![]() ![]() ![]() The virtual production process that we developed helped us ensure that the practical lighting on the actors looked great when expanded out to illuminate the entire world. “In a way, the process was like lighting previs. Kim Miles used an iPad with custom controls to pre-design all the lighting before we shot a single frame. Fortunately, we were able to map out all the lighting ahead of time - we built a real-time set for every mocapped scene and optimised it for the Unreal Engine. “Because the dolls’ faces were going to be a fusion of the actors’ actual performances and CG animation, the actors were in full make up during the mocap shoot and scenes were lit for the Alexa 65, just as you would light a practical set. To drive the dolls’ faces and the CG cameras, beauty-lit footage was shot on the Alexa 65 and their facial performances were also recorded with motion capture. Motion capture was the basis for their body performances. Animating the characters and finalising shots required a proprietary workflow combining motion capture, real and CG photography, CG animation and compositing. Kevin and Atomic Fiction then needed to develop a way of blending the actors’ performances with the dolls. Atomic Fiction then reversed the process by creating fully rigged and detailed CG versions matching their physical counterparts exactly, down to every texture and element. Miniature Effects Supervisor Dave Asling and his team of dollmaking artists at Creation Consultants then digitally re-engineered the sculpts, 3D printed, moulded, pressure-cast, hand-painted and hand-finished them. Each of the story’s 17 doll characters started as a 3D scan of its associated actor, and was adapted into doll form and digitally sculpted by Atomic Fiction. This approach, of course, meant building the physical dolls first. We fused lit live-action footage of actor Steve Carell’s facial performance with the underlying doll structure - and it worked!” “That failed horribly, but it inspired us to try the opposite – instead of sticking CG parts on actors, we’d try augmenting the CG dolls with actor parts. “Traditional motion capture wasn’t an option for these faces, so our original idea was to shoot the actors in costume and augment them with digital doll joints,” said Kevin. He had worked with Kevin before on movies including ‘The Walk’, ‘Flight’ and ‘Allied’. Robert Zemeckis brought the script to Kevin for the first time in 2013, mainly concerned that the actors playing the roles of the dolls would lack the means to express themselves effectively. Method Studios, which has since then acquired Atomic Fiction, completed some of the compositing and environmental work for the film. Atomic Fiction handled 509 of those shots, creating the digital Marwen world and the CG doll versions of 17 characters.įramestore handled shots for the Marwen opening sequence in which Hogie crash-lands a P-40 aircraft and suffers a Nazi attack. Achieving this world for the audience required 655 VFX shots, all captured through physical or virtual ARRI Alexa 65 cameras. In the final film, it occupies 46 minutes of screen time. The director Robert Zemeckis wanted the audience to travel to Marwen, inside Mark’s imagination, and experience it from that point of view. He then photographs the dolls engaaged in dramatic scenarios. Ticket to MarwenĪiming to heal himself through artistic imagination, he creates a complete, detailed model town at 1:6 scale, which he calls Marwen and populates with doll characters that correspond to people from his life, including himself as Cap’n Hogie. Following this incident, as well as permanent physical injuries, he suffers from post traumatic stress disorder that has destroyed much of his memory of his earlier life. ‘Welcome to Marwen’ is based on the true story of Mark Hogancamp, who was attacked and severely beaten up by right-wing thugs who took exception to his fondness for wearing women’s shoes. Kevin and his team earned a VES Awards nomination for their work. The project involved developing a proprietary technique for facial animation, and a huge amount of control over their CG cameras, resulting in highly creative looks and expressive points of view inside 3D imagery. Kevin Baillie, production VFX Supervisor, talks here about the effects and animation created for ‘Welcome to Marwen’, in which artists at Atomic Fiction (now Method Studios) realised the director’s vision of transporting the audience into the main character’s model town, populated by a lively cast of plastic dolls. ![]()
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