Motion capture has provided Hollywood with some of the most memorable characters to ever be augmented onto the silver screen. From Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films to Navi in Avatar, actors have suited up and had their movements beamed into computers and imagined landscapes.
The technique is not just used in cinema and later this year video game franchises like Fifa 17, Battlefield and Gears of War 4 will all continue to adopt motion capture to create the most life-like avatars thumbs can control.
With motion capture more visible and accessible than ever before, IBTimes UK visited the Framestore studio in Soho, London, to see how Vicon technology – a video converter – is used to create virtual reality.
Before we got got into our motion capture suit, Richard Graham, CaptureLab Studio manager, explained the benefits of the technique. The first benefit of motion capture is that you are actually capturing someones performance and youre doing that in real time.
So for directors and actors theres direct correlation between that and just doing normal filming. It allows them to kind of work on the characters and the storytelling in real time and for them to see on various monitors around what things are going to look like in the final result and help them make decisions about what is working and what is not rather than go through a long iterative process which is what you do in animation.
