Acting with…Nothing? – Part 2
Article by Paul Preston
In these pages recently, I took a closer look at the challenges an actor faces when playing a character and never appearing on screen. One specific example was Andy Serkis’ work as Caesar in War for The Planet of the Apes. It’s challenging to work with the suits, head gear and engage the imagination so thoroughly. It’s equally challenging for an actor like Neal Sethi of The Jungle Book to act opposite the animals of the story when they’re not there. So, we looked at acting with nothing…what about acting…nowhere?
Nowadays, it seems like a 50/50 chance that you’re going to get real locations in a big-budget movie. Indie films, dramas and comedies, yes, you’ll usually find the film crew holed up in a house, office or restaurant where the story takes place. Whether otherworldly or just ornate, when a studio makes a summer or holiday franchise action/adventure or sci-fi film, you can count on widespread use of green screen technology and CGI effects in the production design.
The first time I noticed how extensive and ingrained in every shot computer enhanced imagery had become in movies was in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It was easy to see that Davy Jones’ undead henchmen with half a head was a computer effect, but a screening of this film I attended had the VFX team giving a post-screening lecture, and they detailed just how much CGI there was in the movie. I thought, for example, Davy Jones was Bill Nighy with computer-generated tentacles on his face. Not true, Jones was head-to-toe computer generated. But you can spend a whole movie trying to figure out if a character is an actor or not and truthfully, it takes you away from the story. What flies by you without you questioning what you’re seeing, most of the time, are the enhancements to an already-existing set. Dead Man’s Chest adds islands in a shot of the sea that weren’t there. It adds set-dressing to a bridge that’s really there on location on the island of Dominica, but the CGI makes it more elaborate. And although the film built Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship, The Black Pearl, when you need it beached on the shore – computer it. Despite the huge advancements in realism in computer-generated characters, it’s these upgrades to set design added in post that blend more realistically, so it’s no surprise they’re used to the max.
However, this can make filmmakers lazy. By the time you pile visual effects onto a studio shoot, it may not save the money it could’ve cost to fly the cast and crew to a location and get a better look. The temples and jungle scenes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull don’t match up to the authenticity of the scenes shot in Hawaii and Tunisia in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. I mean, they got dysentery! Respect!
Love it or hate it, this technology is here. So, where does this leave the actor? Once again, the imagination must be wildly employed to support the notion that there is a world around you…that isn’t there. And even though the effects to create this world are state-of-the-art, the acting is as old school as it gets and stems from when you were in acting class on a bare stage, conjuring up a set of circumstances you could believe in. Throw in a crew of forty, a dozen blazing lights, other actors here and there and a camera in your face and the ability to focus and churn out believable work the likes of Sandra Bullock in Gravity or Matt Damon in The Martian becomes even more impressive.
Look at this shot of Naomi Watts in 2005’s King Kong. There’s no jungle, there’s no ape hand, there’s no Kong, there’s no weather, and there’s a LOT of GREEN. And she’s asked to be emotional. Director Peter Jackson and the filmmakers work hard to ensure that you, the viewer, believe the unbelievable in terms of being transported to place and time with a scene like this to where you are probably underestimating the skill with which Watts has to deliver the performance – the cherry on top in terms of that final element to sell the whole experience.
Think about the actors in Ready Player One. They play characters in the film’s real world (which itself is futuristic and requires imagination) and they also play their character’s avatars in the virtual world known as The Oasis. The shooting schedule led with all the virtual performances first, then they shot all the scenes in the real world. This meant some actors worked with each other for the first time, trying to establish characters and relationships, in a white motion capture studio with extensive head gear capturing their facial expressions, tight mo cap suits covered in golf ball-sized sensors and dots all over their face. Needless to say, challenging.
The set designer can look at a green screen location or mocap studio and take solace in knowing there are few natural roadblocks between their vision and the finished product. Literally ANYTHING can be built from a blank slate. The actor is getting less and less help by their surroundings as the movies become more and more hi-tech. So, don’t get lazy, you need your skills to be on point.
Same skills, different application. Actors, don’t lose focus.
