DEVELOPING SOLOGRAMS

HOW GIANT ADS WORKED AS A NEW FORM OF HOLOGRAM IN GHOST IN THE SHELL

Technology has evolved to the point where 3D volumetric human beings can be projected onto city streets and made as big as skyscrapers. Ash Thorpe developed the original ideas for the ‘solograms’, and in post-production the art department at MPC used movie shots to further the concepts for what amounted to 60 different ads lit by the surrounding environment.

“I got in touch with Dayton Taylor at Digital Air, who designs bullet-time camera rigs, and asked him if we could create a dome of video cameras to capture the actor’s movement and run animated photogrammetry on a frame by frame basis,” reveals Ghost in the Shell visual effects supervisor, Guillaume Rocheron. “The challenge is that you can’t just use a Canon 7D or a DSLR because if a camera is a quarter of a frame off, you can’t reconstruct the 3D model. We did a few months of R&D and worked out a perfectly synchronised system that had 80 cameras at 2.5K, which created 24 cyber scans a second to produce a moving model with baked in textures. We processed the ‘voxelation’ to recreate volumetric footage of our actors that was then used to make the advertising,” says Guillaume.