Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/711516
22 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 6 stage with Ruby. Artists have to be involved to get that right. Mark works very subtly. He allows an expression to unfold. He gives the audience time to absorb what he's doing. The timing for each part of the face and how it overlaps is really important. We had to pay attention to that." M O T I O N D A T A A crew that would top 100 animators and motion editors moved data onto the giants, refined, and augmented the data. Some augmentation was necessary due to the limited data available. "We don't oen motion-capture hands or get the movement of individual fingers," Beard says. "We don't get ear animation." But, much of the artistic work focused on facial animation – that of BFG and of the other giants. "It was really interesting to work on an actor, Mark Rylance, that underplays," Beard says. That was more of a challenge than working on the other giants. Steven asked those actors to overplay and give a humor- ous performance." Williams provides an example of Rylance's underplayed performance. "When Sophie says, 'Please let me go,' BFG wipes his face and stares at her," Wil- liams recounts. "As he says, 'No,' you can see he wants to say yes. There's all this emotion going through his face, but he has only a two-letter word to read." Each actor was painted with facial capture dots corresponding to 12 major muscle groups. The dots tracked skin movement, and that skin movement implied the underlying muscle movement. The motion edit soware and the motion edit team translated the data and applied it to muscles in the CG model. "We use tracking dots on the face to infer how the skin and muscles move, but we're still le guessing about what's going on under the skin," Beard says. "It comes down to inter- polation. Capturing the movement of the skin is like the tip of the iceberg. Yes, you can see the cheek moving, but what's driving it? The mystery of the performance still has to be unraveled. This isn't about pressing a button. Animators have to solve that final riddle." N O T J U S T A S M I L E Beard provides an example to show how data tracked from dots on the surface of someone's face can be misleading. "There's a shot in which Mark does a warm smile to the camera for the longest time," he says. "We couldn't understand what we were doing wrong with our BFG face. It turned out that Mark was doing nothing with his mouth." The animators realized what was actually going on in Rylance's face when they covered his eyes in the video footage: It no longer looked like Rylance was smiling. But when they uncovered his eyes, he looked happy. "The complexity that goes beyond how the skin moves is really tricky," Beard says. "Particularly on shots like that. There's a tendency to rely on the mouth if you want smiling, but in this shot his mouth wasn't doing anything. He had the apple cheeks usually created by the mouth, but he had used the musculature around his eyes." This, Beard points out, is not unlike what art students learn in drawing classes. "Art teachers drill into you that you don't draw the surface, you draw what's under- neath," Beard says. "That gives you the ability to understand how things are shaped and how to render them in 3D. You need the same skill for life drawing. You need to know the bone structure of a skull to draw a face accu- rately. Muscles are angled and positioned in certain ways at different depths, and when you understand that, you can understand the flow of the skin. The tracking data gets us 80 percent there. It gives us the flow of the skin. That last 20 percent is an uphill struggle, but that's where detail is paramount and the underlying structure is paramount." G I A N T G I A N T S The other nine giants are twice the size of BFG. Stunt actor and choreographer Terry Notary worked with the actors to help them perform as big, heavy characters. On set, motion-captured actors had properly scaled props, and some wore weights. Motion editors used Weta Digital's soware to translate the captured data and scale it the proper size for the giant CG characters. Animators then tweaked the characters' weight by modifying the motion-capture data. "We worked with subtle details," Beard says. "The arc of something heavy tends to be straighter and not change direction as much. So, if an actor swung his arm, we made sure the arm was as smooth as if it were a massive weighted item. And sometimes, we tried to slow things down – particularly for giants in the background." Similarly, the animators sometimes exaggerated the actors' facial expressions to increase the contrast between BFG and the bigger giants. "Overall, when someone spoke, we main- tained their original performance," Beard says. "But, there was an opportunity to have more fun with the facial performances, to amp them up a bit more, because there was more humor associated with them. Steven wanted big expressions, to make sure they stayed fun and not scary." Once animated, all the giants moved into the simulation pipeline. First, a muscle sim- ulation moved the skin. Then, multiple sims moved the hair and clothes. "BFG wears a shirt with suspenders and ANIMATORS DISCOVERED THAT RYLANCE'S HAPPY FACE RELIES MORE ON MUSCLES AROUND HIS EYES THAN A SMILE.