The Opacity of Representations of 3D Scanning and Motion Capture in the Cinema - Text 4
Nevertheless, capturing motion is not limited to this historical connection, which retains the use of a photographic motion picture camera to subdivide the models’ gestures and movements. Whereas the experiments mentioned above produced images which were “limited” to the point of view of the observer – the person who handles the camera lens – some technical set-ups make it possible to capture a body’s motion in three dimensions, without the image produced being subject to a sole point of view. While their initial uses can be credited to the medical field in particular, the arrival of computer-generated images opened the door to a variety of 3D scanning techniques which have sought to improve the realism of computer models by giving them the appearance and/or motor skills of a human body.[2]
This process has now become common in the digital age and has given special effects cinema its heyday. And yet, unlike traditional movie cameras, which cinema displays without reserve, it is rarely showcased on screen as a technology. Above all, it appears that these rare films never show the processes with an eye to documenting how they function, preferring to play the card of a kind of technological mystery while at the same time regularly placing them in the category of science fiction. This dissimulation shows that these films do not aspire to inform the viewer about this equipment, but rather to make it the driving force of a message on the future of images based on this three-dimensional quality of capturing which appears to make up the heart of the problem.
We might, first of all, surmise a kind of prudence towards technologies which have quite often been controversial since the 1980s in the face of the fear of seeing actors and actresses replaced by digital clones,[3] and thus dispossessed of themselves. “Captured” from every angle at once, the body does indeed appear to be literally captured, whereas the traditional movie camera seizes only one of its facets, that which the person acting has agreed to offer up to the mechanical eye. Surrounded by the digital sensors found throughout motion capture studios, actors no longer know which profile, in the end, will be used by the film director, to the point that their image escapes their control. As early as 1981, Michael Crichton’s Looker contained a sequence of the 3D scanning of a top fashion model’s body by a machine whose massive design matched the opacity of how it functioned. Once she is inside, a robotic voice tells the young woman what she must do, which tends to dehumanise the process shown to the viewer, while a kind of troubling breathing on the soundtrack appears to isolate her from the rest of the world.
