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12 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 type of animation curves they use for keyframed animation. The new system might sound similar to previous approaches, but there are important differences. "Before, like others in the industry, we would capture a performance, decode it, create a moving mesh, and the key- frame animation would happen as a layer on top," Helman says. "With Muse, the animators access raw data; they don't manipulate a layer on top of the actor's performance. They have access to points they didn't have before." (See "The Way Muse Works" on page 10.) Although having that access might seem valuable in general, the nature of this film made it necessary. It's an action/thriller, but it's also a comedy. "This movie is made from jokes and smart dialog," Helman says. "The performances come from four funny actors sitting at a table improvising, with writers behind saying, 'Try this.' The final performance ended up being a combination of takes from all the performances." And with four talking turtles plus a talking rat in the scenes, things became complicated. "We shot for four months on set, then the director made his picks," Helman says. "For one shot, he might like a line from one actor on one take and the performance from another ac- tor in another take. Then, there were revisions to the script. So, we'd do another capture of the same scene later at ILM. Some- times we'd incorporate part of that, then go into another volume and re-do the capture. We captured performances in New York, Los Angeles, and at ILM in San Francisco. We had to put them together." T U R T L E F A C E S To help transfer nuances from the actors' performances and make the facial expressions and lip sync on the CG characters believable, modelers sculpted the facial features from the actors into the turtles. "That made the retargeting come across as natural and seamless as possible," Weaver says. But, it wasn't easy. "It took a lot of art directing to create the facial animation rigs for the turtles," Harrington says. "We had to make the actor's smile work with the physicality of a turtle's face, and make it appealing." To check the quality of data transferred via the Muse system from the actor to controls in the digital character, the team super- imposed a moving wireframe of the actor's face on top of footage of the actor saying his lines. "When we were sure it was accurate, we copied and pasted the motion onto the turtle char- acters," Harrington says. "The same motion curves drove the turtle's face." When the animators didn't have data captured from the actors, they would sometimes capture each other or keyframe the performance. "We'd do pick-up shots on our motion-capture stage when we needed something we didn't have or wanted to do over," Harrington says. "A person swinging a punch maybe, or taking a couple steps. We used pretty much everything we could: keyframe, motion capture with iMocap and Muse, footage from witness cameras." Stunt actors performed the physically demanding action sequences, but the story oen called for stunts that were phys- ically impossible, and for those, animators would keyframe the characters' performances. "At the end of the day, I think the facial animation was about half motion capture and half keyframe, with Muse always as our starting point," Harrington says. "For the bodies, because the turtles were physically different from the actors – they look like bodybuilders – the data was sometimes useful and other times we had to re-work it. Physics is always a challenge when you have turtles doing superhero feats. The turtles are ninja masters." N I N J A M O V E S Of ILM's character shots, 166 were with close-up dialog. Action dominates the rest. Fight Coordinator Garrett Warren provided the martial arts moves. "Oen when we work on an animated fight scene, we have a blank plate," Harrington says. "This time, we had Garrett Warren, one of the best fight coordinators in the business. We had real martial arts moves for our animated characters to do. If there was something we didn't get with Garrett, we cap- tured animators who are into EACH TURTLE WEARS A DIFFERENT COLORED MASK, AND IN ADDITION, MODELERS AND ANIMATORS GAVE LEONARDO (LEO), SHOWN HERE, AND HIS THREE BROTHERS INDIVIDUAL CHARACTERISTICS TO HELP DISTINGUISH THEM. P E R F O R M A N C E C A P T U R E