Digital Drapery and Body Schema-tics

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing motion capture acting for film as a creative professional collaboration between actors and animators. Animators are framed as the draper (rathe than the drafter) of the synthespian’s digital costume, informed but not overdetermined by the raw data of the motion capture actor’s performance. Similarly, the data ensuing from the actor’s performance is analyzed in the neuroscientific terms of body image versus body schema, which makes a distinction between the self’s physical appearance and the self’s capacity for action. The paper concludes that ethnographic research on motion capture acting with this new terminology will provide a holistic view of the collective creative processes in digital cinematic production.