Gather around, boys and girls. I'm going to tell you how you can do 'motion capture' without the motion capture technology!
In a previous post about the 3D-animated film GI Joe: Valor vs. Venom, produced for Hasbro by Reel FX Creative Studios, I talked about the time constraints involved in producing an 88-minute, 3D-animated film (reduced ultimately down to 77 minutes for whatever reason) in just under a year. I showed you the 'pretty' finished storyboards of the security guard being attacked by the floating Cobra machines, and I talked about how the rest of the storyboards weren't as pretty, or finished-looking.
These storyboards here (in animatic form) demonstrate what happens when the time constraints become exponentially tighter and tighter.
Reel FX's application development team had created a proprietary production management pipeline tool called INSIGHT that manages their production pipeline in 'real time', allowing their clients visibility and transparency to production and costs at any stage of the production. In this program, you could easily see every version of each stage of production.
As the storyboards were completed in their various rough-to-finished stages, the frames were input individually into INSIGHT. Those frames were then made into animatics, to be synced up with sound & voice for timing. Since we were on such an incredibly tight deadline, everyone was going at such an all-out fast pace, especially in the storyboarding. Valor vs. Venom producer Will Meugniot pitched in to storyboard several key scenes, and the amazing Kerry Gammill worked at a deliberate pace to produce some very beautiful storyboards.
I storyboarded about 75% of the movie & served as Storyboard Supervisor, in addition to having spent a full month doing a first draft of storyboards for the whole film before full production started. One of the biggest challenges I had in this film was to storyboard as sophisticated and exciting group of ninja fight scenes as I could present within the limited timeframe and budget that we had to work with. I wanted to show more of the mechanics of Snake Eyes' and Storm Shadow's martial arts abilities in these scenes.
One obvious way to do this with today's animation technology is with motion capture (or motion tracking, or mocap) the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. This animation data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as the actor. A performer wears markers near each joint to identify the motion by the positions or angles between the markers.
What was even more obvious was that we just didn't have the budget to do this whatsoever.
But then I had an idea. What if I was able to create a 'low-tech' version of motion capture? I heard someone at Reel FX mention that they had a friend who was a martial arts expert, and it got me thinking about how to set this proposal up.
After I storyboarded the first draft all the ninja fight scenes, I hired an amazing martial artist & stunt man named Ilram Choi (who has gone on to do stunt work for movies such as Thor, Avatar, Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Last Airbender, and you may have seen his work as the leaping & bounding stunt-double for John Cho's Sulu in JJ Abrams' Star Trek). Ilram and his other martial arts friend (whose name I cannot remember) spent the day with me at a local gymnastics center to film their live-action reenactments and interpretations of my first draft storyboards.
We had dressed both martial artists in white leotard body stockings. I took a huge magic marker and drew circles on their chests, legs, knees, shoulders, elbows & backs. These circles were to serve as the mapping markers to identify the motion by the positions or angles of their movements, as reference for the animators to interpret as they completed Ilram & friend's final performance in digital form.
Afterward, I took this filmed reference and used it to re-storyboard all the ninja fight scenes in as much detail as I could. I would incorporate all of the movements that Ilram & friend interpreted for us as painstakingly as possible, in order to make sure that the animators could literally go through the animatics frame by frame for guidance for the ninja's body movements. This is where things got very difficult in the schedule, as I was also having to process all the other storyboards from Will Meugniot & Kerry Gammill, supervise Scott Youtsey's able storyboard cleanup work (which kept me from going insane at one point during production), while still occasionally being called upon to work on some of Reel FX's commercial storyboards.
This was the stage at which the schedule was so tight, I was putting in 14+ hour days, producing at times as much as 250-300 frames a day. This certainly sounds absurd and ridiculous, but after all the prep work I described above, I knew what needed to be done. It was just a matter of doing the very best I could to just finish the storyboards in time to be put into animatic form, so animation assignments could be handed out to keep the production rolling along. To accomplish this, there was no way I could have drawn the frames more detailed.
One distinct advantage of working not only on a 3D-animated project, but certainly on an internal project like Valor vs. Venom, was that (unlike 2D storyboards) I didn't have to worry about every belt buckle and costume detail needing to being precisely drawn. The 3D models were already built & rigged, and ready to go to animation. All I had to do was provide good storytelling and composition. This guerrilla-type of animation process would certainly NOT work as well in most other animation pipeline structures. But we had a job to do in the timeframe we were given, so we had to be innovative.
It made everyone swoon with envy to think of what it would be like to work on a production such as Shrek, or Monster House, or any Pixar film, with their really big budgets and their wonderfully extended deadlines. But with the budget, resources & timeframe we had to work with, in many ways it was like a massive group-sprint to the finished line, with everyone carrying Toyotas on their backs.
No matter what, the bottom line in productions like this one... especially in productions like this one, is you need a group of the most dedicated hard-working people who are passionate enough to do the very best they can under the most restricted, truncated schedules ever, who believed beyond reasoning that they could conquer anything in the world.
The people at Reel FX, and those others who worked on this project were those kind of people.
