Robert Zemeckis' Bay Area studio has 450 employees and will close by January. It produces the motion-capture animation technology that was used in 2009's 'A Christmas Carol.'
By Claudia Eller
In a cost-saving move, Walt Disney Studios is shutting down Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital studio in Marin County, which employs 450 people. Those employees will be phased out over the course of the year until the facility closes by January.
The director and producer's San Rafael-based studio, which Disney has been bankrolling, produces motion-capture animation technology that was used in Zemeckis' 2009 big-budget holiday movie "A Christmas Carol."
"Given today's economic realities, we need to find alternative ways to bring creative content to audiences, and IMD no longer fits into our business model," Disney Studios President Alan Bergman said.
Disney Studios has been aggressively cutting costs by consolidating operations, slashing overhead and reining in production and marketing budgets.
"A Christmas Carol" cost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars to make and promote. The motion-capture technology Zemeckis used appeared outdated in the wake of James Cameron's "Avatar," which employed a more advanced technique. The movie generated $324 million in ticket sales worldwide.
ImageMovers is completing production on "Mars Needs Moms," which Disney plans to release in March 2011. Zemeckis is also developing a 3-D adaptation of the 1968 animated Beatles film "Yellow Submarine."
Disney said the studio was "hoping to create a long-term production deal" with Zemeckis and his IMD partners, Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey, which would include the development of "Yellow Submarine."
Disney has been in partnership with Zemeckis for the last four years. The studio and filmmaker have had an association since 1988 when Zemeckis directed the groundbreaking hit "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
This is the gear that gets our troops excited. Microflown Technologies' tiny sensor listens for the sounds of war by measuring particles in the air. Then it reports what weapon made the sound and where that sound originated.
The sensor uses a technology, developed by Microflown, called acoustic vector sensing. AVS heats two 200-nanometer wide platinum strips to 200 degrees Celsius and measures how passing air particles cool them down. From those cooling patterns, Microflown's proprietary software can determine not only what the sound is but also where it came from.
There are other technologies that can do the same type of thing, but they all have their own unique disadvantages: radar-based solutions are traceable; others require the deployment of large apparatuses, and some need multiple sensors to triangulate sounds.
Microflown's matchstick almost seems too good to be true, but several nations' armies—including the Netherlands, Germany, India, Poland, and Australia—are currently testing out the tech and seeing what they hear. [DVICE]
All that headgear and other motion-capture hardware that went into making SAG members into believable N’avi just wasn’t doing the trick for the old timers. Despite those early images of Zoe Saldana getting her wail on and all of Jim Cameron and producer Jon Landau’s calming pledges to the contrary, the veteran actors are convinced it’s a threat. And to paraphrase a rally cry popular with their fellow extremists in the gun lobby, they’re Academy members, and they vote:
The consensus I had drawn in recent weeks from talking to academy members of other branches strongly pointed to Avatar winning, but with few exceptions, most of the actors I asked thought the movie’s advanced “performance capture” technique was threatening their career future. I remember sitting next to JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist) at a Lovely Bones lunch event in December, and she said she worried it had the potential to eventually put actors out of work. Heavily involved with the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, she said then that SAG was forming a committee to investigate the process.
Some of them made remarks like 'There really weren't any actors IN Avatar', which shows just how uneducated people are on the subject.
Aside from sensing a heavy Hurt Locker vibe in the room, many, while acknowledging the technical prowess of the film, didn’t believe Avatar was their sort of film, at least when it comes to Academy Awards.
“I confess I didn’t see Avatar. It’s not really an actor’s kind of movie is it?” said 1987 best actress nominee Sally Kirkland. “I voted for Hurt Locker and Sandy [Bullock]. She took my acting workshop when she was starting out in New York.”
Welllll, there you have it. To recap, JoBeth Williams is going to investigate the motion-capture scourge sweeping Hollywood, Sally Kirkland didn’t even watch the movie tied for the lead in nominations (that also happens to have grossed $2.7 billion globally; after all, actors hate money), and in the end they voted for the ensemble film that was only nominated for one acting prize anyway. Next thing you know, Tippi Hedren will be bitching about how all those abused six-legged horses turned her off. Why do we do this for seven months a year, again?
Christopher Elam jumps. A 50-foot wall shoots out from his feet. Misnomer Dance Theater’s Director has the ground spinning beneath him. Structural forms emerge from his every movement, building a city through physical inspiration.
