The mocap’d Robert Zemeckis film featured pioneering work by Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Sure, a lot of people remember The Polar Express because of the Uncanny Valley. But the film (celebrating its 20th anniversary right now) was arguably one of the big game changers in the way it approached motion capture and virtual cinematography, thanks to the efforts of director Robert Zemeckis, visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston and the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks.
The technical artistry of the film is packaged up in an extremely insightful behind the scenes document publicly available from Imageworks’ website.
It was presented as a course at SIGGRAPH 2005 and titled ‘From Mocap to Movie: The Polar Express’, presented by Rob Bredow, Albert Hastings, David Schaub, Daniel Kramer and Rob Engle.
Inside you’ll find a wealth of information about the motion capture process, animation, virtual cinematography, effects, lighting, stereo and more…even the original optical flow test for the film is covered.
I think it’s a fascinating read, and an important one in the history of motion capture and virtual production. Remember, the film came out in 2004; Avatar (which took performance capture much futher, of course, came out in 2009).
Over the years, SIGGRAPH courses have been an invaluable resource for discovering the ‘history’ of tools and techniques at visual effects studios. I love that this resource for The Polar Express exists.
