In a recent interview with Collider, actor Tye Sheridan revealed that the upcoming adaptation of Ready Player One is being primarily shot with the use of motion capture photography. The actor revealed that he shot for almost two months on mo-cap stages for the Steven Spielberg film, with less than half the shoot taking place on location. As a result, we can expect the bulk of the film’s running time to take place within its fictional virtual reality world, OASIS…
“60% of the film takes place in this virtual video game and 40% takes place in the real world. The idea of the film — it’s established that this video game this virtual reality game is much more glamorous than the real world; people have jobs inside of this game which is called the OASIS, people spend their lives inside this video game.
My character is kind of this loser in the real world, but in this video game the creator of the game dies and leaves behind an easter egg hidden inside of the game that holds his trillions of dollars and control of the game and he says whoever finds it in the game is the person who should take over the OASIS.
So five years go by, no one’s found the easter egg and – there are three keys in order to get to the easter egg – he’s the first one to find the first key. So his avatar becomes famous in the video game, where in the real world he’s still kind of this loser, so he’s juggling both.”
Based on the popular science fiction novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One is directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Eric Eason, Zak Penn, and Cline himself. The Warner Bros. production stars Tye Sheridan as ‘Parzival (aka Wade Watts)’, Olivia Cooke as ‘Art3mis (aka Sam Cook)’, Ben Mendelsohn as ‘Nolan Sorrento’, Mark Rylance as ‘Anorak (aka James Donovan Halliday)’, Simon Pegg as ‘Ogden Morrow’, T.J. Miller as ‘i-R0k’, Win Morisaki as ‘Daito (aka Toshiro Yoshiaki)’, Philip Zao as ‘Shato (aka Akihide Karatsu)’, and Hannah John-Kamen.
This isn’t the first Spielberg film to use a heavy amount of mo-cap technology. The Adventures of Tintin was shot entirely with the tech and the filmmaker utilized a fair amount of it for last year’s The BFG as well. Ready Player One shot all throughout the latter half of 2016 and is currently in post-production. Due to the extensive use of visual effects, however, it will not be hitting theaters until March 30th, 2018. Because of this, the next Spielberg film that we see will actually be The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. An historical biopic set to star Mark Rylance, Mortara is currently in pre-production. It is expected to have a quick turnaround and be ready for theaters late this year. After finishing up work on both Ready Player One and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Spielberg is expected to move on to making Indiana Jones 5 (2019).
