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What if we do it the other way around? What if we make digital dolls and glue the actors faces on those? So, how do you do that...?
resulted in me saying ‘no’ – so I said ‘yes’, and Steve told me that Bob was anxious to meet me and show me some camera tests that had been done. I flew down to have lunch with Bob and talk about the movie. “Before Steve left the conversation, I did ask how Bob found me and chose me for the movie. He said that Bob’s kids watched The Flash and he had noticed my work. From that he chased me down to see what I was up to.” For Kim, this whole episode was a re-affirmation that the Hollywood dream is alive and well – all you have to do is keep working at it and someone will notice. “I nearly quit The Flash after the second season, but my agent advised me to keep going; ironically it was during the third season that Bob noticed my work.” TOWARDS THE VALLEY Kim was told upfront that the movie would
road with films like The Polar Express and Beowulf , when he just about invented the art. What they had found was that there was a certain amount of the audience that had an emotional disconnect from the characters because they were fully computer generated, and the subtleties of human emotions created by the many muscles around your mouth and eyes are almost impossible to recreate. Bob wanted to avoid going down the uncanny valley yet again. “Then someone said, ‘what if we do it the other way around? What if we make digital dolls and glue the actors faces on to those?’. So, how do you do that? Do you do motion capture and then facial arrays,
use a large element of motion capture for the movie, but not the methodology. “We shot a load of camera tests to decide what that methodology would be, the first that the VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie and Bob tried was the idea of just shooting actors in costume and then turning them into dolls or cladding them as dolls in visual effects. What they found from that was you couldn’t convincingly create plasticity out of a real human because your body just doesn’t move the same way, with the same restrictions that a plastic doll has with the joints and the sockets. “Bob didn’t want to motion capture from the start as he had been down that
FEBRUARY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 23
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