I am no Cinema buff – but do read and write a lot of Cricket
matches and its trivia. Recently, the
famous film Avatar was aired on TV and I occasioned to see most of it. It was complex science fiction of James
Cameron set on the story of humans mining precious mineral unobtanium on
Pandora, a lush habitable moon in Alpha
Centauri – there were genetically engineered Navi human hybrid bodies and there
was the usual love story !
When I was in school, the film
Apporva Raagangal was much spoken of – a film of K Balachandar dwelling on
controversial relationship between people with wide age gaps. It was a film where Rajnikanth debuted in a
negative role. After a brief phase of
such antagonistic characters, he rose to become an established actor and gained
idol status – of the recent past, a hype surrounds his every move !
In tinseldom, they innovate reasons for celebrations – film
running 4 weeks !; 50 days; 100 days; 100 shows – to the recent wisdom of song
recording, release of audio, making of audio, preview and what not ? – still an
advertisement that ‘progressing
rapidly’ is perhaps
another new !!
As usual there is much hype about “Kochadaiyaan” – the new
venture of Rajni, to be directed by Soundarya R. Ashwin and written by K. S.
Ravikumar. The film, is reported to be shot with motion capture in
3D, will have cinematography handled by Rajiv Menon. In the advertisement
released in all prominent dailies today [6th Feb 12] it claims to be
“India ’s
first performance capture photorealistic film.”. Sure more people will be writing on
Rajnikanth playing a long-haired, eighth century Pandya king known for his
legendary valour.
The motion capture is reportedly an animation technique used by
Steven Spielberg for The Adventures of Tintin. The producers of Kochadaiyaan
call it “performance capture”. In motion
capture, the actors wear body suits with reflective magnetic markers which will
plot their movements and expressions through several digital cameras and impart
them to animated characters using high-end computers and software. This
technique makes animation close to natural and captures even the subtle
expressions and movements of body parts as one saw in Avatar or Tintin. I am
not too sure whether the technology or adaptation of dance sequence in Sankar
film ‘Jeans’ in which Aiswarya Rai would dance with skeleton - shown as morphed by sensors to represent
movements by another actor is one of motion tracking ?
Read that Motion capture,
motion tracking, or mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording
movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. They are used in varied fields including
military. In filmmaking, it refers to recording actions of human actors, and
using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer
animation. When it includes face and fingers or captures subtle expressions, it
is often referred to as performance capture.
In the film Avtaar, there was the system for lighting massive areas like
Pandora's jungle, and an improved method
of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve
the face capturing, actors wore individually made skull caps fitted with a tiny
camera positioned in front of the actors' faces; the information collected
about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. A
technically challenging scene was near the end of the film when the
computer-generated Neytiri held the live action Jake in human form, and
attention was given to the details of the shadows and reflected light between
them.
There have been some great films in the Hollywood using revolutionary computer
graphics and Avtaar, Lord of Rings, Matrix would all sure rank amongst them –
and perhaps the Star War series set the tone for all these. Understand that in earlier times, they used
to manipulate setting strategic frames and making computer interpolate in a
process known as keyframing. In contrast,
the motion capture uses live action – a real performer acts out the scene as if
they were the character to be animated. That
motion is recorded and applied to animated character.
In Cine-field, most action is un-real – great fight scenes are
enacted by stuntmen masking and duping
for the real hero and this is a different type of hero duping for the animated
character, perhaps !!
With regards – S. Sampathkumar .
cineme, cinema, cine - MGR, Sivaji, NTR, Rajkumar ellarume famous aanathu ithele thaan.. tamilaga makkal padam paarthu mayangum muttalgal - vaiyapuri
ReplyDeleteSuperstar rajinikanth is back with his new upcoming film Kochadaiyaan with the bollywood beauty deepika padukone.The stills were rocking.We r waiting for the film
ReplyDeleteFor online booking click here
Kochadaiyaan online booking