FEEDING THE BEAST
Hunger for digital entertainment fuels studio
It’s Wednesday at 10 a.m. and I’m being urged to unleash a malfunctioning, murderous inner-robot rage on an innocent astronaut. The backstory is that daily relations between the two of us are copacetic and collaborative. Now, my robot wants to crush, stomp and kill.
This is harder to do than it sounds — made more difficult due to the fact that this robot hasn’t yet had his coffee.
My opponent is Max Harvey, who works in marketing and communications at the Vancouver Film School. We’re in the Beyond Capture motion-capture studio that shares space in the VFS building. A cavernous, high-ceilinged and blindingly white room, the 32,000-cubic-foot space is state-of-the-art, wired up with 40 specialized cameras feeding into customized computers we aren’t allowed a close look at.
It’s a soundproof, high-tech facility with adjacent rooms holding more than 50,000 props. There is a wardrobe area to outfit anything you might want to digitize for a project, from babies and animals to, yes, even reporters. A workout space featuring a note from a past client proclaims: “Thanks for the abs.”
Obviously, there is an array of couches with a variety of gaming consoles to kick back at, too.
This is the kind of place where the fight scenes in today’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) mega-movies are made. It’s where impossibly successful franchises such as Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption are formed. Beyond Capture is representative of the exploding world of digital entertainment that has made Vancouver a global hub for this sector and interactive industries, including VFX (visual effects) and animation.
The VFX and animation portion of the Hollywood North budget alone is expected to be worth $1 billion this year. That’s a drop in the bucket considering the global video game market is valued at more than US$93 billion, but it’s nothing to sneeze at.
It’s generating well-paying positions in the industry and things are humming. This is what happens when you become a go-to destination for international blockbusters.
“We opened in May of 2017, which makes us quite young, but we are a world-class performance capture stage with an initial investment close to $1.7 million and another $500,000-plus put into the studio since then,” Beyond Capture president Graham Qually said.
“When I say world-class, I’m not just boasting; we’ve had clients in from Japan, Poland, England, France and several places in the United States, which is a really big deal.
To get people up from California or Seattle, where there are so many motion-capture facilities, really proves that we’ve built a reputation around the business.”
Beyond Capture gets its share of the exploding business providing new content to “OTT” (over-thetop) media services such as Amazon Prime, Apple TV Plus, Netflix and many more. Accessed via websites on personal computers and TVS, as well as digital media players and via apps on your mobile devices, streaming media is set to dominate traditional broadcasters and studios.
When one examines the coming reality in the industry, it’s not hard to understand why the first salvos are fired in a war over who gets to reap the consumer rewards when 5G drops.
Major players expected to launch in Canada include the family-oriented Disney+, which arrives Nov. 12 with content from such Mouse Kingdom brands as Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic and Marvel’s MCU. Apple TV Plus is coming with a star-studded list of celebrities involved and Google’s Android TV app library keeps growing.
The New York Times declared Facebook Watch a “serious streaming platform” when there were only a few titles to consider.
Netflix revenue in Canada in 2019 is estimated at US$861 million and growing. According to Business Insider, the country is the third-highest market penetration for the streaming service with 56.3 per cent. You can bet competitors want a piece of that action.
Moving forward into that future, one thing is clear. Space Robot Rampage — my title for the aforementioned robot shoot — will never be a hit. Understanding what goes into making ones that are is fascinating. And, it all begins with the Mo-cap suit.
Variations of these wearable devices that enable cameras to record the wearer’s movements can range from quite basic to wildly complex. Sensor-loaded haptic suits such as the Teslasuit (estimated US$1,500$2,750) use “electro-tactile haptic feedback systems” to provide real-time feedback to immerse you even further into the digital gaming or virtual reality viewing experience. Now that Oculus Rift has proven VR’S potential for entertainment, education and more, personal motion capture is likely to become more available as time passes.
For now, though, it’s the domain of multimillion-dollar studios like Beyond Capture.
I’m kitted up in form-fitted Velcro leotards, which studio tech Vandy Sok then covers with patches placed over all of my main joint points, torso, legs and arms. These are colour-coded for each actor to make it easier for editing later as it can get pretty busy when you have nine or more actors kung-fu fighting.
Sneakers with more of the small reflective balls are added and so is a pair of lens-free glasses dotted with reflective balls to capture head motion. Standing in the middle of the floor, we are told to take a T-form and the initializing process of rendering our bodies into bits and bytes begins. We will return to this T-form time and time again. It’s used as a kind of reset or punctuation between sequences while filming.
Taking your body from a seemingly random series of dots on a monitor into vectored coloured lines that eventually morph into a rudimentary representation of a skeleton is surprisingly quick. Taking that skeleton and superimposing it onto the already-designed giant robot is even quicker.
Then, you get into the stuff that proves why there should be Academy Awards given out to CGI actors such as Andy Serkis and Vancouver’s Karin Konoval for their nuanced and moving work in films such as the Planet of the Apes series. Serkis has been setting the bar since his turn as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, while Konoval’s orangutan Maurice in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes is a marvel to watch.
The same can’t be said of my work in Space Robot Rampage.
Every movement has to correspond to how a mechanoid 21/2 times the size of Harvey’s astronaut would be positioned. My character is giant, if we stand too close together, we bleed into one another’s image. If I don’t keep staring at the floor to mimic being much taller, it looks dumb.
Every movement from advancing forward to ground-shaking stomps has to be rehearsed and blocked out to produce passable results. The haymaker punch I apply to Harvey’s character is delivered while I’m about five feet away from him to match up with the images on screen. It’s hot and sweaty in the suit, my Velcro bits keep sticking to each other and making that ripping sound with every movement.
Qually says that there is definitely a “proven talent pool” that companies like his use for motion-capture work. It’s a growth industry with the explosion of Vfx-heavy movies and games. And it’s also clear that nothing happens quickly when you are working toward topnotch motion capture.
Even the few minutes of Space Robot Rampage take two hours to shoot.
Given how much work there is for talent in motion capture, acting schools are starting to include training modules in the basics of the craft. The better you are at it, the more work comes your way. Those who can get it right quickly are highly sought after. Shoot schedules are long. Budgets can be staggering.
“We’ve worked with over 50 companies over the two years we’ve been around, on some huge titles with one of our biggest projects coming up this March, which has been two years in the making,” Qually said.
“I can’t talk about it yet, but their VO (voice-over) budget alone was over $7 million. We’re starting to see a lot of convergence in the industry too, with film companies using gaming engines for VFX and it’s growing leaps and bounds, with the need to be on the leading edge and finding new ways to solve problems in the future keeping us moving forward.”
It takes a few days for the results of our shoot to be rendered, edited and compiled.
All credit goes to Harvey for embracing his role and also for having to do the majority of the hard work of hitting the landing pads after getting punched out by my robot character. That said, I think I got a bit better by the time my power supply was cut off and my robot self topples backward like space junk. (Sad thing about those abs, though. I didn’t get any on or off screen.)
The director tells me to keep the day job. I couldn’t agree more.
This story is the first in a three-part series looking at aspects of Hollywood North’s VFX, film and TV industries.
Next up: Faces of the industry. From actors to the folks behind the studios, Vancouver is a vibrant and active centre for global talent. sderdeyn@postmedia.com twitter.com/stuartderdeyn