“We’re shooting two films back-to-back, so I’m writing two scripts, not one, which will complete a free-film story arc – not really a trilogy, but just an overall character arc. “We’re doing a lot of preliminary work right now on new software and new animation techniques and so on. We’re creating a new facility in Manhattan Beach so everybody that’s not already dead is coming back.”

And in time when so many visual effects artists are unemployed, Cameron’s projects, due for release in December of 2014 and December 2015, are a welcome change.
“It’s absolutely going to generate jobs. There is a plethora of visual effects artists and a lot of them are out of work right now, so it’s a really great place to get a lot of talented people,” Peter Gend, visual effects instructor at the Art Institute of California in Los Angeles said. “What goes into his motion capture process is really different than what anyone else does.”
Jon Landau, Cameron’s co-producer of the “Avatar” films at Lightstorm Entertainment, is anticipating that more than 700 jobs will be created for the two productions, which are slated to be bigger and better than ever.
“Another thing the Manhattan Beach studio affords us is the ability to expand. Should we need to pick up and do a live-action shoot, should we need more space, they have it,” he said.

And with the first “Avatar” earning the title of the highest-grossing film worldwide, Cameron is indeed feeling the pressure.
“There’s always an expectation. I had to deal with that after ‘The Terminator’ back in 1984. All of a sudden I had a big hit movie and it was ‘what are you doing next?’ But my job is take the audience on a journey and entertain them,” he said. “The second I am sitting down writing, I just go to Pandora. I don’t think about that stuff, about standing on a red carpet. It has its own life, really. The characters have their own lives.”
And on the subject of “The Terminator,” Cameron is sticking by his star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, despite his recent personal problems.
“He and I have spoken a lot,” the director said. “You have to stand by your friends. He and I have talked and I said, ‘look man, I stand by you.’ He doesn’t need my advice. He knows how to manage his image and to say what he needs to say, and he’s going to say it on his own terms when he is ready. It is that simple.”
Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” is being re-released in 3D, so it seemed only natural he weigh in on the news, especially in light of his well-documented hate for 2D films that have been converted to 3D in post-production. “It is actually a little frustrating because it would have been so easy to shoot ‘Titanic’ in 3D, if we’d had cameras back then and if there had been theaters,” he told us. “It’s actually more work (to convert to 3D in post-production) and I don’t really enjoy the process, but I enjoy the result.”
“We have spent several years and millions of dollars trying to create a time machine so that I could go back and shoot it in 3D and it didn’t work out,” he joked. “So we just have to convert it.”

Reference
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/06/21/james-cameron-to-generate-hundreds-jobs-by-filming-avatar-sequels-domestically/#ixzz1QCHlWY7V

Tintin to get Weta treatment

Steven Spielberg has wrapped up shooting the first Tintin movie in Hollywood and will now pass it to Peter Jackson to complete the visual effects.

Spielberg last week completed 32 days of shooting the actors, including Daniel Craig as pirate Red Rackham, using special performance capture technology, Variety reported.

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of Unicorn will now continue at Weta Digital in Wellington under the eye of Jackson, the film’s producer.

Spielberg and Jackson have been tight-lipped on exactly how performance capture technology a more advanced version of how Andy Serkis was used as the model for the computer-generated Gollum in The Lord of the Rings is being used for the first of three Tintin movies. But it is understood it will be used to make the actors look similar to the characters depicted in the series by Herge.

Requests to visit the Los Angeles set of the film featuring the plucky Belgian reporter have been repeatedly turned down. “You have to see it to understand [the technology]. It really can’t be described,” said Spielberg spokesman Marvin Levy.

Kathleen Kennedy, who is also producing the series, said it was hard to describe exactly the world Spielberg and Jackson were creating in the film. “It’s extremely difficult to explain to someone unless they are standing next to me and usually then their reaction is, ‘Oh my God’.”

Jackson is likely to direct the second Tintin movie.

The special-effects house behind Avatar reveals a bit of its magic

Joe Letteri has served as visual effects supervisor at both Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital. In doing so, he’s had a hand in creating the most innovative and creative visual effects in film history. His career spans from The Abyss to the Oscar-nominatedAvatar. Screen Junkies caught up with him at the VES Awards to discuss Steven Spielberg’s first entry in the Tintin trilogy he’s tackling with Peter Jackson.


First up, he discusses what we can expect Tintin to look like:

“We’re experimenting with a number of different looks. When you do 3D you have a range of options to go with, slightly sort of cartoony. You go more Pixar style where there’s realism but still exaggeration. The problem with going completely photoreal with human characters is you want to honor the comicness of it. So we’re still feeling our way around it.”

MORE FROM JOE AFTER THE JUMP.

He then went on to describe introducing Spielberg to the Avatar technology used on the film:

“Tintin was a similar process because Peter [Jackson] sort of suggested to Steven the difficulty of doing a film that’s based on a comic character, trying to do live-action is always difficult to cast and to get the feel of the characters properly. So he suggested the idea of trying to do it as essentially a performance capture film. So Jim [Cameron] showed Steven and Peter what we were doing with ‘Avatar’ and they shot a couple days on the stage and loved the process. We shot ‘Tintin’ the same way. People are definitely picking up on the process. Jim has shown it to a lot of people. A lot of people came through the ‘Avatar’ set. He was pretty open and happy to demonstrate the whole technique. Because he’s designed it like a live-action set, it’s actually easier to pick up than most people think. From the outside it might look daunting but once you get in there on that stage and start working with it, it’s very much like shooting a live action. That was the whole point. You have all this technology in a way to remove the technology.”

He makes it sound so easy. Something must be holding up the works though since we shouldn’t expect to see The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in theaters before late 2011. Spielberg, Jackson, and Cameron probably spend most of their time gathering for regular let’s-rub-our-beards-together sessions. What, you think this kind of technology comes out of thin air?

by: Dominic von Riedemann

After years of uncertainty, AMPAS has decided that motion capture films are ineligible for the Best Animated Feature Film Award.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences laid a 4-year old controversy to rest when they announced that motion-capture films are no longer considered eligible for the Best Animated Feature Film category.

“I just adored it. It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an XBOX game controller. When Captain Haddock runs across the volume [the name for the motion capture stage], the cameras capture all the information of his physical and emotional moves. So as Andy Serkis runs across the stage, there’s Captain Haddock on the monitor, in full anime, running along the streets of Belgium. Not only are the actors represented in real time, they enter into a three-dimensional world.”

With all the buzz around the skyrocketing popularity of 3-D after the record breaking Avatar made it big, there should be a much bigger reception for the far more impressive and prominent work in performance capture and the animation that accompanies it. There’s a big problem when a spectacular performance from Zoe Saldana doesn’t get one bit of serious awards consideration despite plenty of campaigning. LA Times’ Hero Complex has some great bits from Steven Spielberg speaking with great wonder and passion about his work onThe Adventures of Tintin, which was shot in 3-D with performance capture just like Avatar.

Word from Spielberg comes from a follow-up to a big front page story in the LA Times about the angst of Hollywood actors as more filmmakers embrace performance capture (it’s a hell of a read). Spielberg clears up right from the get-go that the choice to shoot in 3-D and use performance capture isn’t just a gimmick or part of a growing trend. “It was based on my respect for the art of Hergé and wanting to get as close to that art as I could.” Hergé, of course, is the man responsible for creating the comic series, which follows a young intrepid Belgian reporter and his canine sidekick Snowy, mostly taking place in pre-World War II Europe.

Spielberg says the performance capture technique is what helps make the Tintin world more accessible:

“Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe,” Spielberg said. “It was the real universe he was working with, and he used National Geographic to research his adventure stories. It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”

Interesting, because you would almost think that creating a stylized world based on Hergé’s art through motion capture and animation might be a little harder to accept because of its artistic style, but I get what he’s saying anyway. It’s the same reason something likeScooby-Doo, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Alvin and the Chipmunks look so damn silly on screen. So rather than dressing actors Jamie Bell (Tintin), Andy Serkis (Captain Haddock), Daniel Craig (Red Rackham), Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Thomson and Thompson) in silly outfits in a realistic world, you get a completely custom crafted universe where everything feels right.

Not only does it feel right, but it feels genuine as, much like Cameron’s success in Avatar’s presentation of performance capture, the head-rigging captures every bit of an actor’s performance, especially on the face, which avoids the glass-eyed, moving doll look that Robert Zemeckis can’t seem to avoid. For Spielberg, it was pure magic seeing the actor’s performance come alive, not simply watching them with green screen and equipment, but on the digital presentation in the animated world (created by co-producer Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop) which appears on monitors as filming takes place. Spielberg praised the experience:

“I just adored it. It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an XBOX game controller. When Captain Haddock runs across the volume [the name for the motion capture stage], the cameras capture all the information of his physical and emotional moves. So as Andy Serkis runs across the stage, there’s Captain Haddock on the monitor, in full anime, running along the streets of Belgium. Not only are the actors represented in real time, they enter into a three-dimensional world.”

But the most encouraging and important thing that Spielberg says about motion capture is what everyone, especially acting awards shows, need to understand. No matter how different someone like Jamie Bell looks on-screen with Tintin’s likeness, “it will be Jamie Bell’s complete physical and emotional performance. If Tintin makes you feel something, it’s Jamie Bell’s soul you’re sensing.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But we still have to wait two more years, until December 23rd, 2011, which is when The Adventures of Tintinfinally hits theaters in the US.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/02/steven-spielberg-on-tintin-technology-it-made-me-more-like-a-painter-than-ever-before-.html

James Cameron and Peter Jackson are the kings of the CGI world. Cameron, of course, directed Titanic, the highest-grossing movie of all time—which he says he’d make with no ship if he were filming today. Jackson was the guy behind bringing Middle-earth to the big screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now they are back with Avatar and The Lovely Bones, two of the most-hyped films of the holiday season. Newsweek asked them about their new films and how technology is changing Hollywood. An excerpt of the transcript is printed below:

Cameron: So how’s the road trip been on The Lovely Bones?

Jackson: It’s all right. Not too bad. Having a harder job getting over the jet lag than I normally do, but never mind. Getting older, I guess. I’m in … Berlin.

Cameron: Ha, ha! You had to think about it for a minute!

Jackson: I did! I’m flying to Paris as soon as this phone call is over. So we’re talking about technology and movies?

Cameron: People often ask us about the future of filmmaking because we’ve both been innovators in the last few years, creating cutting-edge stuff that gets widely or narrowly adopted. I think the simple answer is that filmmaking is not going to ever fundamentally change. It’s about storytelling. It’s about humans playing humans. It’s about close-ups of actors. It’s about those actors somehow saying the words and playing the moment in a way that gets in contact with the audience’s hearts. I don’t think that changes. I don’t think that’s changed in the last century.

Jackson: There’s no doubt that the industry is in a weird position. It’s not just Hollywood—it’s international. The loss of the independent distribution companies and the finance companies, and the lack of ability to get medium-budget films these days. The studios have found comfort in these enormous movies. The big-budget blockbuster is becoming one of the most dependable forms of filmmaking. It was only three or four years ago when there was a significant risk with that kind of film. Now, especially last summer, we saw blockbuster after blockbuster be released, and they all had significant budgets and they’re all doing fine. It almost doesn’t matter if the film is a good film or a bad film, they’re all doing OK. They’ve lost the ability to have that happen with a low-budget movie and with midrange-budget movies.

