Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/259450
C G W Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 ■ 15 in Lake-town by hand in order to control when and where they appeared. "Some scenes had only a handful in the back- ground," White says. "But in others, they might place as many as 50 or 60 characters by hand." Digital Doubles For digital doubles of the actors, the crew captured their performances and those of their stunt doubles on the motion- capture stage. To replicate their look, artists created skin textures using a meticulous method that Acevedo first devel- oped for Avatar and has since enhanced: He does life casts to capture fine details, and then uses a unique technique to scan the result into Photoshop and produce displacement maps (see "Animation Evolution," December 2011/January 2012). "We even did a new life cast of Ian McKellen, " Acevedo says. "We also cast his teeth and hands, and Keven Norris painted tex- tures for his digital double." Norris worked on Azog the Orc, too. The painters additionally worked with displacement maps that provided skin texture from life casts of Martin Freeman, those playing the dwarves, and some of the other actors, painting color variations and other details into the result. "Evangeline [Lilly] who plays the Elf Tauriel has flawless skin," Acevedo says. "Her skin is so healthy we had to exaggerate the texture or it would have looked like plastic in CG." Although the filmmakers typically use digital doubles for ac- tion shots too dangerous for actors and stunt actors, and some- times in very wide shots, Aitkin describes a situation in which a digital double helped Jackson film a cozy domestic scene. The scene takes place at breakfast time in Beorn's house and includes Gandalf, the dwarves, the hobbit Bilbo, and Beorn. Beorn (actor Mikael Persbrandt) is a shape changer – some- times a bear, sometimes a man. When he's a man, he's 10-feet-tall. To put the dwarves and Bilbo into the same room as Beorn, the filmmakers used a simulcam technique. "We had the actors playing the dwarves on an overscale set with giant chairs, so they looked small around the table," Ait- ken explains. "At the same time, on an adjacent greenscreen stage, we filmed Mikael [Persbrandt] with a scaled-down camera, so all his moves are smaller. We slaved the camera filming him to the camera filming the dwarves through motion control. You could look at a monitor on set and see Beorn looming over the dwarves." Thus, Jackson could shoot the se- quence as if he were filming a 10-foot- tall shape-shifter talking to a roomful of dwarves. But, what of Gandalf? His human scale stands him between the dwarves and Beorn. "The most effective way of achiev- ing the third scale was to replace him with a digital double," Aitken says. "Our digital doubles are now at a level that makes it possible for Peter [Jackson] to make creative decisions he otherwise couldn't make. They give him flexibility. Our performance-capture technology, the way we shade the hair, the skin, the cloth simulation – across the board we're achiev- ing a higher level of quality." The same artists and techniques made it possible for the artists to create believable characters that did not need to mirror actors. The Orc Azog, performed and voiced by Manu Bennett, his tortured-looking son Bolg, performed by Lawrence Makaore, and the other Orcs all benefited from the scrupulous work by texture artists, a sophisticated muscle-simulation system that has evolved over many films, performance-capture techniques, and the work of other artists and animators. "With creatures like the Orcs, our digital performance and digital double work cross over," Aitken says. "They are entirely digital characters, an extension of the performance work that started with Gollum (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit ) and Kong (King Kong ), and carried on through Caesar (Planet of the Apes ), Neytiri (Avatar ), Captain Haddock (Tintin ). They continue that thread which runs through our work. Peter works with the actors on set, and their performances are clearly there, and we want to honor that. But, we get to realize the appearance of the character carrying out that performance." As the artists at Weta Digital move on to film three, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, they will revisit all the technol- ogy and techniques developed for the first two films and pull that thread into new state-of-the-art visual effects. "Working on these big Peter Jackson films is about the most fun we can have," Aitken says. "The scope is so broad and he has us working on such a high level that we get to operate at the top of our game. I really appreciate it." ■ CGW Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. ■ WETA DIGITAL CREATED digital doubles of all the main actors in the film to use in wide shots such as this and in close-ups such as those in the sluice.