Motion Capture Rehersal

On thursday (1/11/12) myself the dancers, The choreographer, Producer and 3D artists went to the motion capture studios to reherse what the dancers had come up with so far, in the motion capture suits.

The main things that we needed to sort out were;

• The suits, wether or not they could easily dance and move around in them.
• The rigging
• Multi character filming
• Seeing how it looked in motion capture
• If everyone was pleased with using the software and materials ready for the actual filming.

                                                                                                                                                                  

The suits, Wether or not they could easily dance and move around in them.

Generally the suits fitted the dancers and they could easily move around. The only problem with the 'dress rehersal' was the balls pinpointed around the suit so that the cameras could pick them up. Because we are the first production group to actually use the studio the balls werent sewn onto the suits. But due to use being there they were able to find were the balls needed to be placeed ready to be attached. So during the rehersal they were stuck on via velcro......Which worked...but to some extent. As the dancers were dancing, often the balls would either fall off or decide to re attach themselves onto the other dancer. If this happend they had to stop dancing and go into the position 'T' so that we could stop the filming and re attach them....Its safe to say this happend a fair bit. But we made a game of it =]

Currently the suits have been sent off ready for the balls to be attached securely ready for the actual filming.

 

 

The rigging.

this was a quick process once it got started, we all pitched in to help re-adjust the balls on the suits so that the rigging linked up to form the figure on screen.
Again we had the odd problem when the balls decided to flee away but once we got used to the suits and had a sharp eye to see were about on the body it fell it was sorted withing seconds.

 

 

With the last three points that i previously mentioned the use of motion capture really worked and could easily be used for both the 2D and 3D. It was usefull that we could move the camera around and re adjust the angles and close ups to find the perfect shots.

 

The use of multi characters was usefull for the studio itself as it hadnt used more than one character yet and a lot was learned from out session there. The two figures moved well together and was really influecial.

 

After the whole rehersal which in all took 4 1/2 hours everyone was excited to try more and we know now what we should prepare for and expect. the dancers left with a better understanding as to what they could and couldnt do due to the restrictions of the suits and space, as the 'stage' was quite small.

We had plenty of footage to work with but we chose one good footage of the female solo and 2 from the duo sequence.

 

We have also done some filming inwhich we will create a video diary of how it all went which will be edited and posted soon!