Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/27779
Performance Capture n n n n colony of motherless aliens. But, the spaceship snags her 9-year-old son Milo, too. Once on the planet, Milo learns he has one night to send mom back home. Fortunately, a geeky and fat Earthman named Gribble and a rebel Martian girl help him take on the alien nation as he attempts to rescue his mom. Created using performance capture, Disney’s Mars Needs Moms is the fifth such film for producer Robert Zemeckis; the second and last for T he story, written by director Simon Wells and his wife, Wendy Wells, takes a left turn from most Disney movies in which mom plays no part. For their part, these screenwriters sent mom to Mars to nurture a Carol and previous films, Wells modified it in ways that reflected his work on traditional and CG animated films. As with Zem- eckis’s films, Wells captured actors’ dialog and performances—on Mars, the hands, face, and body of as many as 13 people at once. “We did scenes in one continuous take,” Wells says. “It’s better than live action, where you do master shots and then coverage, and each has to be set up while the actors go to their trailers, lose energy, and then have to get up to speed again.” Ten, he selected the performances he liked. “At this point, the camera angle is irrelevant,” ImageMovers Digital (IMD), the perfor- mance capture studio he founded; and the first for Simon Wells. Wells had directed several animated films—including Te Prince of Egypt, for which he received an Annie nomination—and the live- action feature Te Time Machine; he also had been a story artist for Shrek 2, Shrek the Tird, Flushed Away, and other animated films. “Te method intrigued me,” Wells says. “I’d been fascinated by motion capture. I like that you get to work with actors, they get to work with one another, and that it’s performance, not voice-over in a booth. So that appealed to the part of me that liked filming live action. And I have directed a number of animated films, so having all the advantages of animation in postproduction appealed enormously to me.” Wells took the job on one condition: that he and Wendy could write it. “Tey had done some development work, but they weren’t happy with it,” Wells says. “So we took Berkeley Breathed’s book and worked directly from that. Te film was always conceived as a motion-capture project.” Modifying the Process Although the process Wells used was similar to that developed by Zemeckis to incorporate live-action techniques for A Christmas ImageMovers Digital translated motion data onto FACS-based expressions, such as these, that the crew implemented within a blendshape facial animation system. Wells says. “You’ll see, during the credit roll at the end of the movie, the performances we captured. Tey are nothing like the shots in the movie.” Wells shot the actors for five weeks starting at the end of March 2009. When they finished, he selected the performances he liked. Te crew then applied the motion data captured from the bodies in selected performances to what they call “video game” resolution characters. But, whereas Zemeckis had a rig that allowed him to steer a virtual camera using gear that resembled a real camera, Wells drew on his experience as a story artist and director for traditional animated films to create a rough cut from the performances. “Wayne [Wahrman, editor] and I found we could imagine the shots in 3D space, so I would draw thumbnails to describe to the artists how we wanted the shots to go,” explains Wells. “We would pretty much talk our way through the sequences, sketching them out. Te crew made our low-res 3D shots from that.” With the 3D characters in the 3D sets for each shot, Wells could decide where he wanted the virtual camera. “Once you’ve March 2011 37