Eriq Gardner, the legal reporter for the Hollywood Reporter (an essential publication to read if you want to understand the entertainment industry), published a long and...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Taraji P. Henson, left, stars as Queenie and Brad Pitt, right, stars as Benjamin Button in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," one of the movies that relied on MOVA Contour for some of its special effects. (Paramount Picture and Warner Brothers/Merrick Morton) | Eriq Gardner, the legal reporter for the Hollywood Reporter (an essential publication to read if you want to understand the entertainment industry), published a long and complicated piece this week about a lawsuit between a special effects company, Rearden LLC, and the Disney, Fox and Paramount movie studios. The issues at stake in the lawsuit may not in and of themselves be terribly interesting to you, but Gardner’s piece has some really interesting insight into how the special effects in contemporary movies are made. In particular, he points to part of the company’s filing in the case, where Rearden’s lawyers argue: A director may be the author of an actor’s performance — when posed, arranged, lit, and filmed like the lithograph of Oscar Wilde or the performance of Garcia. But during MOVA Contour [the technology Rearden licenses] performance capture, the director cannot choose camera angles because the cameras are fixed in the MOVA Contour rigging; there can be no ‘selecting and arranging the costume, draperies, and other various accessories,’ because the capture is of only the random patterns on the actor’s face and neck; and there can be no ‘arranging and disposing the light and shade,’ because the lighting is also fixed in the rigging, and a random pattern of glowing makeup applied to the actor’s skin eliminates shadows for an evenly-lit random pattern.
I think most of us who have watched more than one Marvel, DC or “Star Wars” movie, to name just a few examples, know if only on an instinctive level that those movies look and feel the same. If we know a little bit more, we understand that the corporate executives who guide these overall franchises have substantial control of the overall products and tend to hire directors who can work within the constraints that they set. And if we know even more than that, we might be aware that there are people called second unit directors who handle the action sequences in multiple installments of a series in order to create a consistent visual style. But this look into what MOVA Contour does adds an extra layer to all of this. If you have felt as though the alien characters in blockbusters — or the aged-up or aged-down characters in movies such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — look as if they came off the same assembly line, it turns out that they did. The lawsuit will likely argue out the extent to which directors have latitude within Rearden’s framework, but seeing the framework still helps us understand exactly where our movies come from. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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