I cried during watching Benjamin Button–I really did. I’m not ashamed to say it. The story pulled on some heart strings, seeing as I was the curious kid who preferred spending time with my elders and listening to their stories while bathing in their wisdom. As I got older I start acting like a ‘kid.’ For example in the third grade, while students read Goosebumps I read the book Congo. Now I read books about NLP and all sorts of kid like stuff. Michael Crichton along with John Grisham were my favorite authors until my teenage years. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary Great Gatsby is a classic that I owe the author a hand shake for creating. As you may know, the film, Benjamin Button is based on a Fitzgerald short story of the same name.
Decades later Benjamin Button wins an Oscar for best visual effects and the advertising industry is ready ready to use the techniques in their ads. Don’t believe me?
The first thing to know: After the initial shots of the animatronic infant Button, the next 52 minutes of Pitt do not contain any actual Brad Pitt — it’s animation (until the real Pitt appears in makeup on the tugboat bound for Russia. A total of 325 shots of animation. Visual-effects shops Hydraulx and Asylum also contributed many elements to the film).
Fincher shot the film using small actors wearing blue hoods. Makeup artist Rick Baker created painstakingly detailed maquettes (silicone, plastic and hair models of Pitt’s face) that represented the actor at ages 60, 70 and 80, and Digital Domain (DD) digitized the maquettes. Visual-effects supervisor Eric Barba and character supervisor Steve Preeg turned to what’s known as FACS (Facial Action Coding System, a body of research that categorizes the full set of universal human expressions) as a starting point for capturing Pitt’s head’s performance. DD used the Mova Contour system to capture Pitt performing the gamut of facial expressions. “When we first looked at doing this movie in 2004, we had something in our original R&D plan that was not dissimilar to what they built,” says Barba, who accepted DD’s Oscar at the show. “When they presented their system we looked at each other like, ‘They did it.’”
DD is working on projects that will advance the tech used on Button. “It’ll be difficult to do a less realistic character now,” says DD Exec VP-Production Ed Ulbrich.
And yes, you will see the technology used in commercials. “With computer-based visuals there’s a belief that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, money and resources,” says Ulbrich. “In advertising there’s just never enough. It’s a big advantage for our advertising clients to have tools available to them that would otherwise be cost- and time-prohibitive to develop for a single spot or campaign.”
Source: Adage.com
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