At this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, Brad Pitt was nominated for best actor for his role in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” That itself was rather curious because for 52 minutes and 352 shots, Mr. Pitt did not appear in the film.
Or did he? Filmgoers could sense his presence: his voice, his facial expressions and twitches, his personality. But the character on the screen — a tiny, wizened old man, born in his 80s and destined to age backward — clearly was not Mr. Pitt. Instead, the elderly Benjamin Button of the first third of the movie was a digitized head, animated by a library of thousands of micro-expressions, set atop a 5-foot-tall actor’s body.
