Sabah Masood gets to grips with motion capture at Centroid

Vanya, Alex and Sabah

Bucks animation student Sabah Masood recently spent a week with Centroid, one of the UK's leading provider of motion capture services, getting to grips with the motion capture pipeline and learning the technical nuts and bolts of the process. We asked Sabah to tell us how it all went, and what we can learn from the professionals.

Friday 4th April is Motion Capture Day at Bucks

On Friday 4th April we'll be testing out our shiny new Motion Capture system at Bucks. The Events Hall in the Gateway building will play host to our latest, biggest and most expensive digital toy, extremely useful not just for animators hoping to capture excellent physical performances but also for students studying sports and motion analysis. On Friday we are welcoming students with some experience of motion capture (and even those with none) to come along and help us get the system to work.

Bucks students visit Shepperton Studios

On wednesday our students at Bucks New University visited Shepperton Studios. Being a movie geek, I couldn't wait to visit the place where classic films like Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, The Day of The Jackal,  Ridley Scott's Alien and Attenborough's Ghandi were filmed. I mean, even empty film studios are full of atmosphere; a place to fill the imagination with dreams of stardust. Shepperton did not let us down.

Motion Capture comes to Bucks

The "T pose"

Last week Motion Capture came to Bucks New University for the first time. The green screen room in the Gateway building played host to our latest, biggest and most expensive digital toy, extremely useful not just for animators hoping to capture excellent physical performances but also for students studying sports and motion analysis, helping to turn physical performances and actions into data that can be analysed, broken down, and used to improve the performance of athletes. It's cutting edge stuff, and it's happening right here at Bucks.

Motion Capture, Animation and Sports

Bucks Motion Capture Animators hard at work

Here at Bucks we're excited by the huge possibilities for animators to work with other departments, such as graphic design, drama, dance and sound design. In short, collaborations with other film-makers, to create truly excellent projects.

Bucks Students visit Pinewood Studios and Centroid - home of Europe's Largest Motion Capture Studio

Yesterday a group of students from Bucks went to visit the Motion Capture studio Centroid, based in Pinewood Studios. Motion Capture, sometimes called "Performance Capture", is an animation technique which captures real-time actor's performances and turns them into digital data which can be used to create animated characters - like the character "Gollum" played by Andy Serkis in The Lord of The Rings.

Bucks and Centroid are pioneering a partnership that will offer Centroid opportunities for research and development, and also give the students a chance to use a leading industry facility for their student films. It's just the kind of thing that universities should be doing - partnering with industry to create a mutually beneficial relationship.

Pinewood Studios - home of 007

Motion Capture comes to Bucks

Animators don't like Motion Capture. We fear it because it threatens us, threatens to replace what we do so carefully and painstakingly and slowly with fast, inexpensive, automated technology. I first heard about it way back in 1987 on the set of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" when it was rumoured that a technology existed whereby a computer could capture an actor's motion and express it instantly as a piece of 3D animation. Well, that'll never catch on, I thought (or hoped, more likely). Phil Nibbelink, one of the most talented animators on The Rabbit, called Motion Capture "the battle cry of the untalented". How we laughed.

Andy Serkis at Comic Con 2011, photographed by Gerald Geronimo