Latest news with #motioncapture
RNZ News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Training next generation filmmakers in Wellywood
arts movies 2:30 pm today This week I put on a suit. No ordinary suit. A motion capture suit, in the studios of the Victoria University of Wellington Miramar Creative Centre. It's next door to the likes of Weta Digital and Park Road Post, enabling a new generation of filmmakers to learn within the cutting edge environment that gave Wellywood its nickname. I have to say - moving on the performance capture stage, I'm not exactly Andy-Serkis-as-Gollum level - but its quite the out-of-body experience. I got to be a fearsome Genghis Khan on a grand opera house stage. Miramar Creative Centre was established by Jamie Selkirk, co Founder of Weta and the Roxy Cinema and Oscar-winning editor of Lord of the Rings. The centre is one of a number of initiatives around the country looking to grow film education industry. For example, the University of Canterbury is now partnering with Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animation to provide stop motion animation education through its academy.. Yet, the film industry is also facing uncertain, challenging times. Joining Culture 101: Miramar Creative Centre director Raqi Syed, a lecturer, and visual effects and lighting director. She worked with Disney Animation on classics like Tangled and, with Weta Digital, Avatar, Planet of the Apes and the Hobbit films. With her is Jun Huang, a recent masters graduate at Miramar who has established his own animation studio Dozeface. You can watch Dozeface's 'Weekly bedtime stories for overstimulated minds' on Youtube.
Forbes
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Motorica Raises $5.4 Million To Replace Mocap With Generative AI
Every action a character can take must be animated beforehand. Motion capture has long been one of the most expensive and labor-intensive parts of AAA game development. From booking studio time to cleaning data, the process can take weeks and cost studios tens of millions of dollars for a AAA game. A Stockholm-based startup, Motorica, wants to change that. Emerging from stealth today with €5 million ($5.4 million) in seed funding, the company offers a generative AI platform that dramatically accelerates character animation, allowing studios to bypass traditional mocap without sacrificing quality or control. Founder Willem Demmers. 'Studios today spend millions creating realistic animation—and still often only fully animate one character,' said CEO Willem Demmers. 'With our tech, they can animate a hundred.' Demmers, a serial founder in creative tech, partnered with generative AI researcher Gustav Henter and mocap veteran Simon Alexanderson to bring the company's 2019 research prototype to market. The result is what Motorica calls 'motion synthesis': a transformer-based AI model trained on thousands of hours of proprietary motion capture, capable of generating high-fidelity character animation at scale. According to the company, studios using the platform have reported animation workflows running up to 200 times faster than traditional mocap pipelines, with cost reductions exceeding 90 percent. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder David Peterson, partner at Angular Ventures, which led the round, said, 'We invested in Motorica because they're building foundational technology for the next wave of digital experiences—from games and virtual worlds to robotics and XR. Their platform solves a massive production bottleneck.' That bottleneck is well known in the industry. Red Dead Redemption 2 reportedly required more than 300,000 unique animations and cost an estimated $300 million to develop. Developers commonly cite animation as one of the most time-consuming and expensive parts of production. For large open-world games, animation alone can represent 10 to 30 percent of the total budget. Mocap the old fashioned way. Veteran animator Maxi Keller, whose credits include The Last of Us Part II and Call of Duty: WWII, called Motorica 'the best tool out there for locomotion and motion matching.' He emphasized the platform's ability to give creators precise control over speed, acceleration, and expressive nuance, key requirements in gameplay animation. Demmers is careful to position the tool as augmentative rather than disruptive. 'We're not replacing animators or actors,' he said. 'We're replacing their chores.' According to the company, traditional workflows allocate 70 percent of animation time to technical tasks like keyframing and filler cycles. Motorica flips that ratio, allowing artists to focus on narrative, character, and creative polish. The funding round includes participation from Luminar Ventures and angel investors in the gaming space, including founders of major Swedish studios Avalon and Fatshark. The company, which now has 21 employees—over half of them AI researchers—plans to expand rapidly. Roadmap priorities include SDKs for deeper engine integration, new datasets for stylized and non-humanoid motion, and strategic partnerships with virtual production studios and simulation platforms.
