Motion-capture replaced Supermarionation to bring the characters alive for the 21st century.

It was Oxford-based Vicon Motion Systems, the Academy Award-winning developer of motion-capture systems, that swooped in to help Anderson and company with their delivery delays. David Lowe, business development manager at Vicon, explains, “It was through several contacts of mine that I managed to get in front of Gerry, Mark Sherwood, the line producer on the show, and David Lane, who is one of the directors, and Ron Thornton, the vfx supervisor. We opened up a discussion with them and asked how the production was going and what they were trying to improve. During the first four episodes, they were doing two days of motion-capture every other week. The whole team would go down to a studio about 30 miles away from them and shoot the motion-capture they thought they wanted to shoot and then go back to the office. They would usually have to wait a week to two weeks for that data to come back to them, so there was a big gap between the delivery and a very short timeline as to how much motion-capture they could get done.

“We went in with the premise of them buying their own system, so they could capture five days a week and the director would have the freedom to really explore the system and see what it could do. We also turned around the delivery of the motion-capture data. With Vicon IQ, we were able to pipeline data straight onto the set and it would almost be production ready by the end of the day. The director could have some rough renders out of Maya by the end of the day. It gave them the ability to have a lot more artistic control over how the system was operated and how the actors could interact with one another and with props. One of the major things we were able to deliver and enable them to do was have a huge number of props on the set and swap things in and out. That meant instead of doing 50-60% of the show animation with motion-capture, they could now do it almost 100%. On average, they would spend three days on set and then another one or two days of pick-up shots after they watched the dailies.”

Setting up the production was scarier than this Mysteron-controlled killing machine.

The New Captain Scarlet also became the first television series to utilize Vicon’s MX40 four-million-pixel optical motion capture cameras, which were built into the production’s Pinewood studio. Lowe says getting Anderson and company their brand new studio setup was a huge challenge. “It was a pretty scary time,” Lowe laughs. “They put an awful lot of demands on the team here. They basically said, ‘We shoot once every two weeks and our next shoot is on this date here, so we are going to buy a system today and we need it delivered in two weeks and set up and ready for us to walk in and use. You can help us run it the first time, and then gradually hand it over to us so we can run the system.’ From day one, they were shooting for their production. There were no training sessions, there was no vetting-in time for the system; we had to work out of the box, which is pretty much a motion-capture first.”

In turn, Lowe says Anderson’s team was invaluable with their feedback about the system. “They were a huge help throughout the entire running of the show, helping evolve the software particularly. They were pushing the envelope of the system all the time: capturing 10 people at once, a 16-camera system and capturing hands. They were using a lot of the advanced gap filling tools and enabled the system to work in heavily occlusive situations without any loss of quality to the final output. They were instrumental in helping us achieve that. Everybody is continually pushing the boundaries. It’s kind of scary for us, but it’s also a lot of fun,” Lowe chuckles.

For his part, Anderson adds, “We signed out the stage at Pinewood and installed all our own equipment and from then on, in my words, it was a complete miracle. Yes, we had the odd spot of bother because we were doing it for the first time, but generally speaking the material came through on time. Here and there we had to do a few fixes but, by and large, it worked superbly.” Anderson says the creative and software decisions were actually trickier on the production and had to go through vast learning curves before they achieved what they needed. “I know that a number of companies around the world were playing around with CGI for a television series and I know that some of these companies tended to use whoever was on the crew that was available [for motion-capture performance]. We could very quickly see that motion-capture captures the body movements so accurately that we could tell just from the walk that we were dealing with amateurs.