action and manic animation in the 1988 classic action comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, another fresh use of technology that the director simply acknowledges as a case of “using the modern tools we had to integrate a 2-dimensional cartoon character into a 3-dimensional world.”
“Bob will make a movie to test the art form, or to wrestle with some aspect of emotion or human nature,” says Hanks. “He doesn’t take his job lightly. He’s interested in making films that somehow break a mold or challenge not only himself as a filmmaker but the entire motion picture oeuvre in some way.”
What matters most is telling a story in the best way possible. Essentially, Zemeckis believes, either with or without cutting-edge effects, “the entire spectacle of cinema is illusion. Even the most basic techniques are illusion – a cut, a close-up, it’s all fake. It’s magic. It doesn’t exist in real life. So, if you look at it that way, all movies are illusions anyway, and some of the things I do are just extensions of that. That’s what’s so much fun about being a movie director.”
The Process
Some elements of production on The Polar Express resembled the traditional approach to a live-action film: Zemeckis and Broyles worked on the script, storyboards were created and sets, props and costumes designed. Fabrics and wallpaper were selected. As Starkey explains, “even though we were breaking new ground in the way that images are captured and presented, there were still some fundamental physical details that had to be created upfront in the usual way. We still needed to see the fabric for the costumes and the hairstyles for each character.”
Production began months ahead of the first performance capture session, as the filmmakers assembled their creative team, many of them veterans of past Zemeckis projects like costume designer Joanna Johnston, who unveiled screen siren Jessica Rabbit’s trademark evening gown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and production designer Rick Carter, an Oscar nominee for his work on Forrest Gump.
The difference was that the practical elements, once digitally scanned into the computer, were retired. The filmmakers then had virtual sets, virtual costumes and an exhaustively detailed catalogue of virtual and mobile props. Everything was scrupulously recorded from every conceivable angle and depth, resulting in fully prepared, 3-dimensional stages ready for the actors’ entrance.
Other sets and locations, like the fantastic mountains and forests the Polar Express races through on its midnight journey and the bustling downtown streets of Santa’s village at the top of the globe, never existed in the real world at all. They went straight from imagination into the computer.
In creating the big-screen visuals of The Polar Express, the filmmakers began at the same spot Van Allsburg had begun: in the boy’s moonlit bedroom on Christmas eve, when he first hears the train pull up outside.
“But we were going deeper into the environments than the book did,” notes Starkey. “Taking a look at the book’s first image, there’s a bed, a window and part of a wall. But what does the rest of the room look like? Is there a stairwell? What does the rest of the house look like, or the neighborhood? What do things look like when the train leaves town?”
Using the book as a touchstone, the filmmakers then expanded its borders.
Production designer Rick Carter studied Van Allsburg’s illustrations before, as Zemeckis says, “going in search of Chris Van Allsburg himself.” He and production designer Doug Chiang, the conceptual designer on Star Wars, Episode One and Two, journeyed to the very house in which the author grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and used it to inspire the design of the interior and exterior of the boy’s home and the street where the train squeals to a stop. Traveling next to Zemeckis’ former neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago, they tapped into similar environs and memories.
“After the train leaves the first boy’s house, which is modeled after the house Chris grew up in, it stops at another house to pick up another boy,” Carter explains. “It’s a house that very much resembles one I found two doors down from Bob’s childhood home.” In a way, Carter muses, this might be “the point at which Bob gets on the train.”
Chiang, who lead a team of digital matte painters and conceptual CG artists from offices in Northern California, worked in tandem with Carter to create the virtual environments. As Zemeckis explains, “Rick has never worked in this fashion before. Traditionally, he would design something, draw it on paper or make models, and then have it constructed on site. With Polar, we still started with the drawings and models, but then instead of physical construction we could often built it right in the computer based on those designs.”
One advantage of this process over standard set design was its efficiency. “Typically, in preproduction,” says Chiang, “you create flat 2-dimensional designs and then develop them in physical miniature models. But this way, at a very early stage we were able to give Bob precisely what the finished product would look like.” Adjustments could be made quickly to incorporate the director’s needs in an ongoing process.
Another advantage was its limitless scope, as described by Chiang, who found himself working on a computer reconstruction of the train’s passage through a majestic mountain range. Quoting from Van Allsburg’s text, Chiang says, “the book read ‘mountains so high it seemed as if we would scrape the moon.’ It’s clearly a child’s perspective. Visually, the whole journey could be a dream inside the boy’s head. So why not design it in terms of how a child would design the world? I really enjoyed coming up with the glacial terrain on a huge scale that couldn’t possibly exist in this world.”
