Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 8, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Detailed, lifelike models and plenty of manual work: at the 2008 Academy Awards, “The Golden Compass” won the award for “Best Visual Effects”.
The Konica Minolta VI-910 laser scanner played a key role in creating the impressive, lifelike computer graphics that gave the heroic armoured polar bears their Oscar-winning dynamic appearance. Handmade models and real skeletons were scanned to obtain precise, high-resolution 3D representations of the originals, complete with their colour textures. The results enabled the deceptively realistic blend of 3D animation and real images seen in the film.
A 200-strong team at Framestore CFC, Europe’s largest creative studio for visual effects and computer animation, invested fifteen months in the animations for “The Golden Compass”. On February 24, 2008, the New Line Cinema production received the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
“The creation of such realistic, computer-generated bears does not begin at the computer,” explains Sean Varney, who, as Head of Film Set Metrology at Framestore CFC, is responsible for digitising film sets, actors and props. “For every gesture of an armoured bear, for example, to look realistic, from walking to the individual reflections of the armour’s metal plates on the polar bear’s fur, all the fictional character’s movements must be derived from its real anatomy. Our work therefore begins not at the PC, but with the production of physical models and their transfer into the computer in 3D. And that is exactly what we need a good 3D scanner system for.”
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For the individual characters in the film, three-dimensional fibreglass models had to be created in a variety of different poses, based on real photographs and films, and then digitised. “To capture the individual models in 3D, we used Konica Minolta’s VI-910 laser scanner, which we had already used, for example, to create special effects for films such as ‘Harry Potter’ or TV series such as ‘Primeval – Return of the Prehistoric Monsters’,” Sean Varney continues.
“With its three interchangeable telephoto, medium and wide-angle lenses, the portable VI-910 makes high-resolution 3D scans flexible for all models from miniature to life-size, which is a major advantage of this model. It also needs only a few seconds for contactless scanning of the surface structure along with its colour values. On a live film set, that is practically a ‘lifesaver’. For post-processing, we used Easy-Align software, which reliably combines the captures from the individual perspectives into a 3D model.”
“The Golden Compass”, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, will be available from April 25, 2008, as a single DVD and as a Special Edition with a bonus DVD. And of course, Framestore CFC continues to use the proven technology: current film projects with special effects include “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” and “James Bond 007 – Quantum of Solace”.
