Session 4: See- Ed Ulbrich

Showed us a film clip from Benjamin Button... Ed helped computer generate Brad Pitt for the FIRST HOUR of the movie (couldn't tell, could ya!)

This project wasn't possible 5 years ago, and animating the human head is the holy grail of rendering.

The vision was to have the same actor play the character throughout the film entirely.

This was a high risk project. The process of creation was a 12 step program

1: admit you have a problem
2: break the problem down (3 areas- age brad pitt (and his little ticks, etc; give him all emotions; place him anywhere in time/space). motion tracking is used to capture is good, but they need far more than what it could give

technology 'stew'

Facial Action Coding System- a way of seeing 70 different facial poses that can be combined in so many ways, we can create the world of a person's emotions. They filmed Brad at all 70 expressions.

Contour camera process of painting face in phosphorescence to gather a kazillion points of data instead of the grid that motion capture points.

He's now unvieling the physical life casts of Brad aged in a variety of ways. Then THESE were scanned for additional data.

Now they needed to combine Brad's performance and match it to the digital information they'd gathered to make the scene.

I wasn't interested in the movie but now I HAAAAVE to see it.

Oh, and for their data gathering they needed to gather lighting info.

The eyes were most important - someone was devoted to Brad's eyes for 2 years then another to his tongue for 9 months (yes we all laughed like junior high school students).

They called this "emotion capture". And it is beautiful. And it only took 150 people 2 years.