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How long does it take to make a movie? How does working on the first film in the series differ from working on the eighth film? And what is the technology of capturing the movement? A look at the summer movies at the cinema

Karin Aldea, young Galileo
*The author is the editor-in-chief of the Topgeek website
Photographs: public relations

Mix action and special effects with some XNUMXD animation and loud sound that surrounds the entire movie theater, add an interesting plot, and you get a great movie. The craft of making films seems very simple, but in practice hundreds of people work on each film for several years in different roles: from screenwriting, directing and production to animators, whose job it is to create computerized characters that look as if they exist in reality. Here are two examples from the new films.

Planet of the Apes: Dawn
"Star of the Apes: Dawn" is the eighth in the "Star of the Apes" movie series, and like its predecessors is based on the book "Star of the Apes" written by Pierre Boulle. According to the story, the monkeys become as wise as humans, and after a long war they take over the earth and make humans their slaves. Scary! The plot of the movie "Planet of the Apes: Dawn" takes place in futuristic San Francisco. A decade after Caesar, he is the leading ape, led the apes to band together and rebel against the rule of humans - a disease called the monkey flu causes an increase in the ape population at the expense of the humans. A group of scientists find themselves in a fight against the monkeys.
The production of the film started back in May 2012, but they started filming only a year ago! Think about it - preparing the ground for filming lasted a full year: a year of writing the script, casting, finding the locations where the film will be shot, creating the storyboard (description of the film's story in comics), preparing the basic animations - all this even before they said "action" for the first time!
In the Planet of the Apes movies, the real stars are the monkeys. The first films in the series used actors wearing monkey masks, but the new films include sophisticated computer animation and a technology called motion capture that allows the monkeys to express joy, anger, sadness and a host of facial expressions that a mask is unable to express.
How It Works? Imagine a large, empty room on whose walls are placed special cameras that can only pick up one color. Now an actor wearing a special suit enters the room, to which are attached small balls painted in the only color that the cameras can pick up. When the player moves, the cameras only pick up the movement of the balls, and thus they capture his movement. In the next step, the movement is taken and "dressed" on a computerized character - if it is a robot, an alien, or in our case - a monkey. Now the monkey character will move exactly the way the player moves.
In the next step, dozens of small dots are drawn on the actor's face and a small camera is placed in front of his face. In the same way that the big cameras record the body movements of the actor, the small camera records his facial movements. Now all that remains is to "dress up" the facial movements of the actor on the face of the computerized monkey - and you get a computerized animated character that is able to express the whole range of human emotions. And the result is amazing.
> Watch the working process on the film Planet of the Apes: Dawn

Guardians of the Galaxy
Most of the superheroes who star in movies started out as comic book characters. The first superheroes appeared in comics back in 1935, and over the years became more and more popular. Every favorite superhero has appeared in hundreds of comic books depicting their amazing adventures. For years each superhero went through the adventures without meeting any other superhero, until in 1960 a comic creator named Stan Lee came up with an idea - to bring his superheroes together in the same plot! From that moment the world of comics changed - the different stories met, and the possibilities seemed endless. Nevertheless, there was something that limited them: they all lived and worked within the boundaries of the earth. Until in 1969, the Guardians of the Galaxy appeared: a group of superheroes who live on the other side of the galaxy, and from time to time visit Earth to ask Iron Man and Captain America to help them in their wars against the aliens.

In the film we will get to know the Guardians of the Galaxy up close: the leader of the group is Star Lord (whose real name is Peter Quill). He grew up as a child on Earth until one day he discovered that his father came from space. At that moment, aliens arrived and took him to the edge of the galaxy, where he discovered that he had superhuman powers; Gamora is a tough green alien and the daughter of the evil Thanos, who the Guardians of the Galaxy are fighting against. Gamora knows her father is evil and joins the Guardians of the Galaxy to try to defeat him; Drax is a big, muscular warrior, stronger than even the Green Giant. In the movie he is played by Dave Bautista, who is not an actor at all, but a wrestler. You may know him from WWE; Groot is the strangest character in the group: a huge tree that can only say one sentence "my name is Groot". He has a superpower that allows him to grow a new body whenever something happens to his body; Rocket is a talking raccoon, an expert sniper and has special roller blades that allow him to fly. He is very cute, but don't mess with him - even though he looks cute, he is nervous.

More on the screen

• Airplanes 2: The Firefighters: the stories of a team of firefighting aircraft whose job it is to protect the national park. When racer Dusty realizes that his engine is damaged and he may stop competing, he launches himself into a world of air-fire combat. Dusty joins forces with the fighter helicopter Bladeranger and his brave crew, and together they fight a large fire.
• The cracker robbers: Sully, a mischievous urban squirrel, and his rat friend Buddy plan to rob a cracker shop and get involved in a bank robbery planned by robbers, who used the cracker shop as a cover. On the way of the real robbers to rob the bank, they encounter problems caused by the rodents.
• House magic: Thunder the cat sneaks into the possession of the elderly wizard Lawrence, who shares his world with animals and robots. When Lawrence is in the hospital, his nephew wants to sell the house, but the residents of the mansion develop methods to protect their house: they turn it into a haunted mansion, and use thunder as their secret weapon.
• Mess in the Jungle: Manu and Sasha are two young raccoons in love who live in a rain forest in Mexico. The problem is that Sasha is the daughter of the head of the tribe, and Manu is the brat of the tribe. When hunters capture Sasha, Manu teams up with Chai the monkey, and together they set out to rescue her.
  The Adventures of Captain Harlock: The year is 2977, a mighty battle has been raging throughout space for many years. Billions of humans, who have escaped the planets to which their ancestors were exiled from Earth after it was plundered, plan to return to what they still call "home". The Earth is ruled by a corrupt coalition called Gaia, which is ruled by the human race spread throughout space. Captain Harlock and his crew are humanity's only hope of discovering the secrets the Coalition has been hiding.

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