Back at Imageworks, Ralston and Chen furthered the CGI designs along the same lines. “In a film like this,” says Ralston, “every frame is a painting and that’s how we approached it. Jerome and I would take Doug’s concepts and then move forward in the world of CG, where we built the 3-D sets.” He was especially concerned with “the lighting of each scene, creating the atmosphere, the effects work that makes sparks come off the train’s wheels or the snow fall in a certain way so it’s always lyrical, magical.”
Adds Chen, “We gave a lot of thought to maintaining the stylization of the book.The pastel paintings are impressionistic, with contrast lighting and strong light sources and shadows. At the same time, we wanted a world you could believe in, as if down the street from the boy’s house and around the corner there were more houses and a whole city.”
Not only did The Polar Express production have to broaden locations from Van Allsburg’s illustrations for the screen, but they also had to open up the children’s book into a feature length story with a wider range of adventures for the young hero and accompanying stories for his fellow travelers. All of this had to be a natural progression from, and completely compatible with, the author’s original vision.
“Throughout the script stage,” says Hanks, referring to early discussions shared with Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Broyles about the feasibility of adapting a 29-page book into a feature film, “we kept asking each other, ‘are we expanding this for the sake of air or are we adding something that is going to further develop the themes and concepts?’ A key went into a lock somewhere around the moment that the three of us realized that the first line of the movie should be the first line of the book and the last line of the movie the last line of the book, and where we would extrapolate would be within those boundaries.”
“The book was the inspiration for everything,” Zemeckis confirms. “I used it as an outline. The intention was simply to expand it rather than try to reinvent it.” For example, using Van Allsburg’s illustration of the other children aboard the train, he selected three individual faces and imagined a story for each of them, thus introducing the characters known as Girl, Lonely Boy and Know-It-All-Boy. Throughout the journey, these children interact with Van Allsburg’s main character, the unnamed Boy, and help define his spiritual lessons as well as experience their own.
“What’s interesting about these characters,” adds Hanks, “is that there is not a unified sensibility to what they are doing on the train, they’re not just kids saying ‘yay’ at the same time. It’s a journey of individuals. The only thing they mutually want at the same time is hot chocolate. If you’re going to have a bunch of kids all experience Christmas the same way it’s not going to be realistic.”
While much of the design work was being accomplished, Zemeckis also worked with the actors on the motion-capture stage.
Measured to specific dimensions to accommodate the tight, 360-degree digital receptor coverage, the bare, minimalist sets reminded producer Starkey of Black Box Theater, a style popular in the 1960s and 70s, in which performance and story took an intimate focus over physical elements of a set, and props were either very spare or non-existent. Here on stages 2, 3 and 4 at Culver Studios, an empty picture frame might represent a window, while rudimentary blocks of unfinished wood stood in as doors or pieces of furniture. This provided basic reference points to the actors who had already seen images of the finished sets in the computer.
At this point, “liberated from the tyranny of the technical aspects of filmmaking,” says Zemeckis, he shared the traditional actor-director dynamic with his cast on each scene.
The actors donned form-fitting motion capture suits resembling divers’ wetsuits, onto which were sewn approximately 60 “jewels” or markers made of light reflective material, enabling the digital cameras to record the movement of the body as a configuration of 3-dimensional dots. This translated into fluid and natural action in the virtual world.
Since the true hallmark of Performance Capture is its ability to render genuine human emotion and natural expressions with uncompromising clarity and detail, special attention was given to the the actors’ faces. As many as 150 reflective jewels were clustered onto their faces and scalps, adhering to all lines of musculature; affixed to eyelids, brows, upper and lower lips, chin line and cheeks. The application took nearly two hours.
Once outfitted, actors delivered their performances as though on stage, without the distractions of a regular bustling movie set. In some ways, it was acting in its purest form – just the character, the space and the words.
“As actors,” says Hanks, “we were able to imprint our performances onto the story as opposed to going into the recording studio and providing voices. It was fun but it was also incredibly challenging, albeit in a good way. Because of the sensors, everything you do registers so you cannot afford to make a mistake. On the other hand, having the momentum of shooting for 10 or 15 minutes at a time and getting it all like one continuous moment, one fell swoop, is as free as I’ve felt as an actor. It was like being in theater again. If we could imagine it, we had it.”
