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Animation's Fast Track

By Kathyrn R. Satterfield

Tom Hanks fans should be thrilled when The Polar Express chugs into theaters this week. Hanks plays a train conductor, a boy, the boy's father, a hobo and Santa Claus. The actor nailed each performance without ever changing his costume or makeup. In fact, he didn't use either!

So how did he do it? The Polar Express, based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg, is the first film made with a technique called performance capture. The process allows filmmakers to build an animated character based on an actor's performance.

Every Motion and Emotion
The ability to capture, or record, full-body movement is nothing new. A similar process has been used to make video games. But performance capture is more advanced. It records lifelike movements and human emotions. "The breakthrough is that we're able to record facial movements in extremely high detail," says Steve Starkey, one of the film's producers.

Hanks and the other actors in the movie wore nearly 200 sensors, or reflective dots, on their faces and bodies. They worked on a nearly empty stage, without sets and costumes that could block the sensors. Cameras re-corded each performance in a three- dimensional format. The 3-D image was then inserted into a virtual set in a computer program.

"All I saw were white dots dancing around on a black screen," Hanks told TFK in a recent interview. "But I knew it was (actor) Peter Scolari. I could tell his face, his posture."

Hanks found that he could get into his different characters more easily if he simply changed his shoes to play each one. "You just discover, 'These shoes make me do something very different,'" Hanks says.

A Speedy Delivery
It took Hanks only 40 days to make The Polar Express. But he hopes the film leaves the audience with a lasting sense of magic and wonder: "I'd like them to say, 'If a train pulled up in my yard on some late December evening, I'd like to get on board because it looks as if it would be as wonderful as that one was.'"

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