South Park - Creative COW Magazine

the page that you want, and hopefully it’s in the right
place.
Once you don’t have to have those notebooks
stacked in shelves, it becomes a downhill rush to automate
all metadata coming to the editors. It’s a small
step from there to attach the metadata to the picture
files themselves, and to preserve that information as
it passes from machine to machine in post.
FROM BATMAN TO ARTICULATE DEMANDS
Dave: The Tim Burton Batman movies were where I
first used my hand-created data capture system. In
the earliest days of live action motion control and
data capture, we had a shot that started in a macro
closeup, then boomed up to 60 feet in the sky. The
question everyone asked was, how in the world are
we ever going to focus this thing?
We ended up attaching an encoder to the crane
24
QUANTUM OF SOLACE
In one sequence, James Bond and Camille (Daniel Craig
and Olga Kurylenko) are tossed from an airplane with only one
parachute between them. To create the illusion, the actors and
their doubles were trained to free fall inside an ex-military vertical
wind tunnel, six stories tall with a wind machine blowing at 150
MPH. “We took out all the windows and and some of the walls and
painted it white to suit our purposes,” says Dave, “and we strung
lights everywhere — in the bottom, all around the walls.
“We put in 8 Dalsa Origin 4K cameras and 7 Sony F900Rs, all
of them locked in place. We also had an Arriflex 435, which was
mounted on a Steadicam and flown in freefall alongside the
actors.
“The heart of the challenge was to synchronize all of those
cameras, so that running with 90 degree shutters, they all have the
same effective center shutter opening interval. And it had to be
very, very precise.
“The reason that we worked with
so many digital cameras is because we
could use the the images as data from
those pictures to create a data cloud,
to recreate the bodies of the actors in
any given position. We knew the focal
length and the characteristics of every
lens, so we solved for every pixel from
every camera, for its position in space
throughout the entire synchronized
shot.
“And what you end up with is a 3D
model of those people, in that space, for
the entire length of that shot. A double
negative was taken of that data and
solved for the position of the actors,
who were then regenerated as CGI
characters and inserted into real aerial
photographic backgrounds from the
film’s locations.
“It’s pretty astounding.”
arm to give us a numerical value for the position of the
camera at any given azimuth. We then wrote a lookup
table as an “if/then” equation. If the arm has boomed
up 6 feet, then the focus should be set at 6 feet. If the
arm has boomed up 12 feet, then the focus should be
set at 12 feet.
I’m oversimplifying, but it’s easy to put a motor on
a focuser. Once you write that lookup table, and you
swing the arm, and the arm data drives the focuser,
there’s no mistake to be made. You have the numbers.
It’s just an equation.
It turns out that you can record anything that you
can measure. So for “Batman Forever” I built a little kit,
and Panavision, to their credit, built me three encoded
PanaHeads that had differential encoders on primary
axles, recording pan and tilt, and converting that to
degrees, and saving that data.
Then I put a little puck wheel on a dolly. As it rolls,
it can measure tracking distance usually within greater
precision than16ths of an inch. For
swinging the arm of a crane, the same
thing: you put an azimuth encoder
to the chain of a Titan crane or you
put inclinometer encoders on the
side of the arm. When you read how
many degrees of tilt the arm is going
through, you know exactly what
height the crane is at.
So we were able to record all
these axes of movement, unobtrusively.
There was a little extra wiring
on the dolly that we ran through a
nice little cable harness, on down to
an RS 422 line connected to a computer
sitting off to the side.
Tim: How did we get from your hand-
Creative COW Magazine — September / October 2008
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