Passion Pictures has just completed a cinematic trailer (click for video) for the opening of the music videogame ‘Rock Band.’  Created by Harmonix, developer of some pretty cool music based games, ‘Rock Band’ is a new platform for music fans and gamers to interact with music, challenging users to master the lead/bass guitar, drums and vocals as solo artists or cooperatively as part of their own band.  Passion Pictures worked on the ‘Rock Band’ cinematic with Ryan Lesser, Art Director, and one of the original game developers at Harmonix.

Passion Pictures built the model and rig for this project, and partnered with Image Metrics to produce the facial animation which needed to be very extreme and expressive in keeping with the music track used for the sequence. Passion and the director wanted to achieve a very stylistic animation even though we were animating a human character. The expressions needed to be exaggerated beyond what most people could achieve, so Image Metrics worked with Passion to do animation tests and iterations of the facial rig to make sure it was up to the challenge. The shoot was then completed in half a day with just one standard camera at Passion's studio. They brought in an actor to lip sync over the music track whilst giving an excellent facial performance (see video example of actor). IM's technology then converted the movements of the actor's face into animation data, and applied it to the Rock Band trailer character. Including feedback from the director and updates to the animation, the animation process was finished in about a week.

Directed by Pete Candeland and with music by legendary rock gods Deep Purple, the trailer pays tribute to the classic rock music video genre.  The animated band thunders through the American desert landscape in a battered old car.  The lead singer casually climbs onto the windscreen to give his performance and the rest of the band follow.  As they progress toward rock stardom they are thrown onto their souped-up tour van.  The van speeds up a narrow mountain road, they take a hairpin bend too fast and both band and van are catapulted into the air.

Executive producer Hugo Sands says, “We were delighted to be a creative partner with Ryan and Harmonix and work on the new Rock Band venture.  We are finding more exciting new opportunities for our directors in games and online applications, and this is a good example.” 

The fully CG film was animated in XSI by an international team at Passion. It was rendered in Mental Ray and composited in After Effects. The characters were modeled with Modo. Passion collaborated with Image Metrics (click for video) to provide facial motion capture data for the lead singer, which was a first for the Passion team.
Director Candeland says, “With every new project we test new technology and new ways of working which is why we decided to experiment with motion capture.”

Passion Pictures maintained complete artistic control over the result which was essential in this case to create the larger than life performance seen in the final trailer. Image Metrics technology turned the video input into over 10,000 parameters of the human face and converted that into animation data. This ensured all of the subtle detail was captured from the actor's performance. How that data is styled and applied to the character is decided by the director. The process is simple, requires no special set up and works within any animation pipeline.

Title:        Rock Band
Client:        Harmonix Music.
Art Director:    Ryan Lesser.

Production Co:    Passion Pictures.
Director:    Pete Candeland.
Storyboard/Design:    Pete Candeland, Rob Valley, Nelson Yokota de Paula Lima.
Producer:    Anna Lord.
CG Line Producer:    Jason Nicholas.
Senior 3D Artists:    Stu Hall, Antoine Moulineau.
CG Previz and Camera:    Wes Coman, Nick Symons.
CG Animation:    Wes Coman, Nick Symons, David Sigrist, Raul Moneris, Chris Welsby.
Character Modeling:    Mario Ucci, Matt Westrup, Nick Savy, Stu Hall.
Rigging:    Daniele Niero.
Environment/Vehicle Modeling:    Ian Brown, Marc Dinocera, Raymond Slattery, Daniel Sweeney, Craig Maden.
3D Artists:    Vincent Thomas, Marc Dinocera, Simon Reeves, Claire Michaud.
VFX Artists:    Elisée Cesarotti, Marc Di Nocera, Nuno Conceicao.
Compositing:    Niamh Lines, Lee Gingold, David Lea.
Matte Painting:    Lukasz Pazera, Max Dennison.
Director's Assistant:    Giles Dill.
Exec Producer:    Hugo Sands.
Software:        XSI, Modo, After Effects, FCP
Motion capture:    Centroid
Lip sync mocap:    Image Metrics.
Music:            “'Highway Star”' Deep Purple.