Moving Picture Co. (MPC) was victorious at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards Monday night for its work on VIRTUAL HISTORY: THE SECRET PLOT TO KILL HITLER in the category for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Graphic and Artistic Design.
Jim Radford, MPC's creative head of 3D, Commercials and TV, picked up the award in New York.
The acclaimed Tiger Aspect doc for the Discovery Channel transformed the faces of actors into exact replicas of Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin.
The process MPC used to re-create the political leaders involved the following main stages:
First, plaster casts were made of the actors heads. A sculptor then used these as a base upon which to fashion realistic faces of the historical figures. Once the faces resembled the leaders at that time of the war, the busts were laser-scanned in order to create digital copies in the computer. The faces were then extracted from the heads and textured.
During the live-action shoot, the actors wore specially designed rigs with markers, which allowed for the subsequent tracking of their heads in the footage, and the replacement of their faces with the CG versions.
After this, the actors repeated their lines in a facial MoCap session. Their facial movement (dialogue and expressions) was recorded and processed, and then applied to the CG faces, bringing them to life. The fully-textured digital faces were lit to match the on-set lighting conditions, and then composited into the live-action footage.
Once the team was satisfied with the re-created leaders, digital grade and damage effects were added to the shots. In order to emulate authentic archive material, the team researched the properties of different film stocks of that period, and also created a probable life-story of this exposed film, from the 1940s up to the present day. Using this knowledge, American, German and British looks were created, each displaying different color slants and propensity to damage.
London-based MPC (www.moving-picture.com) is working on the following visual effects projects: Warner Bros Pictures HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE directed by Mike Newell, Danny Boyles SUNSHINE, Wolfgang Petersens POSEIDON and Ron Howards THE DA VINCI CODE. The team recently completed vfx for Tim Burtons CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
