Blades of Glory: A CG Ice Capades
Will Ferrell may not know a Lutz from a flutz, and Jon Heder is unlikely to pull off a perfect salchow in competition. But Rainmaker's facial performance capture techniques make it possible for both actors to look like they're carving up the ice for real in the new DreamWorks/Paramount comedy Blades of Glory (which opened March 30).
Key to film's success was making sure the audience believes at all times that Ferrell and Heder were on the ice executing moves that take real skaters years to learn, let alone master. Greenscreens and editing tricks wouldn't cut it, leading directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck to take on Mark Breakspear of Rainmaker as their visual effects supervisor.
"We wanted to show Will Ferrell skating in the frame, full frame, skating all the way around and then doing a jump and landing and see him act and see him be Will Ferrell," says Breakspear. Rainmaker started off with a test to see if their techniques would work, and ended up developing a proprietary system that used facial performance capture to create 3D digital faces that could be placed on the body of the doubles who did the actual skating, often replacing the entire head. "That way, Will Ferrell could skate in any angle in any scene," he says.
Not Cheap, But Affordable The process used high-resolution motion capture to record actors' facial expressions to create accurate faces to replace those of the doubles who perform the actual skating. (Skater Chad Brennan doubled for Ferrell, and Patrick Hancock for Heder.) Breakspear suggests the directors knew immediately that this was the right way to go even though the process was untested.
"I think it's the performance capture that makes people a little nervous," Breakspear adds. "You're putting a lot of trust in the visual effects crew to make sure that the joke doesn't get lost in the process."
The process went through six months of R&D, during which the process completely evolved twice before it was finalized. The first step was to create very accurate models of the actors' faces. They used plaster cast molds to create clay models of the actors' faces. They took them to XYZ RGB, which scanned the models at a resolution of 50 million polygons per face.
Breakspear says perhaps the most significant aspect of the process is that it's inexpensive enough for "90%" of films to afford. "This kind of process has really only been available to people making movies with really limitless budgets, because the technology has always been so extreme and cutting edge and new," he says. "I'm not saying it's cheap, I'm saying it's out of the stratosphere and into everyone's potential."
Anatomy Lessons Taking an early edit of the movie, they put the actors into their makeup and added the dots. They were then seated in a rig that used mirrors and three HD cameras and one film camera set at specific angles to capture the data from every point. The actors then did their performances, doing multiple takes with the director so they had as many choices later on as to which to use. Breakspear says the cameras recorded both the texture of their faces, which were lighted very flatly, as well as the position of all the reference points.
Rainmaker had the actors make crazy expressions and analyzed in detail how their faces move. The work involved figuring out how each actor's muscles work under the skin and setting limits to how far they could move in any one direction. From this, they determined between 120 and 150 key points that must be recorded to accurately capture the performance, centered around the eyes, cheeks, neck and forehead. With the points set, reference dots were added to each actor's face in exactly the same spots.
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