In the motion capture technology world, the rules bend. “In some ways it’s similar to what one might envision in their body while dancing. But the beautiful irony for a dancer is that you’re very much rooted in the reality of space: the length of muscles, how far you can jump. Only in our minds [can] we extend those concepts,” explains Christopher Elam, Misnomer Dance Theater’s Artistic Director.
His ten-year-old downtown dance company is on the pulse of technology. Bridging artistic genres, Elam collaborated with the multidisciplinary company Tronic Studio in 2006 to experiment with the digitization of movement. Motion capture – often referred to as mocap – has long been used in video game imaging and animation. Now dance is entering another dimension.
“Chris’s style is very much about the physics of dance,” says Jesse Seppe of Tronic. “He’s tweaking reality and…almost defying gravity. We didn’t want ballet or traditional dance. We were much more interested in composition and the experimental side of his work.” Seppe and his partner Vivian Rosenthal approached Elam with just a narrative idea for a mocap shoot. In the rehearsal process, they began to explore the theme of the creative process itself with a blend of movement and graphics.
Like any dance for camera work, the challenges were different than those in choreographing for the stage. The frame directs the audience’s eye, and actions must be repeated and adjusted to achieve the perfect take. It’s no one-shot deal. “You feel like you’re dancing with your ghosts,” Elam says of creating movement within an invisible space that would only become reality in post-production. In the animated piece, every move the dancer makes generates a new 3D building or element in a city being built. “If I’m choreographing a movement where I turn my head and a shape is supposed to come growing off my back, I need to know how long is that shape going to be. If I’m giving an impact of an action, I need to know whether to give a thrust or a gentle petering.” It takes imagination.
Dance and science bonded during the half-day mocap shoot. Elam and his dancers wore suits with multiple reflective markers Velcroed on their joints. “It’s not your typical costume. All the little silver balls fall off your body pretty quickly, especially if you’re partnering with another dancer and lifting them,” says Elam.
During motion capture, multiple cameras circle the room (known as the capture volume) to track the location of each body marker in space, explains Doug Fox, a technology consultant and blogger who has presented research on the topic at the Kinetic Cinema program in Brooklyn, NY. “Motion capture is so valuable because it’s an authentic rendering in animation of the actual movements of dancers.”
“The entire room is mapped out for the software so it can record the XYZ coordinates of the markers. Then the motions are digitized,” says Seppe. A skeletal outline of stick-like diagrams can be played back in real time to be sure the kinetics are recorded as fully and accurately as possible. The data collected is then applied to a character in the 3D software. In this case, it’s the dancer whose movements inspire the creation of other structures.
Initially, Misnomer Dance Theater’s project was set to be the opener of RES Fest (one of the earliest global digital film festivals), but the deal fell through when plans changed for the festival. Tronic Studio and the company are still looking for a final sponsor to help complete its last stages, but in the meantime Misnomer has had other collaborative projects.
In addition to being one of the first modern companies to livestream their performances online and pioneer arts marketing initiatives, they emerged in 3D yet again. Icelandic singer Björk’s 2008 music video, “Wanderlust” featured Elam’s choreography and dancers. While shooting, he coached Misnomer members Brynne Billingsley and Coco Karo through a tumbling sequence in front of a green screen. The final version is a rich visual of movement in an unusual setting.
Dance and animation form a cohesive relationship, particularly for Misnomer. The aesthetics that make dance enjoyable onstage translate well in the digital realm. So often, only ballet is viewed as otherworldly, but with motion capture even abstract movement becomes tangibly, and more engagingly, foreign.
“If you’re shooting mocap for a video game that has soldiers in it, you want to cast ex-military because they move correctly,” Seppe explains. “If you’re doing something that’s really poetic and using the body to speak as the voice, I think a dancer is the right person to look at for that.”
Icon Imaging Relocates to Vicon House of Moves; 3D Scanning, Motion Capture and Animation Under One Roof
Vicon, an Academy Award(r)-winning developer of motion capture products, today announced that Icon Imaging, a leading 3D scanning, imaging and modeling company, is moving into Vicon's 26,000 square foot US headquarters which also houses motion capture and animation facility, House of Moves.
Icon Imaging has moved their human body scanning system, head body scanning system and high-resolution model scanning system onto the House of Moves (HOM) stages. HOM's stages include a 40' X 70' X 25' main stage for clients working with or without first unit crews shooting alongside the motion capture cameras and a second soundstage capable of supporting up to 20 performers equipped to record professional quality audio during facial, body, finger or full body capture sessions. All of the stages at Vicon House of Moves are equipped with the latest Vicon MX T160 16 megapixel cameras.
