ASFF: Industrial Light and Magic

At the beginning of November I decided to go a festival in York called Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF), where one of the most famous VFX studios where giving a masterclass in visual effects and exploring new technology in films. I went because I thought that it would be good research for my dissertation but it turned out that it wasn't because the speaker wasn't VFX supervisor Julian Foddy and so the other person who stepped in from ILM didn't know mush about particle effects in 3D software simulations.

However, there was a lot of talk in motion capture and how they used it in the new Star Wars film 'The Force Awakens' and other films like the ninja turtles film. This was good for me because I am producing my final film for uni using motion capture so I got some great insight into what different softwares I could use for motion capture and which softwares are better at capturing the performance rather than capturing the features.

My favourite part of the talk was when the speaker was explaining how ILM created the motion capture for the character Maz Kanata. ILM used a system called 'Medusa Performance Capture' developed by Disney researchers in Zurich, and how it works in conjunction with an actor's performance to create a seemingly impossible character. The Medusa Performance Capture system consists of a mobile rig of cameras and lighting coupled together with proprietary software that can reconstruct actor's faces in full motion, without using the traditional motion capture dots. The system delivers high resolution 3D faces, with the ability to track individual pores and wrinkles over time, providing very realistic facial geometry that is ideal for creating digital doubles for visual effects and computer games (Medusa.disneyresearch.com).