CONCEPT:
Central to Mavis’s journey at USC so far has been her involvement with the USC Marching Band. In the Spirit of Troy, we decided to celebrate her contributions by depicting a typical Game Day morning.
As much as we would all like to be early birds, waking up in the morning (particularly at 6 a.m. for Game Day) is challenging, to say the least, as portrayed by Charlotte in the first video. In this first video, Charlotte hits snooze on her “alarm” multiple times and snuggles back into “bed” before finally checking the time and frantically running out of the “door”.
In the second video, Mavis performs one of the dance routines that the Band presents along the music “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” during Game Day.
PROCESS:
Charlotte’s Original Video – Waking Up Video
Mavis’ Dancing Animation:
Ideation:
While we were first brainstorming our movement, we were concerned about whether the software could capture small changes in movement, such as a hand flick or face twitch. Thus, we decided to ensure the movements we were presenting were big and overexaggerated.
Recording video:
Since the recording quality of our iPhones was high, we decided to simply record our movements using our smartphones. However, we quickly learned, after filming Mavis’s movement in front of a white wall and filming Charlotte’s movement in front of a glass wall, that recording a video against a plain, preferably opaque and white background would render the best motion capture.
We also attempted to ensure that our whole movements were fully filmed and nothing was cut from the frame.
Intriguingly, when we transferred the videos to Rokoko motion capture software, the movements were fully rendered on the mannequin even when we did a pan shot with our camera.
Making motion capture:
At first, we attempted rendering our movements in Plask. However, when rendering Charlotte’s video, we realised that the software captured the movement of the person sitting behind the glass wall that we were filming in front of rather than Charlotte herself.
Instead of refilming the shot, we wanted to experiment with the capabilities of other motion capture software. Thus, we migrated to Rokoko, which was able to fully capture Charlotte’s movements.
Another challenge we encountered was that Charlotte’s rendered mannequin was often twitching even though these minute movements were not apparent in the original video. Further exploration with the mannequin rigging, or perhaps wearing more form-fitting clothes when filming could possibly reduce the effect of twitching.
Conclusion:
In the future, we will experiment with modifying our mannequins in Blender and then importing our video files onto the new mannequins. Additionally, we will adjust the rigging of the mannequin to reduce the amount of shaking in the mannequin’s movement that we experienced in Charlotte’s video.