CAMERA were commissioned by Aardman to provide motion capture for the TIGA award winning 11-11: Memories Retold, a story-driven narrative adventure set during World War I. With a unique painted style it delivers an immersive experience unlike anything before.
The Aardman team spent nearly two weeks in the CAMERA Studio over the course of nine individual shoots to get the motion capture data to animate the major characters. The capture sessions were delivered using CAMERA’s Vicon system, and involved two performers, along with a selection of props. For each shoot the CAMERA team would attach 50 passive optical markers to the performer’s motion capture suit. The cameras then track the position of those markers in space to create a skeleton that is used to animate a digital avatar.
Real-time pre-visualisation, or pre-vis, is a method of showing live how the motion data that the performer is generating looks on the character avatar. It uses a pipeline taking the motion data into the game engine Unity where it is applied to the character in real time to give a ‘rough’ version of what of the final outputs will look like. Pre-vis was used during shoots to help the Aardman team direct the performer and make decisions about how the shots should be done. In total CAMERA delivered around 8000 character seconds of body motion capture data for the project.