Cameron: But they’ve also lost the courage to make, frankly, a movie like Avatar, which is a blockbuster-scaled movie not based on prior arc. All the blockbusters of the last four years, like Transformers, Harry Potter, Spider-Man—they’re all films based on other films or part of a franchise. The idea of making a film of that scale that’s a unique piece has been lost. In the meantime, we have all these increases in technology. And there’s no clear way to pay for these blockbuster movies in the old traditional way. It’s not clear that the technology will come down in price in the near future.

Jackson: People are holding on to the idea of lowering the price. The vast majority of the CGI budget is labor. Unless everything goes to China or Eastern Europe in the sweatshops, that sort of approach, labor is never going to go down. It’s only going to go up.

Cameron: Because computers don’t create beautiful images. People do. Down at your place in Wellington [New Zealand], we had 800 people working on Avatar for the past six months.

Jackson: The ones that are conscious anyway.

Cameron: I’m sure there was a big night at the Wellington pubs a few days ago when they turned over their last shot.

Jackson: I think there were a few pillows and sleeping bags under desks. A lot of media attention is switching to technology in the wrong way. They’re saying the industry is in trouble; will 3-D save it? That really doesn’t have anything to do with it. The industry is in trouble, but it has nothing to do with technology, nor is technology going to necessarily be the savior.

Cameron: No, it can’t: 3-D may help define the idea of the big show at the cinema, the cinematic experience, but I think the heart of the cinematic experience is the group experience. It’s the psychology of sitting in a dark room with a bunch of people and reacting to something, and feeling like your reaction is the same as the rest of the group, a way of proof-checking your emotions are normal.

Jackson: Or not.

Cameron: If you’re the one guy laughing out of 400 people, you’re obviously out of step. I don’t think that’s going to change. People have been downloading films, watching films on laptops, watching films on iPods for quite some time now. Ticket sales are not dropping at the same rate that those other methods of media are rising. I came to filmmaking in the early ’80s, and it was a time of deep economic recession. It was a time when VHS home video was taking money from the theaters. The film industry was depressed. That’s what I knew—a state of upheaval and change. It all sorted itself out. These things always sort themselves out. The fundamental question is: is cinema staying or is it going away? I think it shows no signs of going away. I feel quite confident you and I are going to make the kinds of films we love 10 and 20 years from now.

Jackson: I do too. In addition to the theatrical experience, we will be seeing a lot of other forms of distribution and delivery, which is going to be interesting. We have things like Xbox Live with all the subscribers. It’s not going to be too much longer before Xbox Live produces programming. There are so many opportunities there. Everybody is playing a defensive game. Nobody is going on the attack and being brave and courageous, apart from you.

Cameron: They always say pioneers are those guys flying on planes with arrows in their backs. 3-D will find its place. It’s like color. Color didn’t affect the career of a single actor. And then people will find out about the intimacy to 3-D that can add to a dramatic film that’s not even on the radar of the Hollywood studios right now.

Jackson: I find personally that within 10 minutes I forget that it’s in 3-D, in a good way. The only thing about 3-D is the dullness of the image. But that’s a relatively simple technical hurdle to overcome. It’s just brightening the image.

Cameron: It’s already been overcome. The new technology has already solved the light-level problem. We think it looks fantastic.

Jackson: How far away are we from taking glasses out of the 3-D equation?

Cameron: I’ve seen displays at a laptop size and a relatively modest plasma size that work quite well. You have to situate your head to the sweet spot so you don’t get the double image. But people are always turning the laptop display to get the best image. I can imagine three or four years from now an iPhone that’s 3-D-enabled that doesn’t require glasses that you can watch a movie on. Certainly laptops will be here before that. I think the ones that succeed in the marketplace are the ones that initially make their sets, their displays, to be able to use the glasses. If you’re going to do a Super Bowl party you’re going to have a bowl of glasses on your coffee table, and they’re going to be the disposable kind. And then eventually I think the glasses have to go away for home use. I think that will happen within five years.

Jackson: I’m seeing there’s a lot of misunderstanding about motion capture at the moment.

Cameron: The irony is that one of the first examples of motion capture that worked so beautifully is Gollum in the second and third of your films. Suddenly this new idea had burst on the scene, that a quasi-human creature could be created with such heart and soul.

Jackson: With Gollum and Kong, the key thing that we did was the eyes. I think Gollum and Kong represented the best eyes that I’ve seen in a CGI film.

Cameron: The experience of creating a soulful performance is through the eyes: knowing how to rig eyes, how to light for eyes, get the reflections and refractions in the eyes. Of course, we had big-eyed characters, which we did on purpose. We couldn’t accomplish the character we’re doing in Avatar through any kind of makeup means. That’s been explored for 30 years of Star Trek and Star Wars. But I think the thing I hope that the media can convey to audiences is that this is an actor-driven process. Nayteri, in my film, for example—she is what Zoe [Saldana] created 100 percent. Initially I thought we want to keep the technique under wraps. We don’t want to pull the curtain aside and show people how we’ve done this; we just want to show you my magic. But I’ve recently changed my tune. I want people to see a side-by-side image of Nayteri in a scene and Zoe doing the scene, so they understand that it’s a physical and facial performance. Zoe took months of training at archery and martial arts, so she could move a certain way and have a certain grace. It’s something she created that just translated to her character. This is a highly actor-driven process.

Jackson: Actors will never be replaced. The thought that somehow a computer version of a character is going to be something people prefer to look at is a ludicrous idea. It’s just paranoia. What is great, when you would have used prosthetic makeup, you have motion capture to do a more emotive version. That’s great for nonhuman characters, but in terms of creating nonhuman beings—why on earth would anyone want to do that? It’s so expensive. It’s 20 times more than an actor’s going to cost.
Cameron: The other thing that people aren’t talking about, you can take an actor of a given age, and you can transform their age. Additive makeup can age somebody, but it’s hard to make someone younger. Let’s say you have a novelistic storyline where you cast an actor in their 40s, but the first time you see them they’re 15 years old and the last time you see them they’re 80. This is the Benjamin Button idea. Clint Eastwood could do another Dirty Harry movie and look the way he looked in the ’70s. He would still be making all the performance choices. It would be his voice. We’d just make him 30 years younger. If I did Titanic today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t be a 750-foot-long set. There would be small set pieces integrated into a large CGI set. I wouldn’t have to wait seven days to get the perfect sunset for the kiss scene. We’d shoot it in front of a green screen, and we’d choose our sunset.

Jackson: There are all great tools that people haven’t quite gotten their heads around yet. But one of the things that has happened [is that] people focus on technology. Probably the film industry has been guilty; there’s more attention spent on the technical aspects than the story. That’s led to a self-fulfilling prophecy. People regard CGI as a gimmick, they almost blame CGI for a bad story or a bad script. They talk about CGI as if it’s responsible for a drop in standards. We’ve gotten to a point now where there isn’t nothing else we haven’t seen. We’ve seen dinosaurs, we’ve seen aliens; with Avatar we’ve seen realistic creatures. I think we’re going to enter a phase where there’s less interest in the CGI and there’s a demand for story again. I think we’ve dropped the ball a little bit on stories for the sake of the amazing toys that we’ve played with.

Cameron: I think you’re right. What’s interesting in the marketing evolution of Avatar is that we put out a teaser trailer that was all about the imagery, and people were less than satisfied, because they weren’t learning enough about the story. We put out a story trailer that set the stage and told you what the main character was, and all of a sudden people were wildly excited about the movie. There’s the proof within the marketing evolution of a single film.

Director James Cameron had many reasons to be happy the morning that this year’s Oscar nominations were announced: His blockbuster movie “Avatar” tied for the most with nine, including best picture and best director. But he was dismayed that his cast, including stars Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver, was shut out.

In fact, unlike the great majority of best picture nominees, the “Avatar” actors have not nabbed one major critic’s award, or guild prize. The snubs reflect the apparent ambivalence of the film community — especially actors — to “Avatar” and its revolutionary use of “performance capture,” a new technology that combines human actors with computer-generated animation to create the blue, 10-foot-tall creatures who are the heart of the movie.

To the uninitiated, it raises basic questions: Is this acting, or is it animation? And, does this suggest that actors could become obsolete? It’s an issue that provokes a strong response from Hollywood figures, from best actor nominees Jeff Bridges and Jeremy Renner to directors Cameron and Steven Spielberg.

“I’m sure they could do it now if they wanted. Actors will kind of be a thing of the past,” Bridges told Tribune Newspapers the day nominations were announced. “We’ll be turned into combinations. A director will be able to say, ‘I want 60 percent Clooney; give me 10 percent Bridges; and throw some Charles Bronson in there.’ They’ll come up with a new guy who will look like nobody who has ever lived and that person or thing will be huge,” he said.


Renner, nominated for ” The Hurt Locker,” put it this way: “Some movies are actors’ kind of movies and some movies are more directors’ movies. ‘Avatar’ is a spectacle. It’s a beautiful experience, but it’s not really an actors’ kind of movie. It doesn’t really allow for an actor to truly tell a story. The director’s telling the story in that one.”

Perhaps mindful that actors make up the largest Oscar voting bloc, Cameron fiercely promotes the contributions of his cast to the success of “Avatar.” He and other advocates of performance capture (known as “motion capture” in its previous, less sophisticated incarnation), including Spielberg, say not enough actors have experienced the process to appreciate it.

“There’s a learning curve for the acting community, and they’re not up to speed yet,” Cameron said. “We didn’t get out and proselytize with the Screen Actors Guild as we probably should have to raise awareness. Not only should they not be afraid of it, they should be excited about it. There is a new set of possibilities, after a century of doing movie acting in the same way.”

Cameron describes it as “an actor-driven process.”

“I’m not interested in being an animator. … That’s what Pixar does. What I do is talk to actors. ‘Here’s a scene. Let’s see what you can come up with,’ and when I walk away at the end of the day, it’s done in my mind. In the actor’s mind, it’s done. There may be a whole team of animators to make sure what we’ve done is preserved, but that’s their problem. Their job is to use the actor’s performance as an absolute template without variance for what comes out the other end.”

“I like to think of it as digital makeup, not augmented animation,” said Spielberg, who is using Cameron’s “Avatar” technology in his new movie, “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” “It’s basically the actual performance of the actual actor, and what you’re simply experiencing is makeup.”

In the case of “Avatar,” Spielberg said, “the digital makeup is so thin you actually see everything that Zoe (Saldana) is doing. Every nuance of that performance comes through digitally.”

Spielberg and Cameron say that making a movie in performance capture is, for the actors, very similar to performing a play.

“Motion capture brings the director back to a kind of intimacy that actors and directors only know when they’re working in live theater,” Spielberg said.

Recording takes place on a spare motion-capture stage called the volume. Actors wear skin-tight bodysuits with reflective markers; every movement is tracked by an array of more than 100 fixed cameras. A specialized head-rig camera records the actor’s face and eyes.

“The virtual camera is always active,” explained “Avatar” producer Jon Landau. Gone is the need for camera and lighting setups, makeup retouches and costume fittings. Scenes do not need to be shot repeatedly from different camera angles. Instead, the camera data are fed into a computer that creates a 3-D replica of the actor’s every movement, and the director can just add his camera moves — from any perspective — digitally.

“There’s a purity to it. You can’t rely on anything else but your own skill as an actor; (it) enables the actor to shoot the scene in one take without worrying where the camera is,” said Andy Serkis, a veteran British stage actor who pioneered motion-capture acting as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Serkis also took the title role in Jackson’s remake of “King Kong” and is performing in Spielberg’s “Tintin.”

