CAMERA collaborated with Aardman on a BBC virtual reality documentary which allows the viewer to step into the shoes of Anna and her sister Lauren to discover how their lives are changed after Anna suffers a head injury from being hit by a car. Viewers can experience the documentary from multiple points of view, exploring Anna’s fragmented memories and piecing together the story of what happened and follow Anna’s journey of rehabilitation.
Researchers at CAMERA worked closely with the animators at Aardman using motion capture technology to make the movement of the characters more realistic. In particular, they used the latest research methods in facial animation to analyse the 3D movement of the actor’s face and transfer it onto the face of the animated character.
Professor Darren Cosker, Director of CAMERA, led the research. He explained: “One actor played the parts of both identical twins for the documentary. We performed a 3D scan of the actor’s face and built an animated model from this. We then used a mixture of different research methods to analyse the fine movements of the actor’s face, such as her smile and eyebrow movements. Each movement of the actor’s face was assigned values which were then transferred to the model of the character’s face. This method is much easier for the animators to edit and tweak movements rather than building a new animated face from scratch.”