Lucasfilm have developed a system which can take motion capture information from actors in a studio and turn it into a high-quality rendered scene in real time.
Pretty much a fusion of their video game technology applied to movie making.
"We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete" - Kim Libreri, chief technology strategy officer for Lucasfilm.
Their rig can even capture accurate facial expressions....
It's certainly interesting technology, but it's also just one more thing to remove the wonder from movie making.
One of the things that always facinated me was seeing something amazing then wondering how the hell they did that. I would go buy a Starlog magazine and then read up on some ingenious technique they did to create the incredible scene you saw. Now, there's no wonder at all in it. Everything you see is just something drawn on a computer. They've turned every movie into one big cartoon.
The next step is to have a skin tight suit that is also a high def screen so that when you look at the actor you it's like he's wearing a costume... oh wait.
how long before we'll all be able to make movies on our laptops... type up a script, run it through a program, select the actors you want, pick from some scenery and bam, you get a movie out the other end...
sawdusk - how long before we'll all be able to make movies on our laptops... type up a script, run it through a program, select the actors you want, pick from some scenery and bam, you get a movie out the other end...
At some point this will be a free app on our watch phones. 2D movie making will be a quaint hobby as full holographic experiences take over the movie industry.
