9/1/2023 0 Comments Motion capture![]() ![]() What if we could help a student actually walk within a building they just designed?” ![]() More and more programmes and students were talking to us about it and we started thinking bigger. At first, it felt like we were developing a module for acting students but then we realised that was too small scale. We were thinking about what we could develop for students. They developed a quicker and refined way to show participants what the technology could do to the point that during the filming process, the setting up and integration process was so quick that people could see their virtual character on screen right away.Ĭonnoll adds: “We kept going deeper and deeper. The more that Connoll and Jake experimented with the technology, the more they were able to start to build more of a character and an immersive environment on screen. However, his work was suddenly obsolete when director Steven Spielberg realised he could create the dinosaurs in computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the film, which lead to the historic line from Tippett, ‘I’ve just become extinct.’ Whilst prepping Jurassic Park, Tippett began designing the dinosaur’s movements through his tried-and-tested go motion technique. The Phil Tippett story is well-known in the industry as an example of how technology can completely alter a deep-rooted industry approach to filmmaking. I was reminded by Phil Tippett realising his work was obsolete when Jurassic Park (1993) was being filmed.” “I’m a visual effects artist by trade and once the capabilities of the technology became clear, I could see that the writing was on the wall and this was the future of production. Suddenly, I had a PhD student who was looking at doing a dance performance in motion capture and I was thinking that we could make it work for them based on the leap in technology. The OptiTrack Motive system captures the movement of the person in a mocap suit through cameras with high intensity infrared light and that real-time tracking data is then processed into the Unreal Engine which creates the world and displays the character’s movement within that world.Ĭonnell said: “It just blew my mind. The engine is compatible with OpiTrack and allows a more realistic and detailed environment with characters displaying greater lifelike movement. Unreal Engine 5 is a state-of-the-art computer graphics game engine created by Epic Games that came out in May 2020. ![]() Unreal 5 then came out and suddenly the opportunities to us were endless.” “This was also around the time that The Mandalorian came out and everyone in the industry was suddenly talking about how virtual production was going to be a game changer and that everyone was going to be using it. “The opportunity came for us to look into the technology more and start to figure out more of its capabilities and what we could do with it,” Connoll said. Fast forward to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and opportunity struck for BA Media and Performance creative technical demonstrators Connoll Pavey and Jake Louden to really get stuck in. The University of Salford’s School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology acquired mocap technology in 2017 in the form of the OptiTrack Motive system and initally developed an asset for students where they could get into a mocap suit and see themselves in a virtual space, albeit in a skeleton form. As extended realities are becoming more and more part of our everyday viewing experience, an increase in the availability of the technology to universities is also helping students tap into the unbounded potential that it can provide for their studies. From its earliest iterations in Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), to the box office-conquering James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) to helping unleash the raw emotional performance of its actors in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013), motion capture technology (or mocap) is establishing a new performance medium in how productions are made, whether its film, video games or television. It is becoming increasingly clear that motion capture technology is here to stay. ![]()
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