What is motion capture film? All you need to know before watching ‘Adipurush’

Hyderabad: Prabhas and Saif Ali Khan’s ‘Adipurush’ will hit the screens on 16 June. The teaser of the film was unveiled a few months ago and received flak for the VFX work that failed in impressing the audience. Keeping this in mind, the makers reworked the film and released a new trailer recently and it looked much better. But not many know that ‘Adipurush’ is a motion capture film.

Well, here is what you need to know about motion capture before watching ‘Adipurush.’

The world of cinema will always keep evolving. There will be no end to this landscape. Throughout history, cinema kept making advances and we have witnessed countless numbers of technological advances. When it comes to the topic of motion capture, it is simply called a mo-cap which is a technology that records the movement of people or objects. The data is captured and transferred to a computer programme in a virtual environment.

This cutting-edge technology has become popular in recent years and the use of 3D characters also came into the picture. Motion capture sessions first involve recording the movements. The animation data will then be mapped to a 3D model which will enable it to perform the actions that were captured. Apart from movies, we can also use this technology in video games, health, sports, military, etc.

Famous motion capture characters

Thanos from ‘Avengers: The Endgame’

Smaug from ‘The Hobbit: The desolation of Smaug’

Caesar from ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’

History of motion capture

The history of motion capture goes way back to 1878 when English photographer Eadweard Muybridge made a series of photos showing a horse in motion. In 1915, American animator Max Fleischer went on to create cartoons and invented Rotoscoping which added realism to the moment of characters.

Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ released in 1937 became the first film to use a rotoscope. In the 1990s, mo-cap became an integral part of video games as well as movies. In 2009, Canadian filmmaker James Cameroon’s ‘Avatar’ used new virtual camera systems to take motion capture in the film to the next level.

Components of motion

Mo-cap suits record movements. A person has to wear a mo-cap suit which collects the motion data and transforms it into the software. Head-mounted cameras are also one of the most important mo-cap components.

The three goals of the motion capture system are to sense motion, process the sensor data, and store the processed data.