Fully captured in three dimensions, their performances were then integrated into existing virtual sets, and from this point forward they lived in the computer. “Now you got to see the characters in motion, walking through the scene as they did on the Performance Capture set,” says Starkey.
And now, from the director’s perspective, the real fun began.
Into the computer was placed what is best described as a virtual camera – a moveable, recordable point of view that can be manipulated like an actual lens. “So,” says Zemeckis, with an ease that seems to deny the complexity of the concept, “you have this virtual set and you put the performances of your actors into it. Then you take a virtual camera and put that in as well. The camera will now record all the virtual images just like a conventional camera would record what it’s pointing at.
“Meaning,” he clarifies, “suppose I have two monitors. I can see what the virtual camera is seeing and, at the same time, I have another monitor in a sort of surveillance position on top of the set. And I can see my little virtual camera moving in amongst my actors just like you would if you were watching a regular movie set from the rafters.”
Understanding how a hands-on director like Zemeckis is accustomed to working, Ralston designed a device at this stage he called “wheels,” which simulates the feel and function of a traditional pan-and-tilt camera gearhead. Using wheels, Zemeckis and directors of photography Don Burgess and Robert Presley were able to manipulate the virtual camera with precision and familiarity, like piloting a dolly and crane rather than punching a keyboard to execute detailed commands.
Zemeckis acknowledges the unparalleled versatility and limitless options the system provides. “I can shoot a two-shot and two close-ups, or let a close-up of one actor run the entire length of the scene just like I would do in live action. Then I could do the reverse on a second actor all the way through, or another two-shot. Then I give those shots as dailies to the editor and we edit them like we would for a conventional movie.”
The essential difference is, unlike a conventional movie, where at the end of the day the director would have only what had been shot in this fashion for his dailies, with Performance Capture he is free to change his mind at any time, return to the source material and revise his point of view completely. Every possible shot, from every possible depth and angle, continues to exist on each virtual set.
Also, unlike conventional animation, Zemeckis points out, “the editing is done cinematically rather than by a layout artist.”
In this fashion he was able to fully create each and every shot for The Polar Express.
“You could say,” he offers, “that I directed this film in two stages: once, live, on the set, and then again, cinematically, in the computer.”
At this point, material viewed in the computer is not always fully finished. Preliminary staging is represented by images not of the actors as they will ultimately look but in a rudimentary place-holding form that the crew dubbed “Michelin men” in reference to the well-known advertising icon. Considering the manpower involved to assemble and render each finished scene, it made sense to wait until Zemeckis had selected his shots before proceeding with the final CG polish. As an adjunct to this specialized view, the director and his team could also consult a video playback of each performance.
Teams of talented computer artists would later apply texture, light and definition to backgrounds, as Zemeckis explains, “once they knew where the camera would be looking. Then they’d know which backgrounds needed to be lit and rendered. The Michelin Men footage is how we budgeted every scene.”
In addition to crafting light and shadow, computer effects animators were responsible for creating such delicate details as the look of moonlight filtered through mist or the gently curling trail of smoke rising from the train. Their artistry makes the drape of a sleeve or the movement of a child’s lock of hair look real and natural.
“But the expressions are all done by the human actors,” Zemeckis clarifies. “No one animates that. The computer does not create the performance, the actors do. The computer just takes the performance and wraps a cinematic skin around it.”
Although easily explained in a step-by-step progression, production on The Polar Express was not wholly linear in execution. Multiple creative processes were occurring simultaneously, and continued to run more or less throughout the duration of two and a half years of production: writing, designing, storyboarding and editing, and all the while teams of CG artists and technicians were at work scanning, recording and rendering.
“The production process was always in flux, as though pre-production continued throughout the whole thing,” recalls Ralston. “You could keep changing and manipulating things in a way you could never do with a live-action film. It was a different way for Bob to work and he was involved every step of the way. It was an ongoing invention.”
“This is much different from a traditional film where sets are finally torn down and costumes put away,” says Hanks. “Our dreams were always at work.”
Limitless Creativity: Changing the Future of Filmmaking
Considering the creative freedom Performance Capture gave him on The Polar Express, Robert Zemeckis attempts to put the process into perspective. “The good news is that anything is possible. The bad news is that anything is possible,” he jokes.
