Breathing Life Into CG Effects: An Overview of Motion Capture in Films
Have you marvelled at Gollum and Smaug in The Hobbit, wondered about Davy Jones's tentacled head in The Pirates of the Caribbean, felt the Hulk's anger in The Avengers, or been awed by the Na'vi in Avatar? If you said yes to any or all congratulations, because you have experienced an inkling of the magic that is possible through motion capture. Called 'Mo-cap' in short, this technology was developed as a way to automate a popular technique that was used in landmark films like 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or 1978's The Lord of the Rings. In those days, to speed up the process of traditional animation, artists would draw over the motion of actors from a projection of live-action footage to produce the final animated footage. Needless to say, it was a lengthy and arduous process: movement was first traced for main or 'key' poses (which came to be called keyframes), following which the flow of action in intermediate frames would be filled in.
During the 1980s, there were several developments in biomechanics, which led to such devices being used in conjunction with computers to produce characters and animation like some stunt