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Jungle Book which was pre-lit, the lighting was pre-designed but the actor wasn’t being motion captured. So there’s all these movies out there which have used components of what we did and we just basically jammed them all together with the goal of bringing the actor’s souls to the dolls for 46 minutes of the movie without ever dipping into the uncanny valley. I think this is the first time that it has been achieved on this scale which I am particularly proud of. “When the uncanny valley isn’t there then the audiences just focus on watching characters and the actors perform, that’s what I’ve heard from people who have watched this movie. I even heard that when people watch the doll scenes that they forget that they’re even dolls. It’s great that people
aren’t talking about the thing that could have been the film’s biggest problem.” FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS This film has moved the world of mocap on, something that hasn’t been done for decades. But what does the VFX world require from the purely photographic world to move it on even further? “Cameras in general have been getting stunningly better at a crazy pace. We’re already getting all kinds of data off the cameras to help us. What I’m excited for in the future of cameras is products that not only give us data about what was done, how something was shot, but do things like actually sense the depth in a scene and give us real-time camera tracks right out
of the camera using optical tracking and gyroscopic data and things like that. “Certain technologies out there are getting close to being able to do that. If camera manufacturers can deliver a sense of what the camera is doing in the world in addition to the data they provide already, that would be amazingly beneficial. Also depth information; I would like to never use a blue screen again, and there are companies working towards that with AI and machine learning to look at imagery and be able to rotoscope something out of the middle of a shot by just pointing at it. It senses that it’s an object and separates it from the background. An increased awareness not just of what a camera is doing but what is it seeing is very exciting.
FEBRUARY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 33
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