Morgen made a pilgrimage to visit Ralph Bakshi to ask for advice. Bakshi told him to make the characters animals.

Most producer/directors might describe a failed relationship with a production company in more politic terms, but then again, if Morgen’s film is about anything, it’s about the anti-political correctness of ‘60s radicals. Given the opportunity, Pick (who’s since left Bermuda Shorts for the animation/production company Th1ng and is creating animation for a global warming documentary) offers a more reserved answer that takes into account misperceptions between Morgen and Bermuda Shorts about the nature of the work, and the difference between being a for-hire animation studio and a creative partner in an organic and evolving documentary project. He pauses, then adds: “I liked Brett and his eclectic approach -- that’s what attracted me to the project. The immediate test I did, which you can see on my site, was all about giving it a contemporary edge, with graffiti, art effects, a hip-hop soundtrack -- make it retro but contemporary, frame the character in an R. Crumb world, then through the use of technology push the character into the future.”

Returning to New York, Morgen gave some of the companies he had originally contacted a second call. “Ironically one of them was Curious Pictures, which is about a block away from my office. I spoke to Richard Winkler, who had built a motion capture stage since we first talked. All I knew from mocap was The Polar Express -- I thought you had to spend $100 million. Richard sent me some tests and said we can make it work for your budget.”

Like many directors, Morgen was intrigued by the idea of working with new technology, tools capable of giving him the maximum degree of control over what finally reached the screen. However, his voice tracks (courtesy of A-level talent like Nick Nolte, Roy Scheider, Dylan Baker, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber and Hank Azaria) had already been recorded to serve as the basis of 2D animation. The actors wearing the mocap suits, if they were to embody their characters and not just be lip-syncing their audio, would have to be brilliant physical performers -- practically mimes...

Fortunately, there were several helpful, blue-hued men right down the street willing to lend a hand. Blue Man Group -- a long-running show featuring a trio of silent, nearly identical blue-painted men in a series of surreal vignettes and musical performances -- was a neighborhood fixture just a few doors south of Curious Pictures’ Lafayette Street headquarters.

“We’re friends with the Blue Men,” explains Lewis Kofsky, Curious’ motion capture producer for Chicago 10. “We brought six guys over to audition with us. [With nine separate productions around the world doing some 12 shows a week, it’s not surprising there’d be a few extra Blue Men to spare.] We had some amazing talent. Brett was very picky -- he had some high standards, and we were able to find people who could impersonate, embody really, the younger versions of [defense attorney William] Kuntsler, Bobby Seale and the other defendants.”

Curious Pictures introduced the idea of using motion capture for the film. Luckily, there were spare Blue Man Group members available, who moved brilliantly to the pre-recorded voice tracks.

The Blue Men, together with other talent that included Morgen himself, were recorded on Curious’ mocap stage. “We went into it prepared to key-frame everything,” says Kofsky. “We developed amazing tools that let us translate performances into animation and then let the animators do things that human actors never could. We were hoping to get 90 percent of the performance onstage and then enhance and nuance it, adjusting the performances to change the camera placement and make certain moments larger than life.

“We developed custom targeting animation software that was able to handle all the facial mocap. We put 50 markers on each body, plus additional, very small markers on their faces. We were capturing those movements at the same time in an immersive volume. We were able to treat the two point clouds or data sets separately and get the facial motion capture synced up and moving with body.

“We had two dedicated software developers with us through the entire process, from pre-pro through final delivery, who gave us many, many amazing abilities. From a low-level pipeline standpoint, the animator could make changes which were automatically carried through the rest of the process -- rendering, compositing, conversion -- and show up in the edit a few hours later.”

Morgen took on several roles, including Julius Hoffman, the arrogant and elderly trial judge who could not have made a better villain if he had been cast by the Yippies themselves. “It wasn’t easy. When we did a mocap test of myself as Hoffman, it looked like an 84-year-old moving like he was 36. I started putting weights on to slow me down and ended up with 20 pounds of buckshot on my head and another 20 on each of my arms, back, chest and legs.” Not surprisingly, Morgen’s weighty experiment “worked really well -- it slowed down all my movements.

“Working in mocap was wonderful. When I was doing cel animation, I would act out the scene for the artist, but there’s a lot of room for interpretation in what’s finally drawn on paper. Mocap gave me absolute control and authority over how characters were going to move and where camera was going to be.”