Several films in next week’s Sundance Festival have a Louisville connection. Louisville’s alternative weekly magazine, LEO, devoted their cover story here this week to the films, and there’s a bit on me and Another Earth.
Ain’t It Cool News has a rundown of the films they’re looking forward to seeing, and they list AE among them here. (It’s about two pages down.)
Also, yesterday’s USA Today has a story on some of the films — including AE at Sundance here, and a sampling of photos here.
Some may remember that two years ago I played a lacrosse coach in an indie film called ‘Warrior,’ starring Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene, two rising stars from the fertile Twilight series..
I’ve reported nuthin’ cause there’s been nuthin’ to report. However, I’m now happy to report more than nuthin’: The film is in late post-production (the usual tweaking of color, sound, music, etc.) and has been retitled ‘A Warrior’s Heart.’
There’s no release date or schedule yet, but as soon as I hear, you’ll hear. Meantime, over to the right is a poster someone directed me to. I don’t know if it’s the official one, but as grandfather used to say, it’s better than a kick in the pants.
Life, the universe and everything is crazily random, as we know, and the movie business doesn’t straighten it out any.
Last autumn I shot Another Earth, a tiny indie drama. We shot nearly all my scenes in mid-New York state, at an old, unheated country house owned by the director’s friend, and the entire crew could almost fit around a table at McDonald’s.
Cut to a bit over a year later. The 2011 Sundance Film Festival just announced its line-up (here) for January…and Another Earth was accepted into the Dramatic Competition Category, in which only 16 films were selected from among 1,102 films submitted.
The NY Times reports on the trends in this year’s selections here, including this photo of Brit Marling and me, and USA Today has a piece on the line-up here.
The director, my fellow cast, the producers, the crew and the casting director are all here, and there isn’t earth enough and time to thank them. But thank you.
Just when you thought (and I prayed) that I couldn’t look any freakier or wear weirder outfits, here comes this: motion capture, aka performance capture.
Cribbing from (and probably ruining) the Wikipedia entry, motion capture, aka mo-cap, means recording movement (eg, of humans) and using that information to animate characters in computer animation.
It’s the same process they used in this little movie you may have heard of, Avatar. In fact, just for your viewing pleasure, you can see a short clip of the process and how it looked in the movie here.
So last week I did mo-cap for an upcoming videogame. No, I can’t tell you which one. Game companies get a little tweaked out when actors announce early, so I’m going to shock everyone and keep my mouth shut for a change. Zipped lip. But I will say that it’s part of a franchise. That’s quite popular. Which is — okay, really, that’s enough.
It was a blast. Basically, you wear a suit covered with 55 or so reflective dots, and while you act out a scene in a big open room, 70-80 cameras are reading your movements via the dots. Then the data from the cameras all gets combined to create your movements in a 3D digital world.
Monitors were set up on the edge of the room showing our characters (okay, fine, our avatars), so as we moved, our avatars moved (though their faces stayed the same). Our mo-cap is animated, whereas Avatar was more lifelike, so we looked nothing like our avatars on the monitors. It was a bit weird at first, and then it became nothing but fantastic. Especially, I think, to the actresses, almost all of whose avatars were, in the time-honored tradition of videogames, really hot.
The director, producers, and crew were terrific, as were all the other actors. Everything was fantastic. Except for the skin-tight black suits. That I could have done without. I’m not sure how exactly, given that they’re a necessary part of the process, but if I were King of Mo-Cap-ville, the first Royal Order would be to improve the suits. Somehow. I don’t know how. I’m the King. Just make it happen.
‘The Burrowers’ didn’t get the love we might’ve gotten if we had a theatrical release, but that doesn’t mean the movie’s been forgotten. It’s on at least one blogger’s ‘Best you haven’t seen” list here.
