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Other than location, the one difference Santa Monica’s Mothership (www.mothership.net) completed the trailer for Gears of War 3(directed by Vernon R. Wilbert Jr.) which in- cluded motion capture and keyframe animation work. Even in shots where mocap data was available, sometimes the director requested changes to the character’s performance that could only be achieved by using keyframe animation. They employed Autodesk Maya in- house for keyframe work and called on Los Angeles-based Giant Studios for motion capture. between the two houses is that HOM has added performance capture. “They have gained a little bit of a lead by being able to do facial, fingers and full body mocap, as well as audio capture on set — you’re really get- ting the whole performance in one single capture session on a fairly large stage.With Motus, if we are going to do facial capture, and need the characters to have full free- dom of movement on the stage, we’ll go back and do a two-pass scenario: one with gross motion first, then a second pass for fa- cial motion.We will be capturing our first full performance session with Motus this week for a project that has fairly constrained spa- tial requirements.” For keyframing, Janimation calls on XSI and Face Robot from Autodesk.They rarely use MotionBuilder.“We generally lean hard on the motion capture houses to provide clean and tidy data files, and from there we will feed it into our systems, either XSI or Face Robot, depending on whether we are dealing with bodies or faces.” PENDULUM “My partner in Pendulum, Mike Mc- Cormick, and I have been around motion capture for some time,” reports executive producer/president Rob Taylor.“We are big fans of the value it can bring to a project, but we see it as just another tool in the toolbelt — a very powerful tool.When deciding on Sway displays creative moves for Chandon LOS ANGELES— For the visual effects artists at Sway Studio (www.swaystudio.com), the decision-making process starts as soon as they see a storyboard, says company founder/creative director Mark Glaser.“Motion capture or keyframe animation? We encourage our clients to come to us as early as possible to help answer this question, and in turn help them sell that to their client.These early discussions always yield greater success from creative, schedule and budget standpoints.” Glaser notes that some- times it is not an “either or question” in terms of which technique is most ideal. In the case of a Chandon com- mercial (which has aired the past three holiday seasons, each time generating a huge spike in sales), Sway used both motion capture and keyframe animation to bring the spot’s character to life. Motion capture was used on the Chandon project (pictured) to provide a “reference point” for the keyframe animation.“The spot features the Tango, which is a very complicated dance to hand ani- mate. So we hired the dancers, and worked out the choreography, and via motion capture, recorded every move.Then,we pulled the material into the 3D space as a reference for keyframe animation. This gave the dancing characters an air of authenticity without the eeriness you can get when you apply captured human motion to non-human characters.” This creative vision is what drove Glaser to invent the proprietary “Drive-A-Tron” technology at Sway.This enables filmmakers to mo- tion capture an actual driver, driving a physics-based simulated vehicle to create photoreal car chase sequences that previously were not possible.The newest generation of the software was used for stunt driving in the earthquake sequence featured in the film 2012. “Our big push right now is to let filmmakers know that this tech- nology is available here at Sway, so they can create the most photo- real and exciting chase scenes out there using CG without sacrificing believability,” concludes Glaser. 30 Post • May 2010 www.postmagazine.com