E-Motion Capture

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times director Steven Spielberg explained the reason that he and Peter Jackson decided to use motion-capture on their joint film adaptation of Hergé's Tintin books out of respect for the material and "wanting to get as close to that art as I could".

He details "Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe. It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You'd have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one."

Because much of the film's production was shot with the same techniques used with the Pandora stuff ala James Cameron's Avatar, Spielberg had the luxury of seeing what the end product would look like while filming it:

"When Captain Haddock runs across the volume, the camera capture all the information of his physical and emotional moves. So as Andy Serkis runs across the stage, there's Captain Haddock on the monitor, in full anime, running along the streets of Belgium. Not only are the actors represented in real time, they enter into a three-dimensional world."

The use of the digital process also allows the director to go back and change elements such as the camera angles and spatial orientation long after the actor has left the set.

The first film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in the series, is due for an international release mid-2011 and a US release later that Fall.