capturing Everything

Weta Digital’s new motion Capture suit allowed the actors and filmmakers to perform uninhibited

Over the years, Weta Digital has employed various motion capture suits and stereo head-cams to capture characters. For Alita:

Battle Angel, a new custom suit was built that featured embedded marker strands. Although this meant that the marker placements could not be changed, it proved to be a very practical solution during filming since it meant performers, such as actress Rosa Salazar, could be ‘suited up’ very fast.

“On set in Austin, Texas every morning,” details Weta Digital animation supervisor Mike Cozens, “Rosa wore the performance capture suit with the tracking markers on it. There’s an array of capture cameras around wherever the action’s going to take place, as well as witness cameras, which cover the action as Rosa, or other characters, move through this space.

“A lot of the performance capture is happening with liveaction actors, and in environments that are real. Then there are more digital sets where you work in a simpler volume, but even then we tend to build a representation of that digital environment so that characters can interact with the space, and it gives them an environment to perform in.”

Cozens said the intention behind the new capture suit, and Weta Digital’s approach to performance capture in general, was to free up director Robert Rodriguez and the actors to be able to quickly understand the digital character that they’re getting into, and be free to interact with other performers and the environment that they’re in.

“We really wanted to make sure that we were capturing Rosa’s performance full-cloth,” adds Cozens.