Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1144162
s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 c g w 6 1 camera tracks and cycle between them to find the right looks and pacing. Unreal has tackled characters in a big way using the virtual camera to drive perfor- mances and even give actors a role in the visual effects. Welcome to Marwen is director Robert Zemeckis's latest sacrifice on the al- tar of cinema-tech advancement: a strange, mostly true, story about Mark Hogencamp, a veteran who built a toy town in his backyard as part of his recovery from a crippling hate crime. To re-create Hogencamp's dream world, Zemeckis worked with longtime collaborator VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie of Method Studios. Baillie talked about his work on the film at FMX 2019. Zemeckis, who was excori- ated for his groundbreaking 3D creation of a digital Tom Hanks character for Polar Express, which strayed too far into the Uncanny Valley, had no intention of going that route to re-create the toy characters Hogencamp uses to play out heroic fanta- sies in Marwen. Instead, they embraced the limitations of current 3D work and scanned the actors to create 3D printed dolls, which were in turn scanned back to digital to create the doll characters to be driven by the actors. The actors' performances were captured on a mocap set with lighting identical to that of the Marwen toy town so the eyes and mouths of the actors could be composited and blended onto the doll characters, enabling the soul of the actors to shine through. Baillie says the magic came as the actors could see their movements driving the dolls. He said the actors were eager to check the performance playbacks to see how their dolls did in the scenes. Alas, the film did not do well at the box office. It's an odd story, and Zemeckis has some kind of drive to push technology to see what it can do, even if it doesn't do much for his bottom line. In this case, according to Baillie, the film demonstrated the power of bringing visual effects and actors together in the process. And again, Zemeckis has pushed the technology of motion capture forward. Animating It All In 2019, animation is a major front line for advancing game engine use in film and TV. ED Films, a Canadian film company, is up- ending film production for small teams. It's creating a wealth of content and using game engines to build scenes and dynamically try out different looks, as well as reuse models, characters, and sets. For its film Giant Bear, which was first shown at the GLAS anima- tion festival this year, the team did most of the visualization in Unity. They created Scene Track as a tool to export content from the game engine to Maya for further work. The film is lovely, intense, and explosive. The company's president, Emily Paige, said at a panel presentation at FMX that the ability to work in real time and see rendered content in context was invaluable to getting the work done within the team's tight budgets in terms of time and money, but she also notes there is a lot of work still to be done to make game engines suitable for artists and filmmaking. For instance, Giant Bear involved fur and clothing, and the film- makers were going for a painterly look that wasn't supported by the Unity engine at the time. That's why they also had to depend on Maya. ED Films additionally used Maya as well as Adobe Aer Effects to render the film traditionally. ED Films has developed a clever boot- strap method. It sells tools like Scene Track as well as assets and training to help fund the studio's ongoing creative work. The role of the game engine has grown dramatically in the animation pipeline during the last few years, and specific problems are being addressed. Disney Television Anima- tion's R&D group invested in the develop- ment of Baymax Dreams with Unity. THE DRAGONFLY SYSTEM BY GLASSBOX IS DESIGNED FOR THOSE ON SET BUT DOESN'T REQUIRE KNOWLEDGE OF HOST SOFTWARE. STEVEN SPIELBERG ON SOLO 2 SET. IMAGE COURTESY MPC.