But, kidding aside, the assessment does ring true.
“It raises the level of your work as a director,” Zemeckis explains, “in that it allows you to do anything. The only limit now is the filmmaker’s imagination, because you can literally create any image. I can do a spectacular shot with a little kid on top of a roaring train in the snow at night and I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to do it. I don’t have to worry about the kid falling off the train, or the camera frosting over or whether the train will hit its mark. I now have complete control over those elements. It’s the closest thing we have to typing a story into a computer and having a film come out the other side.”
With that many options, the task is in the selection, which can easily become daunting. Using Polar as an example, Zemeckis puts it this way: “Let’s say I have a three-minute scene. The actors have done it and it’s perfect; timing is great, the lines are down. That gets integrated into the set. Now the decision is, okay, how do I shoot this? I can shoot it in a thousand set-ups or all in one shot and nothing will change except for my cinematic interpretation of the material. You have to have a lot of discipline for that.
“More to the point,” he offers candidly, “there’s no longer an excuse for not making each shot perfect.”
From an actor’s perspective, Zemeckis believes, working with motion capture at this level of sophistication would be equally freeing, albeit with a similar caveat. “Imagine,” he says, “they can deliver a performance without having to worry, every single minute, about hitting their marks or leaning into the light or walking at a certain speed because the camera can’t keep up, or any of those horrendous mechanical things an actor has to manage. They can focus their energy on doing a scene in continuity without breaking up the rhythm of their performance.”
The tradeoff seems minimal. “I believe the only thing Tom missed was having the physical trappings of a costume,” the director recalls. “He had to remember that the conductor wore glasses when he was the conductor and he had to remember to touch the bill of his cap or adjust his collar, which he would have done more instinctively if he had been actually wearing that wardrobe.”
From the perspective of a career spanning 30 years, Zemeckis welcomes the next wave of filmmaking, which he sees as inevitable. “I think we’re going to see a new generation of filmmakers embrace this system,” he predicts. “We can do it now without lenses, without film. There’s no need to move and bend light to create the images because it’s all done with 1’s and 0’s in the digital realm of the computer. The traditional hundred-year-old optic, chemical, mechanical way in which we record movie images is changing. When people see The Polar Express in a digital theater there’s no film – there was no film involved at any stage.”
“It has to change the way in which movies are imagined and made,” he concludes. “It will be a language influenced by the artistry of video games and the internet – a whole new way of how we use images to communicate.”
Cue the Actors
One vital element of moviemaking remains constant. Regardless of technical innovation, what drives everything is, of course, the actors’ performances.
For a process like Performance Capture, which relies so much on the subtlety of expression or the significance of a glance, a shrug or an upturned face to convey volumes of meaning, this requires actors of extraordinary depth and skill.
In the initial brainstorming sessions, Tom Hanks expected that he would take on one or two of the adult male roles. After the filmmakers got a better grasp of what Performance Capture could achieve, Zemeckis suggested that Hanks also consider the role of the main character, the young boy. “Since we had this fantastic tool at our fingertips, I thought why have an 8-year-old play an 8-year-old when we can have an actor of Tom’s caliber, with all his years of experience, interpret the part?,” the director explains. “He said, ‘That sounds great. Can we do that?’ And of course, then we did it in the test.”
It was partly a matter of operating scale. For adults to portray children, sets and props were designed at 160% of normal size so that when the adult performances were captured and integrated into the virtual sets they were a natural fit. During the live performances, minimal props on the same oversized scale were often built as reference points for the actors.
Beyond physical dimensions that could be manipulated by props and computer calculation, it was Hanks himself who provided the credible emotional scale for the character, a nuance no CGI artist could accomplish.
Analyzing the preliminary test footage, Hanks felt that his gestures and movements weren’t as age-appropriate as they could be and needed to make essential adjustments. “He got more into it, made wider and more childlike gestures,” explains Starkey, “not exaggerated but natural, as if he were an 8-year-old. Tom’s professionalism is such that he fine-tuned his performance based on the earliest test shots. His position and timing were right on.”
Ultimately, Hanks performed five key roles in the film: the hero boy, the boy’s father, the conductor, the mysterious hobo and Santa Claus, or, as he explains, “the main adult male characters the boy interacts with. All these characters carry with them the meaningful weight of the story. They spring from the boy’s own consciousness.”
