As the Oscar awards dinner was taking place last month, a legal row was brewing over the lip-synch technology used to make American Presidents featured in the film Forrest Gump to speak lines they never delivered in real life. According to various reports in the Chicago Tribune, freelance computer consultant Richard Bloomstein is suing Paramount Pictures and Lucas Films, with an eye on a share of some of the $300m box office takings of the blockbuster film. Bloomstein apparently owns a patent on a method of dubbing foreign language films. The filmakers used a morphing tool from Madison, Wisconsin-based Elastic Reality running on Silicon Graphics Inc workstations, which are commonplace in the film special effects industry. Elastic Reality president Perry Kivolowitz told our sister paper Unigram.X that the company’s software was simply a general purpose tool. We make the hammers. If someone buys a hammer and throws it through a window, that is not our responsibility. Elastic Reality was also used on the film In The Line Of Fire, though not on the lip-synching portion. The tool takes a shape to shape approach to lip-synching, tracing the shape of the mouth and then using drawing tools to outline how the shape of the mouth should change. Morphing itself was pioneered in the early 1980s at the New York Institute of Technology, and was first used in films such as George Lucas’s Willow, in the late 1980s. Paramount and Lucas said the claim has no merit, and they intend to fight it.
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