You know what I learned today? That Jim Henson’s amazing creatures from “Where The Wild Things Are” got a little help from CG. Now don’t worry, they didn’t go all Jar Jar and just use these incredible suits for eye line and then replace everything else. Actually they used computer graphics for what it’s really good for. Digital augmentation. Which is a fancy way of saying 3D warping. This was done to match the lip sync of the voice actors, and get a wider range of expression than what could be achieved with just animatronics. A great lesson for future filmmakers on how to use the tried and true old analogue techniques and marry them with the new fangled digital world.
I hope you’re surprised by this too, because honestly I had no idea that Framestore had done this work! If you read this blog often you’ll know that this is the types of VFX I love. That ones where you’re completely unaware of the computer’s presence because A. the artist used the tool intelligently, and B. it was expertly done.
Read more by following the link below. And if you’ve seen this film already, let me know what you thought in the comments below! I’m hopefully going to check it out this weekend and would love to hear what you all thought of it.
LINK: Getting Wild About Facial Animation
They tried a lot of techniques before realizing that the best approach would be limited facial animation enhancement whenever they needed lip-synch. In other words, strictly for the movement of the face, they only animated the eyes, lips, teeth and tongue.
And the faces in Wild Things were brought to life at London-based Framestore primarily using a new twist on an old technique known as “sequence projection” or “projection mapping,” often used to create talking animals. For Wild Things, however, it had to be taken to a new technical and artistic level. Character suit performances were filmed with static faces. The faces or heads were tracked in 3D and a CG articulated head was animated on top to achieve the appropriate performance to match suit and dialogue.