Dan Fogler Quotes

Motion capture is amazing. I prefer it. You wear a 'Power Ranger'-esque suit, you have tape balls on you, you have 60 cameras around you capturing your every movement and there's no hair, no makeup.

All the time that I'm acting with an animated character, I'm looking at a tennis ball or sticky tape or an eyeline or a man in a green suit. There's no real environment, just this electric green that's blaring into your brain.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking.

I am a bit evangelical, I know, but performance-capture is still misunderstood.

I know a lot of games have been going to the facial capture. And movies like 'TinTin' are using it, as well.

When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.

Performance capture is a tool that young actors will need in the next 10, 20 years. It's on the increase, as you say. It's not going away.

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

Acting on a blue screen is awful.

It was close to like a 67- or 70-day shoot for 'Tron' on stage, in the suit. You can't even sit down during the day because of all the cables that divide the foam rubber and all the electrical circuits. We had these stools that were tall with a bicycle seat on them and you're just looking at a blue screen all day.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

With 'Avatar,' you're beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.

I would love to do some motion capture work just to be able to challenge myself.

When you are shooting traditional motion capture, it's a big footprint on set. There are, like, 16 cameras that are needed and constraints over the lighting.

Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.

The most challenging roles were Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Mars Needs Moms' because they were both motion capture, so there was a lot of physical work involved.

Whoever did my mo-cap for Stardust watched my very first entrance and nothing else, because I never did half the stuff ever again, and it's funny to watch. Well, hey, that's what they used, so yeah.

One of the things that motion capture and/or voice acting does is allow you to continue your career, change it, or bring a new aspect to it.

I read about some movie where they did everything on blue screen, and the actors were not even connecting to each other.

Of course you're nervous, but we're really excited to be able to share what we're going to share. And it's cool, because what we're going to be doing, I think for fans especially, we think is really cool, because part of the process that most people don't ever get to see [is] that before these movies are movies starring photo-real apes, they're movies starring the image of Andy Serkis and the other actors, who are playing apes.

When you're doing a film that has so many effects, you do a lot of it on green screen, and you can't see what that world is.

I could take my grandma and put her in a cape, and they'll put her on a green screen, and they'll have stunt doubles come in and do all the action. Anybody can do it. They're relying on stunt doubles and green screen and $200 million budgets - it's all CGI created. To me, it's not authentic.

Every film that comes out that incorporates CGI or performance capture is a little bit ahead of the last film that came out. You're on the cutting edge for a certain amount of time, and then the new technology comes out.