Everything about Beowulf is extreme: The legend itself, the old-English bane of high school and college students, which turns humans into gods and heroes. And now, the film, which takes that legend and twists it into an immersive, stereo-3D reality where human-powered animated characters become fallible heroes who fight strangely sympathetic monsters, and slay golden dragons.
Sony Pictures Imageworks created the bawdy epic under Robert Zemeckis’s direction for Warner Bros, which reportedly poured US$70 million into the production. People will make comparisons to 300, a now legendary film about other historical heroes who fight naked battles, but of course, Zemeckis cast Beowulf’s stylized characters from an entirely different mold.
To develop the stylized look of all the characters, Imageworks organized a human look development team. “Their job was to create standards,” says Jerome Chen, visual effects supervisor at Imageworks for the all-CG film. “We needed to bring the characters to a level of realism where they were lifelike enough to make the performance compelling enough to engage you in the story.”
To create the compelling performances, Zemeckis directed all the CG characters by capturing the action of actors on stage. To do this, Imageworks built a 25 x 35-foot stage and surrounded it with 244 Vicon MX40 cameras positioned to capture data from as many as 21 people at a time. “We had a version of Vicon’s Blade software customized for us,” says Demian Gordon, Imageworks’ motion capture supervisor. Capturing Characters
Actors wore markers on their faces, bodies, and hands, and in addition, a device called an EOG captured eye movement. To help the actors deliver a realistic performance, the crew provided costumes made from transparent material so the cameras could see the markers, and filled the stages with markered props. By the end of production, the motion capture crew had captured data from more than 250 props.