As Zemeckis earlier noted, it can be disorienting playing a scene in a mo-cap suit with no costume and without the atmosphere provided by a fully dressed set. An actor has to remember where the windows should be, if his character might be barefoot or fixing the buttons of a jacket that doesn’t physically exist at this moment – or, in the case of Hanks playing the hero boy, how tall he happens to be. Multiply that by five to approximate the amount of detail he kept catalogued in his head.
“The one thing I thought was going to drive me nuts was not having a costume every day,” the actor admits. “We had one full costume fitting for the computer scans and never wore them again. I thought that would be a problem because of the lack of actual pockets when you need to use them. But for some reason I managed to remember that the boy was wearing a bathrobe that came undone and that the conductor had pockets, a cap and glasses that he is always adjusting.
“I found that I had to change something from one character to the next, and since I couldn’t get out of my Lycra mo-cap suit the only option was my shoes. I wore running shoes when I performed as the boy and different pairs of boots when I played the conductor, the hobo and Santa. It affected my posture and my movements and, in the final result, my character.”
The effect of the suit itself, form-fitting and festooned with reflectors, had the added benefit, according to Hanks, that “self-consciousness goes right out the window, and self-consciousness is the first thing that gets in your way when you’re acting. There was an odd sense of freedom that came with seeing your colleagues on set and knowing that we all looked exactly the same in these unitards and it came down to what we played with our eyes, our voices and our whole bodies.”
When it came to representing the big man himself, Santa Claus, Hanks had a specific idea about the tone and timbre he wanted to convey, “mixing both the caricature we’ve all grown up with and some genuine mystery,” he explains. “He doesn’t ‘ho ho ho’ at the top of his lungs all the time, although he does laugh. Santa is very much aware of the power of his departing on Christmas Eve to deliver presents to the children of the world. He’s been doing this for a thousand years and even he gets involved in the drama.”
Joining Hanks on the mo-cap stage was the late Michael Jeter, who performed the dual roles of train engineer Steamer and fireman Smokey – twin brothers of widely disparate physical characteristics, one short and rotund and the other a towering beanpole. The brothers, both good-hearted, garrulous and given to breaking into song, introduce the boy to the inner workings of the train. They enlist his help in replacing a burnt out headlight, which becomes a more interesting and enlightening enterprise than he ever imagined.
Jeter read for both roles, prepared to take one or the other but, as Steve Starkey recalls, “Bob was so excited that he cast Michael for both roles on the spot.”
The acclaimed character actor, a favorite with cast and crew, passed away shortly after completing his work on the picture. “It was terribly tragic and unexpected,” says Zemeckis, who suspended production upon receiving the news on set. The Polar Express was Jeter’s final performance.
For the role of the girl who befriends the boy on the train, the filmmakers cast Nona Gaye, a recent Image Award nominee for her star turn in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. As Zemeckis warmly acknowledges, “Nona was absolutely wonderful. Her ability to understand the character and present it in a way that is so charming and endearing was exactly what we needed.”
As the filmmakers imagined her, the girl is a strong and capable young person, a born leader, but unaware of her natural talents regardless of how apparent they are to those around her. In joining the boy on a perilous detour along their route to the North Pole, she finally begins to realize and tap into the potential that has long lain dormant in her.
Multiple Emmy nominee Peter Scolari took on the role of a character known as the Lonely Boy, for whom the train stops in a poor section of town. Likely the product of an unhappy home life, the Lonely Boy is wary of everything, especially the kindness and attention of others. He hesitantly boards the train as though unsure he deserves such an honor and, once aboard, remains apart from the gaiety of the other children.
“Peter took a kind of Buster Keaton approach to the role,” says Zemeckis. “He carries a deep sadness, especially poignant in the face of a child. Peter conveys the lonely soul of this boy with complete sensitivity.”
Another child on the train, known as Know-It-All-Boy, is performed by the versatile Eddie Deezen. “I wrote the Know-It-All-Character with Eddie’s voice in mind,” Zemeckis reveals, before saying of his colleague, laughingly, “he can really do that annoying arrogant thing without going too far. It’s really kind of endearing in a way. But annoying, definitely annoying.” The Know-It-All is not a bad child, just sorely in need of some humility.
“You’ve never seen four grownups having more fun,” says Hanks. “Nona, Eddie, Peter and me, when were together playing children, we lost all the constraints of being adults. We were just four kids on a train.”
