Motion capture movie#
Motion capture series#

Motion-capture was fast becoming an essential tool in the forward-looking filmmaker's arsenal. Arnold Vosloo wore tracking lights for certain special effects shots in The Mummy ('A lot of the time I was walking around the set looking like a Christmas tree,' he said), while Ridley Scott motion-captured 2,000 extras for Gladiator and replicated them en masse for realistic looking crowd scenes. Expensive and prohibitive, MoCap was used sparingly at first. Hollywood quickly picked up on this method of optical motion-capture and the results it provided. By the time the hundreds of Indian animators had finished the film for release in 2000 it was old news (it grossed under $30,000 domestically), but it blazed a trail for films to come. Though the film did utilise traditional animation in places, most of the character movement was filmed with a groundbreaking 3D optical technique, whereby actors played out their roles on camera covered in dozens of tiny reference markers, triangulating their movements on a computer.

Motion capture movie#

You may not have heard of Sinbad: Beyond The Veil Of Mists, but it's an important milestone in the history of animated film: it's the first movie made primarily with motion-capture. But by this point, motion-capture had found a new lease of life. In the 21st century, director Richard Linklater adopted the rotoscope technique in 2001's experimental drama Waking Life (each frame of reference animated digitally) and again in A Scanner Darkly in 2006.

In 1978, Ralph Bakshi used the technique to animate his vastly truncated Lord Of The Rings movie and followed it up with American Pop (1981) and Cool World (1992), starring Brad Pitt opposite an animated Kim Basinger. Motion-capture didn't really advance much over the subsequent decades, although rotoscoping never really went out of fashion. It was a smash hit, and Disney used rotoscoping for several other features including Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty. In 1937, the company released their first feature-length movie, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, which was animated by shooting actors playing out the parts and then tracing over the motion they provided. Looking for new and exciting ways to bring their characters to life, Disney adopted rotoscoping – also known as live-action reference – and began to experiment using it in motion pictures.

Motion capture series#

Fleischer's series Out Of The Inkwell utilised this method, including animated classics like Koko the Clown and Fitz the Dog. In 1915, he devised the Rotoscope, a concept which saw animators trace over frames of live-action film to give cartoon characters a recognisable fluidity, if not a photo-realistic look. The earliest example of the entertainment industry using motion-capture is probably the short films of animator Max Fleischer.

The basics of motion-capture are thus: you have real participants provide a template of human movement and translate that movement into another medium. Late in the 20th century, before it was co-opted by Hollywood, motion-capture was a photogrammetric analysis tool in the field of biomechanics, and was used for sports, education and even videogames like Prince Of Persia. In actual fact, rudimentary motion-studies have been around since the 19th century, pre-dating cinema itself, and were primarily used for understanding better how humans and animals move. You probably know motion-capture as the thing with the ping pong balls and the silly lycra suits.