“On a project like this, you have to think down the road of potentially extrapolating characters and environments into game assets, a television series—and flowing the CG creative elements between mediums. By building scenes in a game engine out of the gates, our options are much broader—the need to down res files from broadcast to game for example will be mitigated,” explained Brian Rausch, vice president of production, HOM.

CG assets for the short were built using Autodesk Maya, Pixologic ZBrush and Autodesk MotionBuilder was used to retarget animation and navigate environments during motion capture sessions. HOM captured stunts and poses for each of the 30 Guardian superheroes at their 26,000 square feet of motion capture stages equipped with more than 200 Vicon T160 cameras over nine days of mo-cap shooting. The project was completed over six months with a team of creatives that started at 10 and grew to 200 at the project’s peak.

The Guardian Project animated short at the NHL All-Star Game capped off a big hockey weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina that kicked off with NHL Fan Fair at the Raleigh Convention Center. In addition to the film, Vicon House of Moves designed a virtual interactive experience for The Guardian Project booth at NHL Fan Fair. The experience allows fans to don virtual reality goggles and immerse themselves into a computer-generated environment in which they get up close and personal with some of the newly introduced Guardian superheroes as they perform their signature moves.

About Vicon House of Moves
Vicon House of Moves has been the go-to studio for film, television, game and commercial creatives for over 10 years and has recently worked on projects for clients including Microsoft, Activision, EA, Bandai, Rockstar Games, Capcom, THQ, Naughty Dog Studios, SCEA, Bungie and others. In addition to the HOM main stage, the 26,000 square-foot facility is also home to a full performance capture volume capable of recording simultaneous high-quality audio with a capture session without any interfering background noise.

About Vicon
Academy Award-winning Vicon is the world’s largest supplier of precision motion tracking systems, and match moving software. It serves customers in the CG animation industry, film, visual effects, computer games, and broadcast television, as well as engineering and life science industries. Vicon operates in four offices worldwide, including its Los Angeles-based Entertainment headquarters: a 26,000 square-foot facility equipped with three performance capture stages for Vicon's service company House of Moves.

Vicon is a subsidiary of OMG (Oxford Metrics Group - LSE: OMG), plc., a group of technology companies that produces image-understanding solutions for the Entertainment, Defense, Life Science and Engineering markets. Other holdings include: 2d3, a manufacturer of specialized image understanding software for defense applications; Yotta DCL our highways surveying business in the UK; and Yotta MVS, a leading US provider of data collection services for the assessment of property taxation.

Vicon and OMG global clients include: Life Science leaders University of Pennsylvania, the VA Hospitals, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Titleist Golf, The Andrews Institute; Engineering industry leaders Ford, BMW, Airbus, Lockheed, Pratt-Whitney, NASA, Caterpillar, International Truck, and Toyota; and Entertainment companies Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Computer Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, Sega, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Vivendi, Electronic Arts, Square Enix and many others.

For more information about OMG and its subsidiaries, visit www.omg3d.com, www.vicon.com, www.vicon.com/boujou, www.2d3.com, www.yottadcl.com, or www.yottamvs.com.