Zemeckis’ longtime colleague Charles Fleischer, a 30-year veteran of both film and television who is perhaps best known as the voice of lovable toon Roger Rabbit, joined the Polar cast as the Elf General.He’s not only in charge of the bustling toy production at the North Pole but also tracks naughty and nice behavior for Santa via an impressive global monitoring system.
In addition to capturing the performances of the main cast, either alone, in tandem or in group scenes, Performance Capture pushed beyond the limits of standard mo-cap so far that it enabled the Polar filmmakers to record an entire song-and-dance sequence with multiple dancers sharing the stage in the lively “hot chocolate scene.”
En route to the North Pole, the boy and his new friends are served steaming cups of cocoa by the train’s waiters, who explode in song and traverse the length and width of the car with their long legged leaps, dancing nimbly around the children and the seats, with serving trays hoisted high above their heads. To create the scene, a troupe of dancers were choreographed and rehearsed for a live action performance by Tony-nominated Broadway choreographer John Carrafa before being captured digitally and integrated into the virtual train car. Not a drop of cocoa was spilled.
The Polar Soundtrack and a Surprise Role for Rocker Steven Tyler
Since renowned composer Alan Silvestri provided the score for Romancing the Stone in 1984, he and Robert Zemeckis have shared one of the longest-running and most successful composer/director associations in the industry. Two of Silvestri’s five ASCAP honors were awarded for Zemeckis films: What Lies Beneath and Cast Away. Additionally, he earned Grammy nominations for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Back to the Future, and in 1995 his score for Forrest Gump brought him both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. The Polar Express marks their eleventh collaboration.
At this point, Zemeckis warmly notes, they have an incomparable creative rapport. “His music is always wonderful. I count on him to add that emotional layer to the story, to play up and help define the feelings of the characters. That’s always true with scores, but with a movie like this it’s vitally important.”
On Silvestri’s recent project, The Mummy Returns, he teamed with veteran songwriter and producer Glen Ballard on the song “Forever May Not Be Long Enough.” He subsequently brought Ballard aboard The Polar Express to collaborate on several original songs for the film, including a rollicking number called “Rockin’ On Top of the World,” to which Santa’s elves cut loose after a hard year of making toys. “It’s a scene where the elves rock out,” says Zemeckis. “After Santa’s sleigh is packed and he’s on his way, they throw a party.”
The “Elfin” debut of rock legend Steven Tyler was pure casting serendipity. Ballard had invited the charismatic Aerosmith frontman to perform “Rockin’ On Top of the World.” When Tyler arrived at the studio, his high-wattage personality and natural sense of fun immediately struck the director, who decided immediately that he would be the ideal embodiment of a partying elf. Never one to shy away from a new experience, Tyler enthusiastically signed on to don a mo-cap suit and a crop of reflective dots. As Zemeckis recalls, “It was perfect, the way it all worked out.”
The Polar Express soundtrack, a family-friendly mix of contemporary and classic songs with a holiday theme, also features the soaring ballad “Believe,” written especially for the movie by Glen Ballard and performed for the first time by multi-platinum-selling vocalist Josh Groban. Other highlights are perennial favorites from Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, plus two brand new songs performed in character by Tom Hanks, including the high-spirited “Hot Chocolate,” from the scene in which the children aboard the Polar Express are served cups of cocoa by a troupe of tap-dancing, singing waiters.
The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience Marks Another Cinematic Innovation
Not only is The Polar Express the first feature film shot entirely in Performance Capture, its November 10, 2004 debut marks another cinematic milestone with its simultaneous day-and-date release in IMAX 3D®.
The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience will be the world’s first feature to be presented in IMAX 3D®. Using a revolutionary new process called IMAX 3D DMR™, the footage will be converted to 3D and then digitally re-mastered into IMAX’s format through the proprietary IMAX DMRÒ (digital re-mastering) technology, maintaining its 3-dimensional imagery in projection and making its already extraordinarily vivid images virtually leap off the screen for a truly unique moviegoing experience.
Whether it’s the snowflakes floating around the theater or the train screeching to a halt in the laps of the audience, the IMAX 3D version of The Polar Express will offer the sensation of being not just inside the theater but almost inside the movie itself.
