John Knoll 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.

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.

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.

If you're in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared - it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.

The amazing thing about motion capture is everything translates. Your slightest emotions translate through the suit and into the character.

The great thing about performance capture is you can go off, and then, without changing costume, you can become another character.

'Mars Needs Moms' was motion capture, where you walk into a space that's essentially a black box with cameras everywhere. It was so technical. You have these mandibles with cameras on your face and a helmet, and you have to hit certain marks. You couldn't shoot this stuff without the green-screen aspect.

Shane McMahon did his own mo-cap. Did you guys know that? He went and did his own mo-cap. He didn't want somebody doing his moves. Shane did his own mo-cap.

The technical aspects of doing motion capture and actually, you know, capturing the motion, is very different. It's an interesting learning curve to be part of because you have so much gear on you.

Performance capture, for me, is finding the essence of a performance.

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

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.

People used to say, 'Andy Serkis lent his movements to Gollum,' and now they say, 'Andy Serkis played Caesar.' That's a significant leap.

Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it's just another way of recording an actor's performance.

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.

Sometimes when you're making a film and something happens during a scene that you've just thought of, it can be missed if the wrong lens is on or if you're shooting in the wrong direction but this [performance capture] doesn't miss a thing. So, you might do something that's genius - very rarely, admittedly - but it doesn't miss it.

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.

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.

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.

I have a company in the U.K., a performance-capture studio. We're looking to push the boundaries of performance-capture technology in film and video games, but also in live theater, using real-time performance capture with actors onstage, and combining that with holographic imagery.

The fact of the matter is that an actor, if I'm playing a performance capture role and you're playing a live action role and we're having a scene together, there's no difference in our acting processes.

As soon as you do it, actors realize there is no difference playing a performance-captured role or a live-action role.

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.