Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/786150
j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 7 c g w 1 3 GRAND MOFF TARKIN AND PRINCESS LEIA "I felt strongly from early on that the best ending for a movie about the mission to capture the Death Star plans would be with Leia getting the plans," says John Knoll, executive produc- er, writer, and visual effects supervisor on Rogue One. "And, that a movie which features the Death Star as the central McGuffin needed to have Tarkin playing a role. It would be odd consider- ing how important he is in [Star Wars: Episode IV– A New Hope] if he didn't appear in this movie." But New Hope released in 1977, and Peter Cushing, Tarkin's actor, died in 1994. "The way we thought of it was like trying to do a historic figure," Knoll says. "I felt that given how recognizable Peter Cushing is, he didn't fall into the category of someone we could recast and call Cushing; it would look odd if our Tarkin didn't look like the Tarkin we knew from New Hope. But, as soon as we made that decision, whether we'd use makeup or digital effects [to reproduce Tarkin], we had to cast someone who would embody Peter Cushing's mannerisms, someone who had the right physical build and, ideally, someone who could do his voice as well." They found actor Guy Henry. The ILM crew captured Henry's performance with a head-mounted display (HMD) fitted with two infrared cameras. Henry had infrared dots on his face and wore ILM's iMocap suit. "Previously, we had used visible light cameras with white LEDs mounted next to the camera to flood an actor's face with light," Knoll explains. "That's good for tracking data, but it's bad for everyone else. I didn't want that extra light on the faces in footage taken with the visible light camera. During the Pirates movies, we had always used the taking plate as reference, and it was a big part of how we made Bill Nighy look present in the plates. We could see how the shadows fell, the color of the shadows, and the ratios. So, we tested the infrared camer- as and realized it is a much better solution. The actor can't see the infrared lights, and the taking camera can't, either. It doesn't interfere." As they had done for Warcra and Turtles, the crew built digital models of the actor being captured and the character, in this case, Peter Cushing as Tarkin, whose facial expressions would be driven by the captured data. To create Tarkin's model, ILM artists looked at hundreds of images in the Lucasfilm archives and at shots from New Hope. The images didn't provide geometry, but they gave modelers information about face size, proportions, and sym- metry. From there, the process involved a lot of handwork to capture the likeness. NEW TOOLS "We've also been developing a new tool at ILM we call Flux, which allows us to do shape recovery from archival footage," Knoll says. "It's pretty flexible and powerful, and has a lot of potential. We can give Flux a model, and it will try to fit it to an image or animation. So, we fed our Tarkin model into Flux and ran a handful of shots from New Hope through the solver to see what our model needed to do, to learn what we could about Peter Cushing's facial expressions." To build a facial shape library for the Tarkin model, the artists started by transferring a library of FACS shapes captured from Henry and then refined the shapes when the muscles Henry used were different from those Cushing used to make particu- lar phonemes. The ILM crew captured the data and applied it to the Henry model first using an updated version of the studio's Muse and SnapSolve soware to move the data onto the CG characters. "The model of Guy Henry was our confidence test step," Knoll says. "We checked the tracked performance to know we'd squeezed all the juice out of it we could get. Once we felt that transfer worked and was maximized, we transferred it onto our Tarkin model. If something didn't look right, we wanted to make sure that it was because of the difference in the way Cushing made an 'f' sound. Not because of an error." In all, the process of creating and animating the digital Tarkin took about a year and a half. Digital Leia was easier. "She's in one shot and she delivers one line of dialog," Knoll says. "We didn't do scans; we sculpted the model by hand. And we motion-captured [actor Ingvild Deila] using standoff witness cameras and long lenses framed in tight enough for good data. We did this with Carrie Fisher's permission. She saw the work in progress and the finished result. If she hadn't been happy with it, we wouldn't have put it in the movie." – Barbara Robertson