STACK #122 Dec 2015

DVD&BD

FEATURE

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The TEENAGE MUTANT NINJATURTLES get a photorealistic makeover in their new 3D adventure. Visual Effects Supervisor Pablo Helman talks about the groundbreaking performance capture technology developed to bring the heroes in a half shell to life. COWABUNGA!

Pablo Helman

“T his was a pretty special project for me,” says ILM Visual Effects Supervisor and Second Unit Director on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , Pablo Helman, “because it’s all about performance and how we get it out of the actors and into the movie. I’m always looking for an original idea in visual effects, and to have teenage turtles that are mutants and ninjas is just really cool! It is very original, and at the same time represented the perfect opportunity for us to develop a system that allows you to see those performances.” The ILM Muse, an advanced facial capture system comprised of

be later manipulated by the animators. “We called it Muse because it inspired the performances,” explains Helman. “It’s a system that was developed specifically for this project precisely because we knew we would have to edit performances, and that was not possible at the time with the technology that was around. So we put two cameras on each

all kinds of commitments on set, because then we had 14 people just dedicated to this, and it also meant that we needed to be on location. So, it was complicated: we had to be on set, capture all that data and then recover it, translate it into a digital asset

and finally re-interpret it to make these turtles into real characters. It took about a year and a half for the system to actually work, but we are really happy with the results. It’s awesome! “We tried all kinds of things,” he continues. “And after consulting with [director] Jonathan Liebesman and [producer] Michael Bay, we decided to come back to a more realistic approach to these characters. Part of it has to do with understanding

face of the actors to interpret their expressions, knowing that we might or might not use it all later. And most importantly, we had to think about what to do

both hardware and software, allows the actor’s performance to be captured on-set or in a special stage, to

with the data from the beginning. That created

Will Arnett and Megan Fox

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