“If you don’t have the performance, the rest is dressing,” Serkis said. “You can’t enhance a bad performance with animation. You can’t dial it up, lift the lip or the eyebrow. It has to be right at the core moment. It’s the same as conventional shooting.” For actors to not recognize “performance capture as acting is bad and disrespectful. It’s also Luddite.”

In the case of “Avatar,” some complain that Cameron’s characters are too one-dimensional to merit their actors a nomination, but others believe that “Avatar” star Saldana, whose every minute on screen is in performance capture, was robbed of recognition.

“Zoe played Neytiri with such strength, grace and force. If the audience realized just how much, they would have appreciated the performance more,” said “Avatar” co-star Sigourney Weaver. “The technology is so innovative, and it will just continue to get more innovative. We might as well recognize (the contributions of actors) now.”

From a director’s standpoint, recording in performance capture is unusually free and fast. On a typical day of a live-action production, a director might complete a dozen or so scenes in which the lights, cameras, scenery and actors are repositioned. Spielberg said that on “Tintin,” he completed 75 setups a day on the motion-capture stage and finished principal photography in 30 days. That’s less than half the time it would have taken to shoot a live-action version of the film.


“It allows the director and cast to focus on the performance,” Spielberg said. “The director sits right on the floor (with the actors). Because he’s not wearing a motion-capture suit, he appears invisible.”

“One hundred percent of my focus is on the actors,” Cameron said. “I’m not thinking about the lighting, the dolly, or waiting around … to light the shot.”

Though performance-capture veterans speak enthusiastically about the technique, questions remain. Many wonder whether Saldana will get the kind of career boost usually associated with co-starring in a box-office bonanza. The Screen Actors Guild recently appointed a committee to look into what SAG President Ken Howard described as “pay and recognition” issues associated with performance capture in movies and video games. In fact, studios haven’t formally recognized SAG’s jurisdiction over the work, leaving it up to each employer to decide whether the performers receive standard union benefits such as minimum pay or meal breaks.

Moreover, the actors are not the only ones unsure about their primacy in the process. There’s also a branch of animators who don’t want their contributions overlooked. Cameron points out that it took a team of 20 or more animators at the Weta Workshop in New Zealand nine months to fully animate each “Avatar” character.

“The academy has to come to terms with where (performance capture) goes,” said director Henry Selick, whose ” Coraline” is nominated for best animated film. “Is it animation? Is it a new category? I’m like the academy. I don’t know where it fits. I will tell you this: Animators have to work very, very hard with the motion-capture data. After the performance is captured, it’s not just plugged into the computer which spits out big blue people. It’s a hybrid.”

Tribune Newspapers writers Richard Verrier, Amy Kaufman and Yvonne Villarreal contributed to this report.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sc-ent-0224-avatar-actors-20100224,0,1272757.story

CG In Another World

By: Barbara Robertson

When we think about the first films to convince directors that visual effects created with computer graphics could open their imaginations, two films immediately come to mind: James Cameron’s The Abyss, in which a transparent CG character communicated with an actor, and Cameron’s Terminator 2, which starred a digital, liquid terminator and is lauded as the first movie to show the power of a digital pipeline. Both films won visual effects Oscars, as did Cameron’s Alien before, and Titanic after. Titanic, released in 1997, still holds the record for the largest box-office revenue: $1.8 billion. It was the last feature film Cameron had made. Until now.

A new facial motion-capture system devised by Weta Digital captured actor Zoe Saldana’s
facial expressions and mouth movements to help animators give Neytiri, a CG character, an
emotional performance. The long-awaited and highly anticipated Avatar, written, directed, and produced by Cameron and released by Twentieth Century Fox, pushes digital filmmaking into new worlds. It will immerse audiences in an alien environment, one created entirely with computer graphics and projected, in theaters so equipped, in stereo 3D. Cameron used a Pace Fusion 3D camera to film the live-action segments, but they comprise a small percentage of the film. Weta Digital created the alien planet Pandora and the CG characters and creatures that inhabit it, animating the characters using data from actors’ performances on motion-capture sets. Will it have the same impact on visual effects as did Cameron’s earlier films?

“It certainly changed the way we do things,” says Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital. “We had to go through a complete re-tooling and re-architecting.” Now a partner at Weta, Letteri has won visual effects Oscars for two episodes of The Lord of the Rings and for King Kong, along with an Oscar nomination for his work on I, Robot while at the New Zealand studio.

In particular, Letteri notes, the studio revamped systems for real-time facial motion capture and muscles, created methods for growing a rain forest in which most of the movie takes place, implemented new lighting techniques, built a compositing pipeline to handle stereo 3D, and more. “We could not allow ourselves to cheat anything,” he says. “Everything had to be done correctly; there was no place to hide.”

Weta used an absorption-based subsurface scattering routine to give the blue-skinned avatars and Na’vi a fleshy, believable look.

In the film, Jake Sully (actor Sam Worthington), a paraplegic war veteran, is given the opportunity to inhabit the athletic body of an avatar. He opts in. His avatar is an alien, a Na’vi, a race of humanoids that populate the planet Pandora. He, like all Na’vi, is blue. A 10-foot-tall biped with a stretched, cat-like body. Almond-shaped eyes. Tail. Pointed ears. Through his avatar, Jake immigrates to Pandora, a lush planet filled with waterfalls, jungles, and six-legged creatures, some of which fly. There he meets the beautiful Neytiri (actor Zoe Saldana) and assimilates into the Na’vian culture.

Everything on Pandora—every plant, creature, and character—is digital, created by artists using computer graphics tools and moved by animators working with keyframe and motion-capture data.

“The planet was really inspired by Jim’s [Cameron] underwater dives,” Letteri says. “There’s bioluminescence. The creatures have blue skin, and the animals have vivid patterns. We all know the rules: Big animals don’t have vivid colors. But, they do underwater, and Jim said they can exist on this planet. So we brought that color palette to the surface and made it believable. However, the big thing was that Jim wanted to do facial motion capture.”

Performing Characters

For Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Weta had captured Andy Serkis’s body, not his face. For King Kong, they glued markers on Serkis’s face and captured him in a high-resolution volume, and then retargeted the motion data to Kong’s CG face. “Jim didn’t want to go that route,” Letteri says. “He was more interested in a video head rig.”

To make a head-mounted system that would encumber the actors as little as possible, Weta decided to create software that could track facial movements using one camera. Then they took it a step further by re-projecting the motion onto a 3D model in real time.

“We knew Jim would have real-time motion capture on the stage for the characters, and would be recording the faces,” Letteri says. “We thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do real-time faces? We knew he was coming in six weeks, so we did some all-nighters and got a system working.” When Cameron arrived, he could see actors on stage wearing a head rig that was driving the facial expressions for a CG character in real time.

Stephen Rosenbaum—who had been on the crew at Industrial Light & Magic for The Abyss as a CG artist, was a CG animator on Terminator 2, and who had won a visual effects Oscar for Forest Gump—was the liaison between Cameron and his Lightstorm group in Los Angeles and Weta in New Zealand. He helped integrate Weta’s creatures, avatar puppets, and facial-capture system into previs and the real-time motion systems developed by Lightstorm and Giant Studios. Rosenbaum was one of six visual effects supervisors at Weta who worked with Letteri on the film. The other five were Dan Lemmon, Eric Saindon, Wayne Stables, Chris White, and Guy Williams.

“Lightstorm created environments at a previs level,” Rosenbaum explains. “We created the creatures and character puppets at Weta that they used within the environments. Giant used our puppets during motion capture. And, when they had scenes where actors needed to interact with creatures, we also provided pre-animated characters so they could see the action during motion capture.”

Giant and Lightstorm performed the real-time motion capture that allowed Cameron to see the CG version of the film at a game-quality level as the actors performed in a motion-capture volume approximately 40 feet wide by 70 feet long. Giant set up the volume using close to 120 industrial cameras from Basler Vision, and handled the re-targeting, in real time, of motion from actors onto the rendered, 10-foot-tall aliens. Lightstorm’s virtual cinematography system, developed by Glen Derry, blended the characters into the virtual set using Autodesk’s MotionBuilder for real-time rendering.

“We could tie into the body capture and add our facial capture simultaneously,” Rosenbaum says. “So [Cameron] could see the body performance and the facial gestures happen [on the CG characters] with the dialog, which was a nizce feature.”

The real-time facial performances weren’t always practical—video projection onto the characters’ faces was sufficient for all but the most subtle scenes. However, Letteri believes it’s game changing.

Weta modeled all the plants in the rain forest on Pandora, seen here virtually, using a rule-based growth system. Some plants have as many as one million polygons.

“It’s one of those things,” Letteri says. “You can see a motion-capture demo, and it’s kind of interesting. But, on set, seeing actors and CG characters performing at the same time, well, that’s really cool. It doesn’t even demo well in a video. When you’re there, it’s a whole different feeling. You have to see it in person.”

Rosenbaum estimates that more than 80 percent of the film is virtual. “We’re delivering about 110 minutes of full CG,” he points out. “I would guess that another 20 minutes have a combination of CG and live action. And, there are some other VFX facilities helping out. We sent some flying creatures, Na’vi, environments, and vehicles to ILM, Framestore, and a few other vendors, as well. But, the bulk of the CG work is being done at Weta.” The list of other vendors that worked on previs and postvis for the film includes BUF, Halon, Hybride, Hydraulx, Lola, Pixel Liberation Front, Stan Winston Studio (now Legacy Effects), and The Third Floor.

Capturing Faces

Each actor captured on set wore a helmet with a lipstick camera attached to a boom arm, and green makeup dots on his or her face. The crew positioned the camera between the actor’s nose and upper lip to capture the mouth movement and to see the eyes. To paint the dots, the makeup artists used a vacuform mask cut with small holes designed for each actor. “We’d put the mask on the face, draw a pen mark for the dots, pull it away, and paint on the green dots,” Rosenbaum says. “The actors loved it. It took only five or 10 minutes and they were back on stage.”

To plot the dot pattern, the facial motion-capture crew had first taken video of the actors doing a FACS session—creating particular expressions, mouthing phonemes, doing prescribed facial gestures—and, if they had dialog, saying their lines. The FACS analysis helped the crew identify major muscle groups for each face so they could position the dots, sometimes as many as 70, most effectively.

For the eyes, Weta developed software to track the pupils. “We had an LED array around the camera so we could illuminate the face and see the pupil clearly,” Rosenbaum says. “And if we couldn’t get good data, we’d track the pupils from the video. Traditional facial capture has always been a problem, but I think our eye movement is fantastic. It sells the characters.”

The eye movement was particularly important because although the avatars have eyebrows, the Na’vi didn’t, so their eyes needed to express much of their emotion. Yet, the iris in the Na’vi eyes was so big, the white of their eyes showed only when they were shocked.

“We ended up adding a stripe pattern to suggest eyebrows,” says Andy Jones, animation director. “We studied Zoe’s [Saldana] expression, and found it was really tricky to get the same feeling on her CG character without eyebrows. To prove it to [Cameron], I roto’d Zoe’s eyebrows out of her face, and he realized what we were up against. That’s when we textured in a pattern to get the feeling of eyebrows back in there.”

The motion captured from the actors on stage drove a facial system developed by Jeff Unay on their corresponding CG characters. To help with the lip sync, character designers had created the lips on the Na’vi to match those of the actors performing them. “We kept the characteristics of the actors and reshaped them into alien characters,” Letteri says. “That gave us a good basis.”

