News 2001

MTV Honours

'ROCK DJ' VIDEO WINS BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS AT MTV VMAS
Sept 2001

Carter-White, Audiomotion and Clear Post Production won the MTV Video Music Award for their visual effects work on the Robbie Williams video 'Rock DJ', directed by Vaughan Arnell. Earlier this year the video won the same honour at the Music Video Production Association (MVPA) Awards. Rock DJ also won Best British Video at the 2001 BRIT AWARDS.

Carter Whites' prosthetics work was outstanding and both the concept by production company Godman and the effects by CG house Clear were lauded by commentators for their originality and daring. But it was the motion capture recorded by Audiomotion that tied the whole piece together.

Everyone at Audiomotion is delighted that the video received such a prestigious award and would like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone who was involved.

For more on the Rock DJ shoot, click here

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Horse & Jockey

Ground breaking capture for I-Race
Sept 2001

Vicon, developer of motion capture systems, announced that simultaneous motion capture sessions were held in the UK at Audiomotion and in the USA at Locomotion (Austin, TX) to capture animation data for the world's first 100% computer generated TV channel.

I-Race, a revolutionary horse racing simulation and management game, is due for launch in the second quarter of 2002 as a 24 hour-a-day interactive television channel and internet gaming experience. Created by VIS iTV, a 50/50 joint venture between Telewest, the U.K.'s second biggest cable operator, and VIS entertainment plc, one of Europe's leading games developers, I-Race offers viewers the opportunity to race, buy, train and trade horses and bet on the horse races. Uniquely the channel will allow people who play games to gamble on their game strategy as well as letting people who gamble try and influence the outcome of their bet selection.

Motion capture crews at Audiomotion and Locomotion faced the challenge of capturing the horse and jockey simultaneously in a series of complex interactions.

As Audiomotion's Mick Morris explained, 'The horse and jockey are so closely intertwined for much of the time that one is usually obscuring markers on the other, so it's a constant puzzle for the mocap system to identify which character is which.'

Over a three-day session Audiomotion captured more than two hundred animations. 'We did a whole range of interactions between the jockey, groom and horse, like mounting and dismounting, winning and losing reactions, leading the horse by the bridle and so on.'

Both facilities adapted to meet the special demands of the sessions.

For Audiomotion this meant creating a comfortable environment for the horse inside the capture studio, with an 80-square-meter litter tray filled with sawdust.

Locomotion needed more space to allow the horse and jockey to gallop, so their motion-capture team transferred a 15-camera Vicon 8i from their studio to an indoor rodeo arena. The crew built scaffolding gantries to partially enclose a 60' by 12' capture volume, which the horse and jockey could gallop through. Once the cameras were mounted on the gantries, the crew dug trenches so that the cables could run across the capture space without hindering the horse and rider. Locomotion captured run-cycles of the horse and jockey, as well as the horse loading and then launching from the starting gate.

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Audiomotion Capture Enemy

How Audiomotion and Double Negative Helped Deliver Epic Storytelling With A Cast Of Thousands.
Feb 2001

Some of the most dynamic and spectacular crowd effects ever shot for a movie have been created for the forthcoming epic 'Enemy at the Gates' by Double Negative using motion capture from Audiomotion.

Created by a core effects team of only five artists, the scenes set in the ruins of Stalingrad during the epic WW2 battle feature a cast of thousands of digital extras deployed in computer-generated sets spreading over two miles or more. And the motion data for every extra in the film was captured in a single session at Banbury-based specialists Audiomotion, with just one performer providing all the animation.

Using a Vicon 8 system equipped with 17 cameras, Audiomotion provided Double Negative's effects team with the data for a library of animations for all the action required by the digital extras, running, climbing, ducking, crawling and so on. Using Double Negative's custom crowd control software, effects artist Frederik Sundqvist painted 'scent trails' over the CG scenery for the digital characters to follow. Artificial intelligence routines developed in-house were then used to help the characters adopt and blend animations appropriate to the terrain and situation.

Although an essentially intimate story of individuals duelling under intense pressure, Enemy at the Gates is set against the backdrop of the devastating battle in which more than 2 million people died. For director Jean-Jacques Annaud, VFX director Peter Chiang and Double Negative's Head of CG Paul Franklin it was essential that the tragic scale of the conflict should be convincingly represented in the movie.

Double Negative created a digital model of the whole of Stalingrad, with a vast vista of war-torn buildings stretching over 20 miles into the distance. In the film, even 'blimp' shots of the entire city are filled with moving digital characters. But as Franklin explained, digital characters were also featured extensively close to the camera: 'The motion capture data was so good, that we were able to bring digital extras very close and mix them with real actors without the difference being detectable.'

'There are shots in the movie that I've seen over and over, but I still can't tell which characters are real actors and which are digital,' Franklin added.

'When we were planning the work on Enemy, we knew there would be a huge amount of animation, and we knew we'd need the best data. Audiomotion are a great team and as for the motion capture it just had to be Vicon.' concluded Franklin.

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News 2001

Special effects earn top award...

Capture for ground breaking concept...

Spectacular crowd effects for 'Enemy at the Gates' epic...
 

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