[dangson]

“I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine. And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library.”

The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.

[RedComet]

Again, clearly I'm not tapped in to Hollywood like some here seem to be, but it wasn't clear to me how what he says there, "they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library", was any different than what happened when he was in any other movie, say The One. Motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is it clear that other martial arts movies didn't/don't use it.

[tremon]

Motion Capture is about posture and body movement, captured as a 3d wireframe model. See here: https://study.com/academy/lesson/computer-animation-definiti...

That's completely different from capturing the image of an actor on a 2d video frame.

[RedComet]

Thanks, but I understand what motion capture is.

Again, motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article, nor was it clear to me that even if that assumption is made that it isn't something commonly done in martial arts movies or limited to the Matrix movies.

[beagle3]

It’s now basically done in every CGI enhanced movie - e.g. all Avenger movies, Maleficient and all modern Disney movies.

It wasn’t unheard of, but wasn’t yet common in the early 2000s when the Marrix sequels were made.

Also, Matrix has lots of Bullet Time rigs, which aren’t motion capture rigs, but we’re clearly usable even back then for some “transplanting” of recordings to another scene, much more so than regular shots.

Jet Li was extrapolating into the future, but not far into the future. It was already common and happening 10 years later.

[tremon]

Maybe not common, but The Fellowship Of The Ring (full motion capture and CGI for Gollum) was released in 2001, while The Matrix Reloaded was released in 2003.

I don't think Jet Li needed to extrapolate into the future at all.

[RedComet]

Jet Li did motion capture for a video game within a year of the second Matrix release, so it wasn't the motion capture he was opposed to. Presumably it was Warner Bros' contract for him.