He returned to the world of the 'Apes' this past weekend to continue the story of one of his most famous characters: Caesar. Motion-capture performance has certainly come along since it was first utilized, but it seems to be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Serkis even said that, with ' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes ,' there've been changes in technique since 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes,' and this technology is still evolving.
With 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' now in theaters, marking a high point for this art form, we take a look back at some of the most incredible instances of motion-capture performances, and see how this art form has evolved. The early technology that would come to birth modern motion capture was used as early as the 19th century, when photographer Eadweard Muybridge studied the motion of humans and animals through stop-motion photography. The basic principles of his study would soon serve filmmakers when Max Fleischer invented something called a Rotoscope in In essence, a camera would project a single frame onto an easel so that the animator could then draw over it, frame by frame, to better capture realistic movement for on-screen characters.
Other films to utilize rotoscoping, even if only in part, were the original ' Star Wars ' films, Disney's animated 'Alice in Wonderland,' 's 'Lord of the Rings,' and it's still utilized to this day.
Of course, the introduction of computers would eventually simplify this process. More aligned with the motion capture we see utilized today i. Early advancements saw multiple cameras synced to a computer as they filmed a subject, while either reflective or bright markers placed on the subject's main points of motion elbows, wrists, knees, etc. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors' or animals' actions directly onto a hand-drawn world.
The technique produced fluid, lifelike movements that animators couldn't achieve on their own. The first full-length American film to use rotoscoping was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , which debuted in , and Disney used the technique in subsequent films, including Alice in Wonderland , Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan.
Though actual mocap systems were still decades away, rotoscoping was precisely the proof of concept the field needed -- clearly, it paid off to mimic real people's actions as closely as possible in animated spaces. In , Harrison lined a bodysuit with potentiometers adjustable resistors and was able to record and animate an actor's movements, in real time, on a CRT.
This was a rudimentary rig -- the animated actor was essentially a glowing stick figure -- but it marked the first instance of real-time motion capture. By the s, animators were using bodysuits lined with active markers and a handful of large cameras to track actors' movements, resulting in digital images with much more detail and precision than Harrison's radioactive line drawings. But even in the s, each mocap-ready camera was roughly the size of a small refrigerator, and animators had to manually assign each marker, in each frame, for every scene.
It was nearly as painstaking as rotoscoping. Vicon has been in the mocap business for more than 30 years, established in Oxford, UK, in and surely making George Orwell sit straight up in his grave.
Think of the company as a one-stop shop for mocap rigs, offering everything from cameras and sensors, down to the actual software that turns all of that data into a digital image, in real-time. Vicon provided the mocap systems for a handful of blockbuster films, including Titanic , Marvel's Avengers universe, Paddington and Ready Player One , and games including Life is Strange and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
That last title holds a special place in mocap history. Hellblade is a powerful, award-winning action game from independent developer Ninja Theory, and in , it served as an introduction to the modern world of motion capture.
Motion-capture — or 'performance-capture', to give the method the actor-friendly name it's more recently come to be known by — has now become the norm for the contemporary blockbuster. We barely bat an eyelid at a fully-rendered CG character these days, so ubiquitous are they as to remove all mystery of how they were created. As evidenced by the flawless, lifelike animation we see on screen today, motion-capture has evolved at a frightening rate over the last few decades, which is fitting, as it reaches previously inconceivable highs in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes this month, with entire simian armies animated using the technique.
But how did motion-capture get off the ground, and which films — and filmmakers — do we have to thank for its existence? YES NO. Was this article informative? In This Article. Celebrity In The Know by Yahoo. Sports Rockets Wire. News Men's Health. Celebrity People. Style BuzzFeed. NBC News. Entertainment Consequence of Sound.
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