Movie Magic

Reported May 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- A character's movement can look very real in movies, but animators admit it is hard to make the faces look as expressive as human faces. Animators are now working hard on new technologies to make it almost impossible to tell the difference between cartoons and real-life. Ken Pearce, a computer scientist with Mova Contour, admits, "We recognized that facial animation is really one of the last big challenges of computer animation."

Steve Perlman, the inventor and president of Mova Contour, is taking on the animation challenge. His new technology, called Contour, captures facial movements of actors and turns them into very realistic, animated humans. His goal is to make his computer-generated characters indistinguishable from real people. He paints glow-in-the-dark makeup over actor's faces in order to capture striking and subtle facial details from muscles, wrinkles and expressions that human faces make.

After the makeup is applied, the actors go into a studio where lights flicker on and off at speeds too fast for the human eye to notice. In the dark, cameras snap digital images of the glowing face. Using computers, the images are then edited -- inserting fake eyes and teeth where makeup can't be applied. Perlman explains, "When we have humans brought into a computer-generated world, it gives us the flexibility to create any world we want."

The technology is catching on quickly; video game companies want the technology to make more realistic characters, and motion picture companies have orders in to start creating real-life animated worlds. The new reality capture technology is being used in for the upcoming film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in which Brad Pitt plays a character who ages in reverse! The movie is scheduled for release in May 2008.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. IEEE-USA
Washington, DC 20036-5104
202-785-0017
http://www.ieee.org
ieeeusa@ieee.org

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