| Rygiel says the challenge for the next two films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy - a challenge he knew about in advance - is to improve the digital armies. Of the massive battle scenes in the prologue to Fellowship of the Ring, he says “we had six weeks to do 20 shots?every time I see it I think ’I wish we had one more week.’“ In the second film, due out at the end of this year, the battle shots are more intricate and complex, and the “camera“ is able to get much closer to the Orcs on the battlefield. By the third film, in which the largest and most complex battle scenes take place, Rygiel is confident that the technology will be ready to take the audience right up close to the antagonists on the battlefield and still make us think they’re real. Synthetic people are also the target for ILM’s Giacoppo. He says the biggest challenge is getting virtual actors to appear “convincing and natural“ alongside real actors. The key, he believes, is faces. “When you move your eyes around, your eyelids move, and your whole face is involved subtly with that movement. The next thing is mouths - you move your mouth and your face is involved. When you’re watching a VFX actor, and their eyes and mouth don’t move naturally, that gives it away.“ As well as the motion dynamics of eyes, he says there is cutting-edge work being done on the lighting of eyes - the way light behaves when it enters an eye, the way it reflects, the way it interacts with the internal structural details of an eye. |