“When I saw the tests for The Polar Express in IMAX 3D, I was tremendously excited that audiences would be able to experience the movie this way,” says Zemeckis. “The 3D adds incredible depth and allows the viewers to experience the visual splendor and amazing adventure of this classic story in a way that should create a really memorable experience, not only this holiday season but for years to come.”
The Polar Express: The IMAX Experience will play in IMAX, IMAX Dome and IMAX 3D Theaters worldwide beginning November 10, 2004. The fifth feature presented in IMAX theaters by Warner Bros. Pictures since 2003, it follows the successful IMAX DMR releases of the second and third installments of The Matrix trilogy and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The IMAX Experience, as well as its first originally produced IMAX 3D live action film, NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience.
The IMAX 3D DMR process is based upon basic principals of how the eyes and brain work together to naturally create the three dimensional world we live in. Most people see through two eyes and although both eyes automatically focus on a single center point they see it from two slightly different positions. This creates two slightly different images, which the brain fuses to give the world three-dimensional depth.
IMAX 3D takes advantage of this natural process. An IMAX 3D film actually consists of two separate strips of film projected onto the screen at the same time, one with images captured from the viewpoint of the right eye, and the other with the left eye. Special IMAX 3D glasses allow the left eye to only see the left image and the right eye to only see the right, allowing the brain to do the rest by fusing the two images and creating a three-dimensional visual that appears to come off the screen. The distance, or “separation” between left and right viewpoints determines the intensity of the 3D; too little or too much will distort.
The implementation of dual filmstrip technology is far superior to the old fashioned “red-blue” anaglyphic 3D, which combines left- and right-eye images onto a single strip of film, compromising sharpness and color. IMAX 3D technology eliminates this compromise and enhances the images by not only using the world’s largest film format (15/70mm), but also by using two separate strips of film for both image capture and projection.
Although The Polar Express is constructed in 3D, it is still projected in 2D when shown in conventional theaters and therefore only a single view point is projected. The original 3D modeling of the film contains the data required to create that necessary “second eye” and IMAX uses this to carefully calculate the appropriate separation from the 2D view point to create the ideal 3D viewing experience.
Both left and right eye images are then digitally re-mastered into IMAX format using IMAX DMR technology and recorded onto two separate prints of 15/70 film for projection in IMAX 3D for the world’s most realistic and immersive movie experience. With crystal clear, larger than life, 3D images complemented by exhilarating state-of-the-art surround sound, audiences feel as though they are in the movie.
The IMAX 3D projector simultaneously projects two strips of 15/70 film, one for each eye, onto a special silver IMAX 3D screen. In addition to IMAX 3D glasses, which channel the right-eye image to the right eye and the left-eye image to the left eye, some IMAX theaters offer P3D glasses, polarized to separate the left- and right-eye images. Other theaters use E3D glasses, which utilize electronic liquid crystal shutter technology. The 15/70 film format used by IMAX is ten times larger than conventional 35mm film and three times larger than standard 70mm. The sheer size of a 15/70 film frame, combined with the unique IMAX projection technology, is the key to the extraordinary sharpness and clarity of films exhibited in IMAX theaters.
IMAX theaters’ specialized design and unobstructed views place audiences right in the on-screen action. Gigantic IMAX 3D screens – up to eight stories high – eliminate the discomfort and decapitated edges of smaller-format 3D systems. The screen, coated with a specialty high-performance metallic paint, has a slight curvature that extends beyond the field of geometric recognition, incorporating some of the audience’s peripheral vision, enhancing audience members’ feelings of being in the film. The visuals are enhanced by a superb specially-designed six-channel surround system comprised of 44 custom-designed speakers that extract 14,000 watts of pure digital surround sound.
Founded in 1967, IMAX Corporation is one of the world’s leading entertainment technology companies. IMAX’s businesses include the creation and delivery of the world’s best cinematic presentations using proprietary IMAX and IMAX 3D technology, and the development of the highest quality digital production and presentation. IMAX has developed revolutionary technology called IMAX DMR (Digital Re-mastering) that makes it possible for virtually any 35mm film to be transformed into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience®. The IMAX brand is recognized throughout the world for extraordinary and immersive family entertainment experiences. As of June 30, 2004, there were 240 IMAX theaters operating in 35 countries. IMAX®, IMAX® 3D, IMAX DMR®, IMAX MPX® and The IMAX Experience® are trademarks of IMAX Corporation. More information can be found at www.imax.com.