Weta wins ‘Nobel Prize of cinema’
Weta Digital has won an early Oscar for its development of FACETS, and before you ask what the heck that is, the hint is in the first four letters. Luca Fascione talks to Hannah McKee about this groundbreaking technology.
Remember seeing Avatar and wondering how on earth they managed to make computer-made aliens still resemble actors like Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana?
Or how detailed and realistic Tintin’s facial expressions were?
What you were seeing was the magic of FACETS, a technology developed by Miramar’s visual effects company Weta Digital, which won at the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards last week.
In the world of visual effects, it’s about as big as it gets, Weta Digital’s Luca Fascione says.
‘‘It’s effectively almost the Nobel Prize of cinema.’’
FACETS began its early days in about 2006 when Weta Digital, fresh from signing on for Avatar, was looking for a better way to film faces than motion capture was providing.
Motion capture is the technology where actors wear tight suits with markers for computers to pick up body movement, made famous by Andy Serkis’ performance as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.
When shooting King Kong (2005), for which Serkis also performed the motion capture work, filming the the body and face were two separate processes.
‘‘Andy would do the body, and then on a completely different day, maybe a month later, he would sit in a chair and try to keep his head as still as possible and just do the face. It was terrible,’’ Fascione says.
‘‘It’s extremely hard to do, and indeed Andy is one of the few people in the world who could pull this off convincingly, it’s that hard.’’
With Avatar, a film which required several motion-capture characters, Weta knew it needed to up its game.
‘‘There are many scenes in Avatar in which you see maybe four, six, or eight people acting in the same shot.
‘‘This whole thing of, ‘we’re doing the body one day, and then we’ll sit everybody on chairs one by one and do the face on a different day’, was just nowhere near possible in terms of scheduling and getting the movie done in a time that made sense.’’
So over the course of about eight months, they developed FACETS.
It became one of the first reliable systems to demonstrate accurate facial tracking from an actor-mounted camera, combined with rig-based solving, in a large scale production.
The technology made the likes of Tintin possible, as well as the new Planet of the Apes franchise, and The Hobbit trilogy.
Now, Weta use an evolved version of FACETS technology on almost all motion-capture projects.
Fascione accepted the award, along with former Weta Digital employees J.P Lewis and Iain Matthews, but said a big team were responsible for making FACETS happen.
‘‘Joe Letteri [Senior VFX Supervisor] and Dejan Momcilovic [Head of Motion Capture] entrusted us with the project, they gave us the time and resources to make it happen and provided us with inspiration and courage to stay true to our path, to push boundaries, and keep moving forwards.
‘‘This continues over the years and we’re very grateful for that.’’
Weta Digital also said the system would not exist without the help of Shane Cooper, Nebojsa Dragosavac, and Goran Milic.
Fascione said Weta Digital was always looking at how cinema technology could be improved.
‘‘Weta has a very strong tradition of technology advancement and innovation, and Joe pushes us really, really hard for that.
‘‘But the thing is, he provides us with an environment in which we can go and do large things, which is the great thing, he wants us to get better.’’
Weta Digital recently won a Bafta award for its work on Disney’s The Jungle Book, for which it also won two Visual Effects Society Awards, and is up for an Oscar on February 26.