“Solving” software applied the data to Weta’s facial system, and a facial-solving team adjusted the result. The motion data worked best for lip sync and mouth movement; animators spent more time tweaking brow and eye animation. “When the overall expression straight out of the facial solve was not what it should have been, the team would push the data around to get the right poses and extremes, yet still keep the live feeling of the data,” Jones says. “As the team adjusted poses with sliders—they called it ‘tuning’ because they tuned the solve on various frames—the solving software learned which poses to use.”

Unay based the underlying system on blendshapes. “We started with a dynamic muscle rig for the faces, but although it was good at preserving volume, it was coming up short in terms of level of detail,” Jones says. “[Cameron] was very specific. If he saw tension in Zoe’s mouth, he wanted exactly that [in Neytiri]. We had to art-direct and sculpt her face.”

So, Unay modeled blendshapes to mimic a volume-based system using FACS, which describes the muscle groups that control parts of the face. Thousands of shapes. The resulting rig for Neytiri, for example, has 1500 blendshapes. “The animators use sliders that control only about 50 shapes at a time,” Jones says. “The system switches to banks of shapes depending on which muscle sliders they move. It all happens under the hood without the animators knowing. The combinations of shapes look amazing; the skin looks like it’s pressing and pulling.”

As the animators worked in Autodesk’s Maya, they could bring up, on their screens, reference video shot in HD from multiple angles. “We could see the skin and get the timing from the helmet camera, but it distorted the face too much to see the overall mood,” Jones says. “We needed cameras farther away.”

Animators at Weta persuaded director James Cameron to add a stripe pattern to suggest eyebrows on the Na’vi’s faces to help give the computer-generated characters the same emotional feeling as the actors performing them.

Animating Performances

Animators also keyframed Na’vi ears and tails. “We’d whip their tails around if they were upset, and use them as a counterbalance when they ran,” says Jones. “They were like another appendage. We also found the ears really useful for adding emotion to the character.” The ears tell when a Na’vi is angry or shocked, just as they do for cats and dogs.

For the Na’vi bodies, the motion capture worked extremely well. “Giant’s body capture was fantastic,” Jones says. “We still had to animate their hands and fingers, but the offsets and targeting and retargeting was well done. They kept the weight. And, the data was clean.”

The characters’ design might have helped with the retargeting. Rather than completely altering the human proportions, the designers created the Na’vi with similar proportions to humans, but with slim hips, narrow shoulders, and long necks. “It made the retargeting process easier,” Jones says.
Oddly, although animators often use motion-captured data to add the tiny movements to help bring alive a character that is standing still, Weta’s animators found themselves adding jitter to the mocapped data in some cases.

“When someone was yelling or screaming, the high-frequency jitters were often filtered out,” Jones explains. “The system couldn’t distinguish between muscle shake and noise precision. So we would animate it back in, and all of a sudden it felt like the characters were screaming, not just opening their mouths. We had the body muscle rig, but when a bicep fires, there needs to be a jitter. When [Cameron] saw us doing that, he really loved it.”

The muscle rig is new, developed at Weta specifically for this film. “It’s a dynamic system that simulates muscles properly,” Saindon says. “It calculates the fat layers and colliding volumes much more accurately than in the past.”

Prior to this, after animation, the character TDs needed to fine-tune the look of the character and fix problems—intersections, muscles that didn’t look right, and so forth—by sculpting the character on a shot-by-shot basis. With the new system, that was rarely necessary.

“We’d get something much more accurate and realistic straight out of the box,” Saindon says. “We had to do little in the way of going back and fixing things.”

Creatures

In addition to the characters, Weta animators performed approximately 10 creatures, a hellfire wasp, and thousands of insects. “Every single frame has something alive in it, whether it’s a moving plant or bugs,” Williams says.

Of the creatures, four fly and most have six legs. “Our first approach was typically to hide the middle legs, animate the animals as quadrupeds, and then bring the middle legs back in,” Jones says. The animators might animate a horse-like creature by having the leg movement cascade, or change the gait by changing the offset. A cat-like creature might arch its back, lift its front legs, and use them as arms and hands.

Jake learns to ride a creature that looks like a flying horse, and for those shots, the crew used a gimbaled motion-control rig. “The good thing about motion capture was that it gave us the posing [Cameron] liked for the character on top of the creature, where the character should be looking, and the riding style,” Jones explains. “But it was obvious that his legs weren’t reacting to his chest popping up and down, so we couldn’t use the motion capture completely.”

Am I Blue?

Facial capture was perhaps the biggest challenge. The second biggest challenge for the technical team was keeping the aliens from looking like someone had poured blue paint on them. “It was a tricky problem,” Letteri says. “They needed to have warmth under their skin, so we had to find the right shades of blue and blood color that would look good in firelight, blazing sun, overcast skies, and rain. Blue skin quickly wants to look like plastic.”

For skin texture reference, the crew did photo shoots under controlled lights of young people with the most perfect skin they could find. “We discovered that even someone with nearly flawless skin still has lots of imperfections in displacement and color. They have nodules, bumps, pink around their eyes, and blotchy layers,” Williams says. Painters added these imperfections to the texture maps and created a pore structure for the aliens that looked realistic. All this helped make their skin come alive.

As for the color, even though the aliens had blue skin, the crew put red blood in their veins, and did so without turning their skin purple. “Before, we had more of an analytical approximation for subsurface scattering,” Williams says. “We went to an absorption-based subsurface scattering routine. The system we use now does proper frequency-based scattering.”

Because they used the actual wavelength for red transmission through the nose, ears, and pores of the skin, the red blood didn’t cause the blue skin to turn purple. They also added a little red to the skin tone. Then, they applied some of the same techniques and shaders written in Pixar’s RenderMan to the plants.

Deep in the Jungle

“We cross-pollinated the efforts,” Williams says. “The plant shader now uses the skin shader.” The plants, however, aren’t blue, even though they started that way. Blue light from a blue sky bouncing off blue plants onto blue-skinned characters created uninteresting images.

“We needed to have other colors hitting the characters’ skin to give them the kind of complexity that helps make them look real,” Williams says.

At night, as the characters walk through the jungle, the plants glimmer with bioluminescence. The CG artists used subsurface scattering to cause thick plants to glow like a wax candle. “Some plants just have a glowing moss over them,” Saindon says. “It depended on the plant and how [Cameron] felt it should look.”

To create the rain forest, the Weta artists started with FBX files from Lightstorm that they imported into Maya scenes. “We had simple representations for where the trees and plants were,” Saindon says. “Jim moved and placed things where he wanted for camera angles. So, we did a one-to-one match at first to get a layout that he specifically liked.”

Because the plants needed to be dynamic, all of them are models created using a rule-based growth system. Although they average 100,000 polygons, some have as many as one million polygons.
“The plant-growing tools were almost like a modeling tool,” Williams says. “Once we grew a plant, we could instantly create variants by changing the seed value for the random functions.” The variants might change the number of branches and sub-branches, the height, the silhouette, the age, or other parameters.

The crew planted the jungle using painting techniques to place trees, shrubs, and grass. “It’s similar to [Maya’s] Paint Effects, but we aren’t creating geometry,” Saindon says. “The system is taking pre-existing geometry and placing actual full-res models at correct angles on the ground.”

They also used Massive’s software to grow forests. When artists planted seeds on a terrain, Massive would simulate a forest growing and competing for light and space. Bigger trees grew quickly, smaller plants died, and shade-loving ferns grew around the base of the large trees.

Jake Sully (actor Sam Worthington) prepares to inhabit the avatar body resembling a Na’vi, seen forming in the tank behind. The color palette for the film reflects James Cameron’s fascination with the underwater world.

“We’d create large areas, and then on a shot-by-shot basis, would sculpt scenes to play well for the camera and the depth of the scene,” Williams explains. “All of our show is done inside Maya, and everything in the jungle is 3D, so when you move the camera around in Maya, you get a real 3D sense.”

To light and render the massive jungle, Weta implemented two techniques: stochastic pruning and spherical harmonics. The stochastic pruning threw away unnecessary geometry on the fly as a plant moved away from camera. “It might take a fern with a million polygons and push it back to a few pixels when it’s in the distance,” Saindon says.


Spherical harmonics, a technique used for real-time rendering in video games, made it possible to light the rain forest. “Basically, we store coefficients for angles,” Saindon says. “We calculate the harmonics for each individual plant, all the lighting angles, and store that on the geometry. That allows us to drop simple lights into the scene and still get proper occlusion from each plant. The plant does its own self-occlusion using its own harmonics, seeing what should be occluding what, and stores the information. That means we can light an entire jungle with one light. We could get complex lighting with a very simple setup. We couldn’t have done the movie without it.”

Even so, the data processing requirements for the show were enormous. In addition to the characters, Weta created volumetric explosions, fireballs, 3D water simulations, and other effects. “Joe [Letteri] set down the hard line,” Williams says. “He told us not to plan on cheating anything.” At one point during postproduction, the studio was generating 110gb of data an hour.

“Jim Cameron’s expectations are extremely high, and he demands a lot,” Rosenbaum says. “The scope of CG movies is getting so large and the time constraints too tight, that people tend to compromise, but Jim doesn’t compromise. He insists on a high standard. When I worked on The Abyss, it took us six months to create 90 seconds with the pseudopod. We went into it with the same question we had on this film: How the hell will we do this? And we had the same mind-set: We’ll put our heads together and figure it out. He’s always one to push a VFX company. And he certainly did it on this one.”

http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2009/Volume-32-Issue-12-Dec-2009-/CG-In-Another-World.aspx

Bill Desowitz speaks with Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri about staying on the cutting edge of digital acting and 3D environments at Weta Digital.

After winning an Oscar for vfx on King Kong, Joe Letteri has remained at Weta Digital to supervise work on The Water Horse (Sony/Revolution, Dec. 7, 2007), including the CG sea creature, and Avatar, James Cameron’s long-awaited, first feature since Titanic. Letteri also discusses early work on the CG Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Fox, June 16, 2007). Under the vfx supervision of Kevin Rafferty, Weta has reportedly enhanced its CG animation process that employs performance capture techniques to add further dimensionality to the liquid-metal hero performed by Doug Jones.

Bill Desowitz: Please fill us in on the state of the industry with regard to digital actors and 3D environments.

Joe Letteri: I think as far as digital actors go, in terms of characters rather than digital doubles, we’ve come pretty far. Especially with motion capture and facial motion capture, you can really work with an actor to develop the character. It’s an extension of what we did with Andy Serkis with Gollum and Kong. There is still a huge call for an animation team to work the actors and help develop the digital characters the rest of the way, because, typically, there are characters that are non-human and invariably there are things that a human actor cannot do. It’s too dangerous or physically not possible because of the configuration of the character. So you need this integration with the actors and the animators to pull everything together. I don’t see that going away anytime soon. I’m not sure you want it to go away because it’s really a great combination to have.

BD: In terms of techniques, how do you see it evolving between performance capture and keyframe?

JL: What we’ve always done here is to try to make the path as two-way as possible so we can start off with performance capture but then layer on the same set of tools that the animators are used to working with. So it’s always the call of the animators to make requested changes. Sometimes it sails straight through based on what the motion editors are doing. Other times, if you get a request to change the performance, you just have to decide at some point the data is too heavy and it’s going to be easier to reanimate it. The performance is a guide. But again, by having the data there, you’ve got a good starting point for the character and what you need to do next.

