The special effects firms transforming the film industry

Under the guidance of VFX supervisor Tim Webber, the company worked closely with director Alfonso Cuaron to bring the tale of two stranded astronauts to the screen. Originally conceived as a small, intimate film with practical effects, Webber believed that the difficulty of representing gravity in space, or the relative lack of it, could best be overcome through digital technology. The end result is a film that is about 80% composed of digital shots. Each frame took around 50 hours to render fully and if the entire film had been rendered using a single CPU processor then it would have taken about 7,000 years. As performance capture has advanced over the past decade so has the quest to make a realistic human CGI face. Rather than doing away with the actor, the process actually works in conjunction with their performance, tracing and capturing the movements of their face. This information is then fed back into the software to give as realistic a digital performance as possible. One of the most recent products in this field is the Vicon Cara. Its makers claim that the system is the world's first, out-of-the-box, 3D facial motion capture system. The light-weight helmet is made up of four HD cameras which record their movement and which allow the performer to act without their view being obscured. While the tech still has some way to go before it can create a truly believable human CGI performance, it has reached a stage where human performances can be altered by visual effects artists afterwards, albeit in subtle fashion. Phil Elderfield of Vicon points out that: "You can start with the true performance of the day but you can also tweak it a little bit if you want to - you can embellish it or you can play it down, you can emphasis or de-emphasis certain things and by re-creating a [filmed] world inside a computer that flexibility exists." Details also here