The Future of Motion Capture
In order to give the stand-in a guide for his movements, an interesting superimposition system was set up, which amounts to a sort of realtime previsualization. “In addition to Caleb’s photography, we also shot Jim’s body with three commonly synced digital cameras. When these images were played back in the studio, the stand-in could see the playback, which was running on a mix, through the video tap on the camera shooting himself. The stand-in could see his own body on top of Jim’s — he basically saw himself matted on top of Jim. We looped the playback, because we found if he could go through the motion, and do it repeatedly, by the time we got the seventh or eighth take, he was very, very close to matching Jim’s movements.”
A Veteran Speaks Henry Turner is a writer and award-winning filmmaker, whose Lovecraft-inspired horror feature, Wilbur Whateley, won top awards at the Chicago International Film Festival. His writing on film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L’ecran Fantastique, Variety and many other publications. A longtime film festival executive, he has programmed for the Slamdance Film Festival, and currently heads FilmTraffick L.A.
The great cinematographer Allen Daviau, whose latest work will be seen in Van Helsing, maintains that while previs is a useful tool, it does not eliminate spontaneity on location. “Planning something like Van Helsing, you naturally have very detailed planning. We had animatics that showed what was to happen in a scene, such as when Dracula’s brides come flying into a village. We were working with some very complex shooting systems like the Cablecam, which takes a lot of rigging to set up. With Cablecam you can literally make the camera fly, and it is a wonderful device, but a big deal to set up. By having the previs everybody can see what needs to be done. But you always do alterations during production, because you discover something better in the course of shooting.”
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