BD: What do you think of the various techniques that are available, including what Sony is doing with Imagemotion, what ILM did with Imocap on Dead Man’s Chest, Face Robot from Softimage and the new Contour from Mova that was introduced at SIGGRAPH?

JL: I think those are all great ways to go. They all bring a little bit of something to the toolkit that you have and each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so you can tune which technique you use to the situation. In the course of a large feature, you’re probably going to use several of those techniques. It’s great to see all of these things being developed in different ways to look at an important part of the problem for a particular task and try and solve that.

BD: I had a chance to ask Andy Serkis about performance capture recently and he thinks there will be a time in the future when a director can look through a viewfinder of a handheld camera and see in realtime physical and facial capture. Is this something you’re keen on?

JL: Yes, I think that would be a great thing to have to be able to work with the actor to get as much of his performance as possible. For example, on Kong and even with Gollum, we had a lot of the body stuff working in realtime. But looking at the facial, there was a problem of translating and learning the character, particularly with Kong. Yes, I would like to see that happen. One thing that it means, though, is that all that character development has to be done upfront if you’re going to do it all on stage with a director. We spent weeks and weeks with Andy on the motion capture stage for Kong and we got to digest all of that and turn that into his character. So it means shifting the way you’re doing things. It’s another one of those paradigms where what we used to call post-production pushes more and more into preproduction.

BD: How close are we to conquering “The Uncanny Valley?”

JL: You mean the real/not real, the human/not human? I think it depends on the application. Obviously we have seen digital doubles done really well using a lot of image-based techniques, for example, where you couldn’t tell the difference between the original performance of the actor and the digital performance. So from that point of view, it’s almost already been hit. But to take a human performance and have it actually be a human character? I don’t know. I’ve never been in that situation before. We usually just hire a real actor. We’re always looking at creating the other characters.

BD: And that includes Avatar? (The sci-fi film is about Jake, a paraplegic war veteran who is brought to another planet inhabited by a humanoid race at war with humans.)

JL: Well, we’re early days, so there could certainly be that coming up. To me it’s not the problem that’s most interesting [about the project]. So you’re only going to use that in those situations where it’s too dangerous for an actor. So if it does come up, I’m sure we’ll dig into it and tackle it. But the idea is to get a full-on performance that you can carry a movie with.

BD: What can you tell us about Avatar at this point?

JL: I think it’s going to be a combination of a lot of the things that we’ve been doing that you and I have been discussing. There’s performance capture techniques out there that really allow us to work in realtime with actors that allow us to develop the characters. And then just allowing the time to work with it after the fact, because the characters — no matter what you do on a performance capture stage — really come alive when you get them into the scenes and get them lit and rendered and see what they really look like and how they behave. And that always influences your perception of them. You start making adjustments to bits of the performance that you might need to do just to bring them alive. In a CG performance sometimes you need to add a little life, so you might add a little movement to the eyes. It’s stuff you start to define once you’re in there working with it that alters it in a subtle way. The final result is what you’re going to see on screen.

BD: What kind of toolset fine-tuning are you planning?

JL: We’ll be building on what we have here because we have a pretty robust toolset for character animation. Again, we’ll look at that a lot more once we see what the performances are and see what we need to do to bring it all alive.

BD: And does the added immersion with 3-D excite you?

JL: Yeah, the 3-D stuff looks really cool. We’ve been doing some tests for ourselves just internally. When you do everything in a 3-D world digitally, then you can play with different things and figure out what works, and start to answer the questions about how to watch a 3-D movie without getting a headache. We’re learning about how to do it properly and it’s been really good to chew through those problems.

BD: Moving on to the 3D environments, what are you looking to improve?

JL: Probably in general to use the same technique we used to create New York City in Kong [Maya-based software from Chris White dubbed “CityBot” rebuilt the city, floor-by-floor, section-by-section, block-by-block, adding intricate and period-accurate detail to the low-res dataset.] And extend it to build any type of environment, not just cityscapes. As you get more and more down the line, different locations that are called for are hard to reproduce. And it’s not just fantasy. It’s getting more and more difficult to do big scenes like New York in a real location. The amount of cleanup and replacement and set extension that you have to do dovetails into, “Gee, we just replaced that digitally — we could’ve done the whole thing that way.” So we’re looking at that for various types of environments to give us the freedom to answer that question.

BD: With Avatar, there was work done by Rob Legato in creating a virtual production studio in L.A. How does that fit in with your current plans?

JL: That’s still the basis of everything he’s doing and that dovetails nicely with the system that we’ve developed down here. We wound up using a lot of the same technologies and things. There’s not that much of a difference. Probably the real difference is one of approach. Rob has created an immersive system, which is necessary for Avatar. Whereas our system was designed mostly to work with things that had been shot on set and to add motion capture into those. We’re finding it very compatible, which allows us to keep a consistent workflow back and forth. We both use the Giant system for motion capture. The rest involves developing an infrastructure around that to support the film.
BD: What can you tell us about The Water Horse and the mysterious Scottish sea creature?

JL: We’re right in the middle of that… going through our first pass on the animation blocking and getting everything up to speed. Where it plays into what we’ve been discussing is in the area of character design and character performance. The main character is really fun to work with and it’s been great to continue what we did [with Kong].

BD: And how is Fantastic Four 2 going?

JL: We’re still early days on that but the obvious question is you want something with a cool silver look to it. We’ve been coming up with some things on that. So that’s more like taking what they’re doing onset and use that to drive the Silver Surfer.

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.

http://www.massivesoftware.com

Andy Serkis is the reigning master of performance for motion-capture — the recording of an actor’s every move and facial nuance for use by animators to enliven CG characters. In his acclaimed star turns as the ring-addicted Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the noble mega-ape in King Kong, 43-year-old Serkis invested his digital roles with the power of old-school stagecraft at its best. The London-based actor has also recently ported his skills to the gaming world, appearing in the new PlayStation 3 title Heavenly Sword, which he co-produced. Now that even Angelina Jolie is getting in on the sensors-and-greenscreen action — for Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming take on Beowulf — Wired spoke to Serkis about digital acting, the future of mo-cap, and why Gollum didn’t score an Oscar.

Wired: What tips would you offer an actor doing motion-capture for the first time?

Serkis: For digital roles, the actor is manipulating their character like a puppet. It’s really useful to have time on a monitor to work with the CG model — to play around with your puppet before the actual shoot. It’s like having a third eye on yourself. Actors have to learn to demand that time.

Wired: Did your role in Heavenly Sword expand over time, as in The Lord of the Rings?

Serkis: I got more and more involved in the character development and the writing. When I took the actors down to New Zealand to rehearse, we sat in a circle and performed the whole game, from beginning to end, as a play for each other. By treating it as theater, we could see how all the characters were inter related, figure out where scenes weren’t working, and feel the whole arc.

Wired: Were you already an avid gamer when you took the gig?

Serkis: No, but Heavenly Sword got me much more into it. I’m not bothered by hack-and-slash games, but what I really enjoy is being taken on a journey to other realities. I have a strong desire to create games from Shakespeare — play as Romeo, play as Juliet. Macbeth is an amazing story. Maybe I should be keeping these ideas to myself (laughing). One thing that’s going to change in the next few years is that scripts for games are going to come more from the dramatic arena. They’ll be more like film scripts. You can’t just come up with an idea for a game and stick the drama on top. It all has to be one driving thrust.

Wired: While you were growing up, you spent a lot of time in the Middle East.

Serkis: My father’s Iraqi — he’s a doctor, retired now. My mum moved me and my older sisters to London when I was a year old, but my father still had a practice in Iraq. I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad’s sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

Wired: What experiences in your early acting career prepared you to do motion-capture for Gollum and Kong?

Serkis: My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically. In 1992, I played a homeless kid called Dogboy in a play at the Royal Court Theatre called Hush. When his dog is killed, he allows the creature’s spirit to possess him, and he breaks into this middle-class household to avenge his spirit. I was naked for the entire performance. There was a lot of Dogboy in Gollum.

Wired: Were you surprised at how much input you ended up having on The Lord of the Rings?

Serkis: It was very much an organic process. I got a call from my agent who said, “They’re looking for someone to do a voice for a completely digital character. It’s going to be three weeks’ work.” But then I met Peter Jackson, and he said, “No, we’re looking for someone to be Gollum on set, because we want real chemistry with the other actors.” I learned that the only way that I could generate Gollum’s voice was by fully inhabiting the character.

My first day, I was climbing down the side of a 6,000-foot volcano in a Lycra suit, and the crew was like, “We thought Gollum was going to be animated. Who the hell is this guy who looks like he just walked out of a fetish shop?” That was terrifying. But as everything came together — the motion-capture, rotoscoping, animation, voice and breath work — the process became very exciting. Nothing like it had ever really been done before.

Wired: Have years of cyber-acting changed your approach to stage acting?

Serkis: It’s made me more still. My natural bent is to have an overabundance of energy, and motion-capture essentializes your every breath, your every move. Seeing yourself through that mask, you realize how far you can pull back and make the performance even more powerful.

Wired: What’s on your wish list as a digital actor?

Serkis: The environment you’re working in for performance-capture is very clinical. There’s no stimulation from sets or costumes; you’re working in a black box with lots of lights around you. I want to be able to shoot a scene in costume instead of a Lycra suit. We need motion-capture studios that let directors use lighting, back projection and other forms of stimulation to help the actors feel immersed in the world of the film.

Wired: What projects are you working on now?

Serkis: I’m in the early stages of a film called Freezing Time about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man. He tried to have a relationship with his wife, but it wasn’t fully consummated, so she ended up having an affair with this dashing guy called Harry Larkins. Muybridge shot him dead in a fit of jealousy but was acquitted because the murder was considered a crime of passion.

I’m also working on a movie called Inkheart with Brendan Fraser and Helen Mirren based on a book by Cornelia Funke, who is like the German J. K. Rowling. It’s about an antiquarian bookbinder who has the ability to “read” characters out of books. I play a very dark character called Capricorn who is accidentally read out of a book and doesn’t want to go back in. Then the bookbinder’s wife falls in. That’s coming out next year.

Wired: You got dissed by the Academy because Gollum was considered a collaboration with the animators at Weta Digital. Will a CG character ever win an Oscar?

Serkis: For The Elephant Man, a whole team of prosthetics artists worked on John Hurt’s character to help him create that performance. Whether or not the Academy can learn to see ones and naughts as a digital form of prosthetics — that is the question.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/pl_serkis

The digital acting in King Kong was a huge leap forward, because it was the first such performance that really brought emotional weight. © 2005 Universal Studios.

Several years ago, I got to spend some quality time alone with Ray Harryhausen. It was only about half an hour, but I count it as a career highlight. Although I don’t recall his exact words, Harryhausen told me that he always had a deep commitment to the animated performance, believing that a great one was as engaging and emotionally telling as life itself… or at least a great human performance. The thing that convinced me was his work on Mighty Joe Young. I know that he’s right – it’s not just movement; it’s performance.