"Moving into House of Moves made perfect sense for us. Motion capture and 3D scanning fit together like hand and glove, and we've already been working together for many years on projects for shared clients in gaming and film including EA, Sony and Activision. House of Moves has the best stage in the world, and a very talented team which we look forward to collaborating with on many future projects," said Piturro.
"Vicon always strived to offer clients a complete end-to-end animation solution, and to that end purchased House of Moves in 2004. We added an animation division and a soundproof mocap soundstage in 2008 and now with this latest alliance with Icon Imaging-our clients will have the convenience of premium 3D scanning on-site. We work parallel in the same high end production market and we look forward to having such a complimentary service at Vicon House of Moves," said Brian Rausch, Vice President of Production, Vicon House of Moves.
Icon Imaging was founded ten years ago by Domi Piturro. Piturro was also the co-founder and co-creator of Paraform Technologies, a Stanford developed and Paul Allen backed company which was awarded a Sci-Tech Academy Award in 2000 for its breakthrough process of scan data surfacing and model creation for 3D filmmaking. Piturro's background as a fine artist combined with his deep roots in computer graphics allow Icon Imaging to provide clients with a more customized and end-to-end experience in 3D scanning.
Icon Imaging specializes in projects for films, games and industrial applications, and has completed 3D scanning for Activision and EA on projects such as "Madden NFL", "Guitar Hero", "Tony Hawk", "Fight Night" and celebrities including Jessica Alba, Sting, Metallica, Aerosmith, Nicole Kidman and many others. Film projects include "I Am Legend", "Superman Returns" and "Fantastic Four"-for which Icon provided both scanning and built CG models for several of the film's characters.
The idea of Puppeteer is to create functional wearable motion-capture technology using off the shelf supplies, experimenting with all kinds of materials to achieve interesting results. The goal is also to achieve comfortable costumes for the performer, not restricting movement. We design and fabricate Puppeteer suits/costumes for each new performance, tailoring both aesthetically and functionally to the context/concept of each performance. Because this pressure sensor technology is so simple and relatively cheap we believe it offers a range of interesting implementations. We believe in sharing our techniques and methods, supporting the DIY spirit.
The fabric pressure sensors integrated in this version of the Puppeteer costume are made from two layers of conductive fabric with a layer of ex-static in between (see Flexible-fabric-touchpad Instructable). These layers are sandwiched between two layers of neoprene to offer a certain amount of stability and thus more regular data. The patches of conductive fabric are "ironed-on" to the neoprene using fusing. The layer of ex-static, which is taken from the black bags used to package or store sensitive electronic parts, lies between the layers of conductive fabric, preventing direct contact. The neoprene is sewn together around the edges keeping everything in place.
The sensors work such that a current of 5 volt runs from the microcontroller (we are using Arduinos) into one of the conductive patches of the sensor. When pressure is applied to the touchpad, by pushing the layers together or by bending the sensor, the ex-static layer lowers its resistance. The lower the resistance of the ex-static, the more current can flow to the other side, reaching the other patch of conductive fabric which leads back to an input in the microcontroller. Thus the current reaching the microcontroller input varies with the pressure applied to the sensor. This change in pressure can be mapped to an angle between two bones of a virtual puppet.
Depending on which bones the sensor is addressing, the software running on the computer (we are using Processing) that receives this data needs to know the minimum and maximum angle for this sensor, and also the direction or the segment of the sin circle. For example, the sensor under the armpit offers maximum current (minimum resistance of the ex-static) when the arm is at the body’s side. When the arm is stretched up then the sensor will not be bent and the current flow at a minimum (the resistance of the ex-static at its max).
In this first version of Puppeteer each side of the fabric touchpads is connected via a wire to the main plug, which is situated at the lower back of the body. From the main plug a 3 meter cable leads away from the body to the microcontroller which interprets the electric signal before sending it to a laptop via USB.
In all twelve sensors were integrated in the suit at the joints, six on either side of the body. Following joint movements were captured: - Knees - Hips - Shoulders - Underarms - Elbows - Wrists
The sensors were sewn into place underneath the tight stretchy fabric of the suit. Depending on what worked best for each joint the sensor was placed either on the inside or the outside of the joint’s bending angle. The wires from the sensors protrude thought the suit and are covered in bright orange fabric to hide the delicate feeling that exposed wires give, they also to emphasize the connections to the joints and are a kind of visual metaphor for the “strings†of a puppet. The plug at the back of the suit is stable enough to stay attached despite rigorous movement but also allows for the dancer to disconnect herself and walk away. Disconnecting kills the data transfer and reconnecting works without restarting the software.