Fast Company
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Video game voice actors have been on strike for nearly a year. They finally have deal
Video game voice actors and motion capture artists could be headed back to work soon. SAG-AFTRA and major video game companies have announced a tentative contract agreement, 11 months after union members began a work stoppage. Artificial intelligence was at the heart of the dispute. 'Patience and persistence has resulted in a deal that puts in place the necessary A.I. guardrails that defend performers' livelihoods in the A.I. age, alongside other important gains,' said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for the union in a statement. Terms of the agreement were not immediately released. SAG-AFTRA said it would offer details with ratification materials to members. While a tentative deal is in place, members will continue to strike the major video game companies until the final terms are agreed upon, the union said. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher seemed to stop short of declaring victory, saying 'The needle has been moved forward and we are much better off than before,' but later added planning would begin for the next negotiation immediately saying 'every contract is a work in progress.' Voice and performance artists have been on strike since July 2024 against Activision Productions, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts Productions, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, WB Games, Take 2 Productions, Blindlight, and Formosa Interactive. The strike followed 18 months of negotiations. Generative AI was at the heart of the dispute, as the union maintained there were no contractual provisions that prevented game companies from training AI to reproduce an actor's voice or likeness without informed consent. (Game publishers countered that their AI proposal contained strong protections for performers, requiring prior consent and fair pay when duplicating their performances.) The union worked out side-deals with over 130 game developers early in the strike, which let work continue on many titles. Industry analysts say the settlement is a good development for the industry, noting that many games are increasing the use of live actors in development (such as Norman Reedus taking a lead role in Death Stranding and the growing number of celebrities who appear in Fortnite. 'I think these artists are essential and were relatively unappreciated until executive producers saw how much worse AI solutions were,' says Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. 'There is a tendency for Hollywood to get this and for video game developers to assume they can replace anyone with software, but it's clear from the settlement that the game publishers agreed that these actors are essential.' The strike over AI protections was the second SAG-AFTRA work-stoppage the video game industry has faced in the past decade. In 2016-2017, voice actors and publishers battled over the issue of residual payments. That strike lasted for 340 days, resulting in a three-year contract, though many voice actors complained the agreement was toothless and the union had ceded too much ground. The agreement called for 'bonus pay' based on the number of sessions a performer worked on each game, but did not follow the traditional residual model. The tentative agreement over AI demands comes just over a month after video game companies gave their ' best and last' offer to SAG-AFTRA. The two parties began negotiating on a new agreement in October 2022.
Gizmodo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Fantastic Four: First Steps' Replaced the Thing On-Set With a Rock Named Jennifer
I hope she's in the credits, at least. Marvel Studios films are known to use unconventional methods for their character stand-ins and The Fantastic Four: First Steps aims to top the methods that came before. Actor Sean Gunn acted as a stand-in for Bradley Cooper as Guardians of the Galaxy's Rocket Raccoon throughout various productions, but in a fun turn of events for the Matt Shakman-helmed feature, star Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays superhero Ben Grimm, got a different sort of companion to help bring the Thing to life. Pulling a lot of the weight was 'Jennifer': a rock. 'We went out to the desert and found a rock that looked exactly how we thought the Thing should look,' Shakman told Empire Magazine, 'and we filmed it in every single shot that the Thing appears in in the movie, under every lighting environment.' The practical stand-in—no insight was given into the name choice, in case you're also wondering about that—helped CG animators with the reference needed for coloring and lighting that would be required to support Moss-Bachrach's motion-capture performance. It also helped ensure the character's final form on screen wouldn't be too cartoony. Moss-Bachrach told the magazine, 'It's a little bit heady to think about all the hundreds of people that are helping animate this character. I just had faith that they would make my performance so much cooler. I'm very, very happy with the way Ben looks.' While Jennifer helped with the character's craggy appearance, the actor also did a deeper dive into Grimm's interior too. 'He's a Lower East Side guy,' the actor explained about his connection as a NY native, same as the character's creator Jack Kirby, who he kept in mind while creating his take on Ben. 'A lot of this character was a homage to his father, and that, to me, is very meaningful.' The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in theaters July 25.