Following in Harryhausen’s footsteps is Dr. Mark Sagar, who was responsible for much of the wonderful facial animation in Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Sagar too has a commitment to performance. I’ve been fairly outspoken about Kong’s MoCap performance being just awful. He looks like a 4,000-pound gorilla bouncing around Times Square like a 190-pound man. It just doesn’t sell. But the face was a different matter. I said to myself, “Kong’s face doesn’t look MoCapped.” MoCap in general still has a “look” that I’d rather not see. Kong’s face — and all the other truly great facial performances so far — arise mostly from the brilliance of the individual master character animator(s). Each subtle movement of the face imbued with the loving touch of a dedicated and talented artist. I understand that as much as 75% of Kong’s face was keyframed, and I think it made the movie. But keyframing is an expensive, time consuming luxury and it’s all changing.

Perhaps the finest example ever of this hybrid approach with MoCap tracking being used with keyframe animation is found in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I believe ILM has crossed the valley into the land of believable virtual human performance, but more about this later on.

With the unprecedented popularity of animated performances these days, we need a way increase production, believability and magic. When it takes the delicate hand of a great character animator – and they are few and far between – you’re not going to see useful increases in output. It certainly would not be possible to keep up with even current demand and tight schedules. So we end up with what happens all too often these days, inconsistent animation of the same character. Shrek, as successful as it was, went from great (for example, the eye animation on Princess Fiona) to mediocre at best, with inconsistencies within characters. Shrek is not alone: the Star Wars franchise has had its uncanny digital actors as well. Not to pick on them, but nearly all virtual performances in features have been inconsistent because of the number of people working at different levels on them. But they were entertaining and they set the ball in motion. We now need better virtual performances. Imagine going back to the old Felix the Cat animations: you might still find them entertaining, but the animation would likely be annoying…it is to me.

Taking a large portion of the responsibility for life-like performance out of the hands of lower level animators is changing the business big time. In a way, it’s sad. Many animators are developing a whole new set of skills. It actually takes a different, more technical type of person to be a character animator these days. Some of the great artistry is being lost, and I, for one, think that artistry can never be fully replaced by technology. I call these newbies tech-animators. Most of the one’s I’ve talked with recently truly have hand animation talent, but they’ve been trained to use technology to power through a ton of shots quickly. I believe in the near future, this new breed of tech-animator will evolve into a population with little or no knowledge of traditional animation, digital or otherwise. They will know the technology and how to use it to create life-like performances. Thus we are bound see a decline in animated character performances a la Chuck Jones et al.

With the demand putting pressure on producers, it’s necessary that we move on. I’m thinking there will be a place for master character animators for a long time in tweaking Hero characters to give them that special animated personality look, that’s bigger and more engaging than any recorded performance. But I’ve already seen a small army of tech-animators on the rise.

Getting back to technology, though, there are three basic approaches that I’m looking at, and all involve MoCap. First, the long standing standard MoCap approach and its newest refinements that is making capture more accurate. The second uses fewer capture markers to give the general performance, with the detailed nuances created by underlying virtual face structure. The third is the use of virtual sensory perception and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create behavior streams on-the-fly using MoCap libraries and behavior blending.

Where Kong wowed us with one powerful performance, Narnia was able to bring to life a whole world of expressive characters. © Disney Enterprises Inc. and Walden Media Llc. All rights reserved.

A Time Of Transition
Sony Pictures Imageworks is one of the most respected vfx/animation, and I think they have a great attitude about virtual performance. They’ve been responsible for some of the wonderful virtual performance work done in movies such as Narnia and Monster House and many more. Imageworks seems to believe in both the power of MoCap and magic of talented people. It’s one place where you’ll find a lot of talented animators who are working hand-in-hand with new technology. According to Debbie Denise, evp of production infrastructure/exec producer at Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio’s basic philosophy toward animation and character performance strongly impacts their R&D and staffing efforts. It may sound cheesy, but it’s that philosophy that makes all the difference in what you see on screen.

“Imageworks’ approach and philosophy is that through motion capture and animation tools, we try to preserve the essence of what actors and directors bring to the performance of a character. This applies to body and/or facial capture. To this end, we are always trying to improve our ability to get that performance on screen as faithfully as possible, taking into account the design and feel of the animated character.”

I asked if she thought all the equipment and greenscreen claptrap hampered performance at all: “We feel that it’s critical to allow the performer and the director to be unimpeded by the technology we deploy to capture the data. That’s why our R&D group is working hard to develop new and better ways to capture the data with less invasive technology and in creative environments.” Naturally, I wasn’t able to get many details of the actual R&D efforts or how next year’s Beowulf improves the process. However, this is what she offered: “As you know, there are several ways to capture a performance. Generally we go about getting the character’s skin to animate by tracking drive points on the mesh skin surface directly with the markers (on the actors) and another approach is to develop software that analyzes the movement of the markers to trigger muscles or shapes to deform the surface.

“Our current solution uses both of these techniques. We work directly with the data in an extremely efficient way, and animators can alter it to reflect any changes in dialogue, sight lines or exaggerated or toned down movement. And we can choose the degree of application of each method in all shots. This seems to us to be the best of both worlds.

“We are also working on methodologies that would give us ways to capture the facial performance with as much data as we currently capture, but with few or no markers on the performer… in all types of environments or stages… Not too much to ask!”

I knew that Imageworks has long taken character animation seriously on many levels. I asked Denise to comment in general on the artistry vs. technology of their philosophy: “No matter how great the technology is, the animators are still the ones who turn the data into magic. To that end, we build “animator friendly” tools that allow the animators to enhance the data intuitively, rather than through overly complex user-interfaces.” She stressed that for Sony, it’s as much about art as it is about technology.

The Magic of MoCap
Until recently, the MoCap approach has required actors to don shiny little balls or other markers that could be tracked by multiples special video cameras, within a confined space. In some cases, it still does, but as demands for accuracy and comfort are heard, some new trends are emerging. Recent photometric approaches involve tracking facial characteristics in new ways. This sometimes involves the actor having their face done up in strange makeup in lieu of markers. These new approaches claim higher data density, accuracy and comfort for the performance actors.

With MoCap, as you probably know, human actors perform the character’s lines and business while it’s captured in video and translated to a flow of mathematical motion data. The data is filtered and interpreted by 3D animation software on a point-by-point basis using standard plug-ins or proprietary pipeline elements. Essentially the cleaned motion data is used to manipulate the 3D character mesh. As the actor’s face or body moves, so goes the 3D mesh doppelganger. In the best productions, master character animators tweak the performance before final render and compositing so that it has character that can’t yet be captured. The results can be spectacular.

The biggest problem with this approach has been capturing the subtleties of the face, especially the eyes. It’s often impractical to get a master face animator to do the magic necessary for a believable performance. Polar Express is an example of how disturbing inappropriate eye movement can be. I’m happy to say that ILM did a spectacular job of eye capture in Dead Man’s Chest.

One of the most effective refinements of the standard MoCap approach comes in the form of “Stretchmark,” a software system being developed by Pendulum. It’s designed to use high-definition MoCap data in an innovative way to produce highly realistic character performances.

Artist/animator/engineer Robert Taylor is a co-owner of Pendulum, an animation studio down in San Diego. Taylor recognizes the need for more and better character animation in ever-shorter time frames. “We don’t use a model of underlying muscle systems because I’ve seen that tried and so far I haven’t been so impressed. We take a more global approach using the captured data stream to control a custom set of blend-shapes. We did a lot of trial and error work to come up with about 45 base blend-shapes for the human face mesh. This base group can be blended to reproduce a huge variety of emotional expression.

Studio Pendulum’s Mark Anthony character displays the results of the Stretchmark system. © Studio Pendulum.

“We like a lot of data; for example, Mark Anthony (an impressive demonstration of concept) had 90 data points on the face. The work was done at House of Moves using the latest Vicon system. First, we apply a data fit to the mesh using our Stretchmark software and then run the Cap data to see how it goes. It’s never ideal, so we then we apply what we call a corrective ID. The base blend-shapes cover most of the performance, but we will see breaks in the performance because the base blend-shapes couldn’t cover a particular expression. Our sculptor then creates any needed custom blend-shapes to cover those. It’s a quick process taking only about a half-day or so. With the new shapes the performance will be smooth and complete. We have a lot of tweaking tools that we can use to then customize the animation. We can also control the weighting or influence each point has on the mesh. We can add multipliers to get cartoonish behavior, or we can even modify the final performance using puppeteering tools or hand animation to tweak the performance. We set it up that way because we’re animators, and we love to tweak the final performance.”

Some New Approaches
MoCap is the basis for all the tech-animation approaches. One interesting and effective new approach is Face Robot, which is available from Softimage. It’s a software approach that sits on top of Softimage XSI, bringing you that remarkable set of tools, making it a full-face animation system. You can do everything from sculpting to final render with this setup. “Face Robot is a high-end stand alone product that incorporates Softimage within it,” explains special projects manager Michael Isner. “Our solver has two inputs: the MoCap, and our soft tissue model. This is the first face performance software that contributes to the performance. Our soft tissue model is tweaked in cooperation with the director and art director’s input, to reflect what they want from the face movements. It’s an artistic process. The artist works with what I describe as ‘soft IK in a jelly fish.’ We use a Wizard to create the core model of the face and how that underlying jellyfish will behave. Then we attach the MoCap data to specific points. The beauty of it is that we use a small number of markers because all the in-between portions of the face move in a life-like way on their own. They’re not locked into a hard set of rules nor are they dependent on static morph targets. The facial expressions are more dynamic, more life-like than you get by any other means.”

In a sense, the artist creates a face personality that will create a look and performance that is original, though based upon a face actor’s performance. I’ve seen some early attempts at using underlying muscle structure etc. to help create emotional expressions before, but none of them have been very impressive. It’s the uncanny look of slightly inappropriate movement that kills it. Face Robot doesn’t have it down perfectly yet, but it is certainly a unique approach that is capable of giving fine performances and saving a lot of money in the long run.

Virtual Acting: The Innovations Are Real

Image Metrics’ most high profile work can be seen in Warner Bros.’ Polar Express.

Twice Negative
One of the most technologically cutting edge vfx and animation houses in the U.K. is Double Negative. I spoke with Paul Franklin about the DoubleNeg character animation pipeline. “Over the past couple of years Double Negative has been developing a new facial motion capture system. We’ve been collaborating with another U.K.-based company called Image Metrics where they have devised a unique method of analysing video footage of human faces in motion. This analytical process produces very detailed data, and the team at Double Negative has worked out how to take this very dense, abstract data stream and plug it directly into our proprietary character animation pipeline.”

I had heard that their proprietary system uses sort of a biological substructure of virtual muscle and bone that is controlled by the dense Image Metrics data stream. “Yes, the key to this system is an understanding of how the underlying muscle groups in the human face combine to produce recognisable expressions and emotion; by sculpting the shapes resulting from the contraction and relaxation of the muscles in unison a powerful character rig can be built with a minimum of animation controls. The same philosophy informs the approach to analysing data generated by the video capture so there is a bridge between the two ends of the process.

I’d also heard that the Image Metrics approach to MoCap, called “CyberFace,” doesn’t require all those nasty face markers. Way back some time ago, Famous Faces had a system that would track facial characteristics without markers, but they never really went forward with it. I thought it a great idea at the time. Image Metrics has definitely taken this approach to a high level. “Yes, perhaps the most striking aspect of the whole methodology is that the capture sessions are marker free — the actor only wears light makeup so as to emphasise various key facial features, Franklin adds. “This provides a major advantage over other techniques where the large numbers of markers placed on the actor’s face can often prove to be an unwelcome barrier between the director and the performance. We have also worked out how to run the video capture simultaneously with standard full-body optical marker based capture so we can record the entire performance at the same time.

