Post Magazine

emian Gordon, a motion capture specialist at Sony Pictures Imageworks (www.image- works. com) in Culver City, CA, and the chairman of the board of the two-year-old Motion Capture Society (www.motioncapture- society.com), remembers back a dozen years when he was just star ting in the field of motion capture and saw a documentar y about the beginnings of film. It seemed to him that the same restrictions that Thomas Edison faced in those early days of cin- ema "described motion capture perfectly" at the time. "Motion capture is film 100 years ago," Gor- don recalls thinking. "But with computing technol- ogy moving at the speed of Moore's law, we have come a tremendous way in just 12 years." Yet motion capture is, in many ways, still in its in- fancy for feature films, commercials, videogames and theme park rides. It remains "a kind of invasive process," Gordon notes, despite devel- opments in active optical, passive optical and iner tial motion capture systems. But he sees "glimmers" of motion capture's potential. "We're taking baby steps toward needing no special technology or hardware. One possible end game is where you get motion cap- ture for film all the time, for free, via software on the camera or lenses. Another is getting motion capture via a personal, wearable digitizer." J U S T A N OT H E R TO O L Although the industry isn't there yet, motion capture has made great strides in recent years using performance capture on films such as The Polar Express, Monster House and Beowulf."Every movie that utilizes performance capture helps the industry; everyone gets the benefit of a trickle-down effect," Gordon points out. Performance capture takes an actor's entire perfor- mance into account, capturing hands, face, eyes and body instead of just body movement. Right now, "the big push is to make doing motion capture simultaneous with shooting any film element a reality," he reports. "Motion capture is trying to become more transparent. We'd like to make this as easy as using any other visual effects tool for our filmmakers." Recently, Imageworks used a combination of performance capture and animation to create Dr. Manhattan in the movie Watchmen. Gordon, along with Sony Pictures Imageworks' next-generation technology group, designed the approach, which was then carried out by Imageworks's Josh Ochoa, the motion capture super- visor on the film.To create Dr. Manhattan, performance capture recorded the face, body and hands of actor Billy Crudup, who is live action until a radiation accident gives him superpowers and he's transformed into a blue, semi-transparent CG character. "We had access to Billy before production started for a survey of facial shapes and surface capture," Gor- don recalls."By capturing a range of facial expressions and body motions we were able to create his skeleton to correlate between the film plates and the motion capture and create a relationship between the 2D data and the 3D character." Gordon worked on the initial survey and developing the methodology for capture. Once principal photography began, Crudup's performance was recorded with multiple Sony 950R HD cameras synced together. "Only one pick-up shot was done in post; all other motion capture was done si- multaneously, on location in Nor th Vancouver, including a tricky sequence in the rain where we had to do more manual work to unidentify the tracked raindrops," says Gordon recalling some of the challenges Ochoa's team faced. "Billy wore an outfit with hundreds of glowing blue LEDs — the Dr. Manhattan character is his own light source — so they didn't have to introduce blue lights on him. But the LEDs didn't blink like active opti- cal LEDs, so they used software developed in-house to track the video data. Billy's body was roto- www.postmagazine.com May 2009 • Post 23 Sony Imageworks used its performance capture system to create the Dr. Manhattan character in Watchmen. Red Eye Studio provided mocap and animation services for High Voltage Software's upcoming release of The Conduit.

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