DEFINITION February 2019.pdf

CAPTURE STORY | WELCOME TO MARWEN

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS Kevin Baillie, VFX supervisor on Welcome to Marwen, explains how he brought the dolls to life

WORDS JULIAN M ITCHELL / PICTURES METHOD STUDIOS

K evin Baillie works for Method Studios out of Santa Monica and was the VFX supervisor of Welcome to Marwen . He has also worked with director Robert Zemeckis on a number of his films but started his career as a pre-vis artist on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace when he was just 18. With the new movie, Kevin and his team have moved the motion capture world on from the uncanny valley inhabitants who repel us on a subconscious level. “The original idea was to shoot actors on oversized stages and then augment them with digital doll joints. Robert is such a fan of his actors and their performances that he wanted to make sure that they came through at full fidelity in the final film. But

the tests that we did to that effect looked really terrible, they were totally horrifying. So we were stuck as we couldn’t do that and we couldn’t do traditional motion capture because that technology isn’t good enough for the 46 minutes worth of human doll performance to the screen. “So we had that eureka moment of thinking that instead of putting digital doll parts on Steve [Carell] and the rest of the actors we could put Steve parts on the digital doll using his eyes and mouth. The process of getting to the realisation probably took about a year.”

RIGHT The metamorphosis of actor Steve Carell from a nervous mocap artist to a fully formed Cap’n Hogie doll.

30 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9

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