“Despite the process being marker-free it produces a very detailed recording of the subtleties of a performance. This is down to the fact that rather than sampling discreet points on the human face and then interpolating the missing data; our technique records continuous moving shapes taken from the eyes, mouth, cheeks etc… The analytical process then relates this detailed, yet localized, data to a comprehensive database of human expression, generating the animating muscle combinations that went into making the recorded shapes. This animation data then goes directly onto the same character controls used by our animators when they are keyframing a performance from scratch. The data can be left in its raw state for an unedited version of the performance or it can be worked on using a suite of in-house tools that allow our animators to use as much or as little of the captured performance to build the final character.”

One of the main complaints with MoCap is all the rigmarole that goes with it. I’ve heard actors and dancers complain about the costumes and markers, crew can get frustrated setting up multiple capture cameras and in general MoCap is a pain way below the neck. I asked Franklin if any effort or thought had been put into making the system easier on the director, crew and actors: “One of the most exciting aspects of this new approach to motion capture is that it eliminates a lot of that complex preparation generally associated with the whole field of performance capture. It also removes many restrictions placed upon performance — previously actors might have to keep their heads completely still or be confined to a very limited area on the stage. At its most simple this process can work with a single video camera with basic lighting. Adding more cameras and higher resolution enables more coverage and looser framing which in turn allows performances to flow naturally — another barrier removed between the director and the drama.”

The ability to capture a face with one camera sounds remarkable. I assume the software provides the 3D movement. In that case since you don’t have 3D position tracking. Of course, in most cases they use multiple high- resolution cameras. Franklin says they’re currently using this technology on several high profile movies and he believes the results will be spectacular.

As Animal Logic did on Happy Feet, many vfx companies are going to in-house solutions for motion capture needs. © 2006 Warner Bros. Ent. Inc. All rights reserved.

Animal Logic
I have a lot more research to do on Animal Logic, but I just had to mention them here. They were greatly responsible for the spectacular virtual performances in Happy Feet. Audience appeal of this movie has been spectacular in no small part because of the amazing dance sequences, fluffy stars and cute personalities. I understand that the crowd scenes were primarily animated using new proprietary crowd animation software known in-house as Horde, which takes multiple performances with variation and then randomizes them further through time and space warping. Very naturalistic crowd scenes were made possible through this tool. More procedural and cycle-based crowd work was handled by Massive, which also must be mentioned. More on Animal Logic down the road.

Massive
I’ve written about Massive, the intelligent crowd simulation system, on several occasions. It’s so good it floors me. Briefly, it uses artificial intelligence and virtual perception to select appropriate MoCap sequences, blends them and attaches them to characters in a highly realistic way. The result is that sequences animate themselves. In speaking with the Massive team at Rhythm & Hues, I discovered that there is always a ton of excitement when they gather to review the final render. They have no idea what the characters will do, but are always amazed at how flawless it usually looks. Massive is available for licensing if you need smart, believable crowds.

However, in chatting with Stephen Regelous, founder and product manager at Massive, he suggests that the application of AI need not be limited to crowd behavior. After all, each individual crowd character has to perform in believable ways. Blend-shapes could be scripted within Massive Prime, to emulate believable face expressions and emotions. Last year he implied that he had an interest in pulling high quality intelligent Hero performances out of Massive. Imagine using artificial intelligence animation software with Hero characters and getting believable performances. Having seen what Massive can do, I believe it’s not far off. In fact, I spoke with R&H Massive supervisor Dan Smiczek, who says: “It’s all there, built right into Massive Prime. It can handle very highly detailed face models using blend-shapes. You can get extremely fine animation details like eye blinks and impressive emotional expression. The really neat thing is that the blend-shapes are controlled directly by the AI. So you can have like one character yell at an other character and the one yelled at will ‘hear’ that and react appropriately, say with jerk and a nasty face.” I asked Smiczek if they’d been using Massive in this way and he adds: “Not yet. R&H has its own outstanding face animation software that we’ve been using, but it can be done.”

I know Regelous has had his sights set on intelligent automatic Hero animation for some time. He built an unexpected amount of face animation capability into Massive and many users don’t have the slightest idea of how powerful it is. You can develop an extensive library of FaceCap data sets and then script the Hero character, using the built in visual and auditory perception, to react. Remember you can also hand animate on top of this, if you like. I suspect this will shortly become an area of heavy use as studios learn that Heroes too can be intelligently autonomous.

ILM’s work done for Davy Jones’ eyes fooled even veterans in the vfx world. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. Photo credit: ILM.

Uncanny Eyes
I think creepy eye movement has bothered me more than anything else in the virtual acting world. However, I think the guys at ILM have finally captured the holy grail under the brilliant leadership of supervisor John Knoll, R&D director Steve Sullivan and director Gore Verbinski. Davy Jones is a kind of hybrid character created by English actor Bill Nighy and a vast team of amazingly talented tech-animators and a director with the eye. In a sense, Davy Jones is probably the most advanced case of digital makeup ever conceived. With a ton of innovative approaches that I’m still exploring, Verbinski & ILM managed to extract and compile perhaps the most perfect virtual performance in history to date.

Jones is the character with the beard made of octopus-like tentacles. What you see is virtually all digital: the entire performance. It’s lively, exciting and real…even magical, but it’s all virtual. Or is it? I honestly don’t know how to classify it. Jones is a MoCap/keyframe hybrid because even though he is virtual, Nighy is fully represented in the performance of that digital makeup, which is tracked to the actor throughout the action. Can you say that virtual makeup gives a performance? I think we have to in this case. And the eyes — even in the close up I’m convinced the eyes are really Nighy’s, they’re all digital…amazing.

Meanwhile, the tentacles were animated using an articulated ridged body solver and flesh simulation developed by Ron Fedkiw’s team at Stanford. Nevertheless, I’m told much of the performance was keyframed and tracked flawlessly to the actor. But what techniques they used to get it this perfect is beyond me.

ILM had to develop an innovative way to track the virtual makeup onto Nighy as well. It was done, not in the typical greenscreen environment, but live on set and on location during a regular shoot, surrounded by actors in costume. Nighy had to wear something like a black-and-white checkered tracksuit with a skull cap and headband for tracking. His face had tracking dots and black rings around his eyes, so he looked a bit peculiar. He was out there in the water and on the beach, acting with the other players, who were resplendent in their wonderful costumes.

Hank is part of the Artificial Actors project at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. © Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

It was necessary to track the virtual makeup to Nighy with great precision. To do this, Knoll, Sullivan and the R&D team developed what they call the Imocap process. Each performer is put in a suit with special tracking marks on it. Two high-resolution “witness” cameras are positioned on either side of the film camera. Parallax data is then used to triangulate positions of the special markers. Knoll credits the R&D team for coming up with remarkably clever software capable of reconstructing skeletal motion from the relatively straightforward triangulation data. What makes it even more amazing is that it was all done on location without the normal sources of power, often in knee-deep water. The entire system is portable, rugged and clearly robust.

I’d like to add a few words about Fedkiw, the Stanford professor who advises ILM on deep technology issues, often providing tools used for some of their amazing vfx and animation work. Fedkiw and his graduate students are using some of this virtual human simulation in very interesting ways. For example, one of his students has been working with surgeons from Iraq in designing facial reconstructions. They often work with the medical school at Stanford. Interestingly, it was this work that lead to the development of some remarkable technology for virtual acting. It’s based on biometrics. Fedkiw says: “We actually built a model of the human head using MIR images that give us a look at the head’s internal muscle structure. They come out a little bit warped and we had to correct for that. We also acquired the Visible Human data set to help refine it. We modeled the inside of the human head with all the muscles and bones etc.” Working with Motion Analysis, they developed some trial motion data streams. Using Motion Analysis’ acquired SIMM biomechanical animation software, they linked up the MoCap data to their virtual head. Motion Analysis used about 200 markers to develop some hi-res MoCap data. The data controls how much and in what way the virtual muscles of the head respond, yielding facial expressions that track the face actor with remarkable accuracy. This biologically accurate functional 3D model of the head shows great promise both in medicine and in entertainment. It is the most technically and medically robust physical head simulation I’ve seen, and perhaps that is why it works so well, when others have failed. Those of you, who thought Fedkiw and his team only did fluid dynamics, think again.

Something for Everyone
There is actually a sophisticated free facial animation system available for download. It’s being used professionally by production companies and it’s worth taking a look at. Volker Helzle and I have had coffee and chats on several occasions over the past few years as I followed the development of a very interesting facial animation system using an underlying blend-shape library with some 65 control sliders capable of creating virtually any emotional expression you can imagine. This one reminds me a little bit of the Pendulum system, and yet it’s very much its own system. This is part of the Artificial Actors project of the highly respected Institute of Animation, Visual Effects and Postproduction at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany. The documentation is available in English. It comes as a remarkable tool set that you can download here: “http://aistud.filmakademie.de/actor/88.0.html” at no charge. Don’t think that because it’s free, it’s not a very valuable tool. It’s been developed at enormous expense by top engineer artists, and I think you’ll be impressed. Helzle tells me he would very much like to have you join in their development effort by downloading and using the tools and reporting back with suggestions and complaints. I can’t tell you about the latest developments because they haven’t been announced, but this is cutting edge stuff.

When undertaking back-to-back sequels to Disney’s surprise blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Industrial Light & Magic quickly realized that it neWith the help of the Imocap system, Bill Nighy’s creepy Davy Jones is the next great CG performance after Gollum and King Kong. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. Photo credit: ILM.

eded to significantly raise the bar. Not only did the shot count triple from 324 to 979 on this summer’s record-breaking Dead Man’s Chest, but also the CG creatures were more complex and closer to the action. This required several R&D wrinkles and getting the creature pipeline up to speed on the new Zeno platform in San Francisco.As most of you have seen by now, the results of the character animation are very impressive. They’ve already begun talking about the creepy Davy Jones as the next great CG peformance beyond Weta’s Gollum and King Kong. Lord of the Deep and commander of the mysterious Flying Dutchman ghost ship, Jones is a delicious mutation: part human and part squid, with a beard full of wiggly tentacles, and crab-like claws.

Unable to rely on traditional MoCap or hand animation, ILM created an innovative new system called Imocap that allowed onset and on location motion capture to elicit the most believable look and performance possible out of actor Bill Nighy.

“The characters required a lot of careful examination of human performances and then trying to combine that with the animation,” explains animation supervisor Hal Hickel. “We knew that there were going to be actors cast to play Davy Jones and his crew, and that those actors would be on set in the plates that we were going to be put those CG characters into and that somehow we had to extract the motion of the performances without having to reshoot later. We didn’t want to bring the mocap stage onto the set. So the R&D and MoCap groups came up with a solution: special [sensor-studded] suits that would be worn by Bill Nighy and other actors playing his crew. We would take reference cameras onto the sets and untethered cameras out on location with lightweight tripods and position them at angles off of what the main taking camera was seeing. This allowed us to track the movements and provided great data from the hero plates with the actors in them, casting their real shadows and making good eye contact with the live actors, and then we were able to extract their motion and apply it to our CG characters and put those characters right on top of the actors. There’s still a lot of animation artistry in there because there’s a lot of interpretation. This is just about getting the skeletal motion of the character; we still did all of the facial animation by hand [in Zeno].”

A second R&D project at ILM involved creating Davy Jones’ tentacle beard itself. Many tests were done to get the behaviors right.

