If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from Hidalgo by simply clicking the image.

On The Polar Express, Alberto Menache of Sony Imageworks pushes the envelope on the amount of motion capture work in a movie.

Alberto Menache of Sony Imageworks is enthusiastic about his work as senior CG supervisor on The Polar Express. “We are really pushing the envelope of what can be captured. We have multiple stages where we are capturing data with almost 80 cameras at a time. It is incredible. On one set we were tracking bodies and faces together, in 360 degrees. This is something that has never been done before.”

Set visitors would be startled by the look of the production. “All the actors were walking around in color-coded spandex suits. We had the wardrobe department dealing with the spandex suits and the body markers, and we had the make up department dealing with face markers. The actors would show up at 5:30 in the morning and go to make up to be fitted with face markers, and then go to wardrobe where they got their spandex and body markers. The make up and wardrobe people were trained to know where the face and body markers had to be. Not only that, they were trained to check between shots that all the markers were still in the right positions.

“The shooting ran like a real, live-action movie. The cameras are 1,000 line digital cameras that have a light ring around the lens, and the light ring shines red light onto the markers that are covered in Scotchbrite, so then the camera receives the reflection back. What the software does is extract everything that is not highly reflected, and it does some image processing on the frames. You really only need two or three cameras to see a marker to show this; the reason why you want a lot of cameras is redundancy, to create a fully 3D figure from any angle. This is the state of the art in motion capture systems today.

In the future we will be able to track — in realtime — the actors and the environment and all the props on location, which we can’t do now because all the optical systems are too sensitive to lighting. If you light your set with 10K lights, the current systems stop looking at the markers. That’s why we do motion capture in a studio in most cases. But in the future, we will be doing it on location. There is some developing technology that will allow us to track without the need of markers. We will be able to collect data throughout the whole shoot without worrying about it; it will be tied to the time code, and we will be able to use it later.”

Tim Alexander (left) of ILM covered all different angles and light conditions for the backgrounds for this bluescreen work of Viggo Mortensen running on top of a wall in Hidalgo. © 2004 Touchstone Pictures. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.

Previs Innovations
Meanwhile, Industrial Light & Magic’s Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor on Disney’s Hidalgo, used his ingenuity to find ways of creating preliminary composites while shooting the film. “We were in Morocco and I had my Power Book with me and a digital still camera. I would take stills of locations where we planned to shoot our plates, or at the location where they were shooting that day. I would then take those digital photos back to the hotel room with video from the video tap. The video assist used miniDV, so I just borrowed the deck and plugged it right into my Mac. I imported the footage into Final Cut Pro, and then composited the shots, sticking them together on the computer using Combustion. When we went to nightlies and I could show the images I created to [director] Joe Johnston, so he could buy off on a location, or see how a composite might be going together.