But more about Imocap in part two. Suffice it to say, Davy Jones is the most complex and human looking CG character in Dead Man’s Chest — and he’s all-CG. The animators incorporated as much of Nighy’s face as possible. However, the eyes proved to be an interesting test case. “As a backup, [director] Gore [Verbinski] asked us to put some makeup in a T-zone around his eyes and mouth, in case he wanted to do a blend for an extreme close-up,” Hickel continues. “But we never used it. We knew it would be difficult, but we figured we could get there pretty quickly. What was just as difficult was the whole spark of life. There’s always that last percent of realism that’s hardest to capture. The closer you get to the goal of it being real enough that people will stop worrying about it and thinking about it, the more glaring the omissions are. On top of which, there’s the gray area of his performance. The thing about Bill was he wasn’t a stone-faced villain. It was a very mercurial performance — he was constantly changing his expression and delivery. Nobody expected it. Every scene we’d stare at it and study it. I know there are animators that are leery of any technique that takes away some of their authorship. I totally understand that. Pure animation is wonderful. But I also think the collaboration between an animator and a live actor is an exciting thing too. I imagine it’s what makeup artists feel.”Zeno added an additional challenge. ILM came into Dead Man’s Chest with only a small portion of its creature pipeline function intact. War of the Worlds and The Island, the two previous projects done with Zeno, were primarily hard surface works. The creature work on those didn’t need cloth, sim, flesh or hair. A large part of the effort was re-enabling the pipeline, particularly the facial animation.

Meanwhile, the second R&D project involved the tentacle beard itself. “Our R&D folks worked with James Tooley, our sim guru [creature development supervisor], and Karin Derlich [creature technical director], who came up with behaviors,” Hickel adds. “And we’d do tests and I’d say, ‘This one is too tentacly and this one feels too much like an elephant’s trunk and this one feels too much like a snake.’ We would look at tons of octopus references. After we got it, then those behaviors were added to the solver through what we call ‘Joint Motors,’ so all the tentacles were divided into little joint segments and each segment was essentially a little motor that was directed to move this way or that way. So those joint motor impulses were sent out at the same time the tentacles were receiving force information: I need to swing this way, I need to swing that way… and so it would all happen together.

The crew of The Flying Dutchmen features a cast of characters with visual references to the ocean and its creatures, including coral, sea sponges, barnacles, mussels, hammerheads and puffer fish.

“Once we added those behaviors to our sim engine, the last thing we needed was something called ‘Sticktion,’ which is a combination of friction and stickiness. The problem was that without Sticktion, the tentacles would just slide onto each other. We really wanted them to be this heap of viscous tubes that would stick to each other and stick to his chest. And the ones at the bottom of the stack would stick there in a big matte. The biggest ones out in front that hang from his chin and moustache-like tentacles could really swing around.”

“Imagine a piece of spaghetti sticking to a leather jacket,” suggests visual effects supervisor John Knoll. “That was the effect I wanted to get. R&D added this subtle stickiness to the engine.”

“The great thing,” Hickel continues, “is that as complicated as it was, once Karin came up with basic settings for all of the controls, the sim artists got up and running very quickly. I’m pretty amazed by that, actually, because this was very stressful for me. Back in December, when we really didn’t have this working yet, there was no plan B. We couldn’t animate it by hand and we looked at other sim possibilities, but they didn’t achieve what we had in mind. There are more than 200 shots and 15 minutes of screen time of Davy and we had only one artist who knows how to do this.”

With as many as 50 animators working together on a total of 18 CG characters, there were plenty of technical and artistic challenges. “What makes these characters so complicated is that they are encrusted with sea life and we had to figure out ways to cover them with barnacles and such,” Hickel observes. “We wrote tools that the modelers used where they had a sea life picker, where they could pick a mussel or a barnacle. As our model supervisor, Jeff Campbell, said, it was a little like flower arranging. And they also used ZBrush for displacement textures for the sea life and for the characters themselves and our usual suite of modeling and paint tools.”

The crew of The Flying Dutchmen include Ogilvey, who has a sea sponge head; Palafico, whose head is a red fan coral and very translucent; Koleniko, in which one side of his face is a puffer fish and can puff up with spines; and Knoll’s favorite: a crab-like creature whose head rotates in and out of the shell.

The Kraken’s tentacles modeled in Maya. The creature was keyframe animated with some flesh sim enhancements in Zeno, courtesy of the new creature pipeline.

Then there’s the Kraken, the mythological squid monster that most are familiar with from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which plays a prominent role in Dead Man’s Chest as the instrument of Jones’ destruction. Tentacles were crucial here as well. Modeled in Maya, the Kraken was keyframe animated with some flesh sim enhancements in Zeno, courtesy of the new creature pipeline. They even had to procedurally tweak the suckers on each row of tentacles because they were too clean looking, so they randomly replaced suckers that were more rough and worn looking. Utilizing ILM’s new fluid dynamics engine, developed in cooperation with the Stanford University research program, Dead Man’s Chest, like Poseidon, contains improved CG water, in which nifty algorithms are put through multiple processors. And thanks to Zeno, which has been described as “Maya on steroids,” you can introduce particle controls, Soft Body, Rigid Body controls and other techniques.

“We started out in parallel with Poseidon, but they got into a bit of a crisis and we loaned them my entire water crew,” Knoll admits. “They wrapped in April and I got them back to finish my shots. They really pushed the envelope. The development they did at the end of Poseidon really paid off here. We did a lot of difficult water shots right up to the last day. The crew really knew what nobs to turn to get it to look good. We used CG water around the bases of the tentacles when they’re sloshing back and forth underwater. The Flying Dutchman travels underwater and reaches the surface like a submarine, so those shots were done with CG water as well, and the Dutchman is 380 feet long. We got realistic droplet size and realistic dispersion of particles.”


The scenes on Cannibal Island, where Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) narrowly escapes, contain a large number of shots where you see different variations of the same view under different lighting conditions, so Knoll and matte supervisor Susumu Yukuhiro needed to think about a 3D solution. “We saw ads for a product called Vue. It’s designed for organic landscapes and getting realistic renders. We started playing around with it and it became our primary tool for big, exotic landscapes.”

Overall, Knoll believes Dead Man’s Chest takes character animation another step forward at ILM, especially considering Nighy’s performance. “There are not as many shots numerically as on Sith, but it’s [a greater accomplishment] in terms of the amount of shots in the time that we had. Sith had 2,400 shots in about two years and this had 1,000 shots in about five months, but the average shot complexity was higher than on Star Wars.”

Looting CG Treasure From Dead Man’s Chest — Part 2
Bill Desowitz concludes our two-part coverage of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest with a report on ILM’s innovative Imocap system.
By Bill Desowitz
[ Posted on July 17, 2006 ]

Printable Version

ILM’s new Imocap was used to create the CG characters of Davy Jones and his crew in Dead Man’s Chest. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc. Photo credit: ILM.

Tasked by director Gore Verbinski to come up with more complex and authentic-looking CG characters in Dead Man’s Chest, since Davy Jones and the crew of The Flying Dutchman would be interacting closely with the live actors, Industrial Light & Magic put its R&D team to work on a new incarnation of its proprietary motion capture system, dubbed Imocap. The results of Jones are so impressive, in fact, that people have already begun talking about the sea-encrusted villain with his creepy tentacle beard as the next great CG performance breakthrough.

	Early concept art for Davy Jones.

“We’ve done a lot of computer vision work here in R&D for the last several years and we were hoping to apply that to motion capture work outside of the MoCap studio some day,” remarks Steve Sullivan, director of R&D at ILM. “Dead Man’s Chest provided an opportunity for [remote MoCap] and a clear case of [requiring] that same quality on set where we needed those actors together in a scene for those hero performances. So we worked with the production team to nail down constraints of what we could get away with and what’s off-limits.” Imocap became a new protocol for measuring the actors and obtaining data during the actual shoot for the creation of skeletal motion in the computer. The software contained added functionality and new ways of tracking data. Special sensor-studded suits for the actors playing CG characters were created, which were more comfortable than typical MoCap outfits, as the actors were required to wear them in a variety of simple and treacherous conditions. “…On set, I wore a gray suit, which had reference points comprised of white bubbles and strips of black-and-white material, so that when they come to interpret your physical performance, they’re better placed to do so,” adds Bill Nighy, who plays Davy Jones.

According to Sullivan, “the suits needed to be ‘dignified.’ They had to be comfortable and not look ‘stupid.’ There were a few iterations of the material itself, which started out as a cotton blend but ended up being a stretchy, semi formfitting material. And we arrived at a neutral gray to help with our lighting calculations… and we used some markers and bands to help with the capture process itself. Those needed to be comfortable as well. Cameras were based on location and shooting conditions.”

“For shots where we used reference cameras, Kevin Wooley, our Imocap lead, housed some cameras in watertight enclosures and wired them to a computer for storing the images,” explains animation supervisor Hal Hickel. “This was great for the onset stuff. For beaches and jungles, we used untethered cameras with lightweight tripods. They were a little more trouble on the backend because they weren’t synchronized to each other, but both solutions worked well, and will continue to be used on the third Pirates movie [At World’s End].”

Davy Jones and the crew of The Flying Dutchman interact closely with live actors throughout the film.

Thus, by integrating the MoCap process with the actual shoot — providing the animators with hero plates with the actors in them, casting their real shadows and making good eye contact with the live actors — they were able to create, for instance, a more expressive, nuanced performance out of the maniacal Davy Jones, with the help, of course, of Nighy.

“We had new ways for the computer to analyze the images,” Sullivan continues. “The software piggy backed on MARS, the matchmoving [and tracking] solver. It understood what the actors could and couldn’t do. Our process is more holistic than traditional MoCap. We try to capture the whole body at once from different kinds of information, and that allows the flexibility to use many kinds of cameras and to work with partial information sometimes.

“The product of Imocap comes out as an animated skeleton, just like regular MoCap, and the animators do with that whatever they want, with artists in the middle running the post process. Sometimes they’ll need to cheat the body to get a better composition of the image. But the advantage is that the animators are overriding things and animating for performance reasons rather than just getting the basic physics and timing down. That all comes from the actor.”


Although ILM is currently developing its own facial performance capture system, Hickel determined this wasn’t the time to introduce yet another R&D component. “We have a lot of confidence in our facial animation, so we decided to do it by hand. The creature pipeline was being moved over to Zeno and most of the faces were different enough from the actors anyway.”

During the actual shoot on beaches and jungles, ILM used untethered cameras with lightweight tripods to measure the actors and obtain data that was then used to create the characters’ skeletal motions in the computer.

Hickel adds that there’s still a lot of animation artistry at work. “The CG characters weren’t 1:1 proportional copies of the actors, so there’s a lot of reinterpreting their motion and figuring out how to get a good performance out of a guy who’s head is made of coral. We had a little more freedom with some of the background actors because their faces are so different, such as Ogilvy, whose head is basically a giant sea sponge and he has one eye in some weird orifice. Davy Jones is the most complex and human-looking CG character. He’s 100% CG — even his eyes. We knew it would be difficult, but we figured we could get there pretty quickly. What was just as difficult was the whole spark of life. The thing about Bill was he wasn’t a stone-faced villain. It was a very mercurial performance — he was constantly changing his expression and delivery. Nobody expected it. Every scene we’d stare at it and study it.” Concludes visual effects supervisor John Knoll: “For us, it’s taken character animation another step forward with Davy Jones and how nice Bill Nighy’s performance comes through.”