WAR OF THE WORLDS

When composer and record producer Jeff Wayne was planning the second live tour of his classic album, The War Of The Worlds, which visited Australia, New Zealand and the UK late last year, one of his goals was to produce an improved, ‘photoreal’ performance of the late Welsh legend Sir Richard Burton as ‘The Journalist’ projected as a 3D hologram floating above the stage.

    Nothing like this in live entertainment had been done before anywhere in the world to anyone’s knowledge, and Wayne and fellow producer Damian
Collier turned to digital animation specialist Image Metrics and holographic experts at Digital Video Enterprises.

    Wayne explained: “The role of our Journalist is that of a man in his early thirties. Countless hours were spent scouring through magazine and press images, movie posters and past movies of Richard Burton. Eventually we found two images that between them contained all the iconic characteristics that made Richard so charismatic throughout his life — especially the intensity of his eyes.”

    Patrick Davenport of Image Metrics recalled: “The first step in the process was to find an actor who could both lip-sync to Burton’s original 1976 audio recording [for the album], while at the same time perform the role on camera. Fortunately, there was Irish actor Brian Mallon, who had the uncanny ability to capture the legend’s personality and gravitas.”

    Mallon was filmed at Technicolor Studios in California last April, where he performed all 76 sections of the Burton narrative in just two and a half days. Davenport continued: “Once filming was completed, the next step was to extract Brian’s performance, combine all the facial characteristics of Burton and apply it to a computer generated model. We call this a ‘faceover’.”

    Sculpting Burton’s head on a computer, ready for animation, was the next phase. “One of the coolest things about this project was that we were creating the first computer-generated thespian,” said lead modeller, Cesar Dacol Jr. “This wasn’t for film, this wasn’t for television: this was for the stage! I’ve worked on plenty of major films and TV shows, but this was by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever done!”

    With the look of Burton identified from the chosen images, reproducing all the subtle definitions that made his image unique was achieved. These were meticulously built up digitally, before Image Metrics’ computer vision software technology was applied to ‘drive’ the head and bring the iconic actor ‘back to life’.

    Their team then went back to the film of Mallon’s performance. Animation producer David Barton explained: “Every pixel that’s on Brian’s face that we could monitor or analyse the movement of at that point, gave us so much data that we could extract and use to drive the animation of Richard Burton.”

    A vast team of animators then painstakingly applied all of that information to the computer-generated Burton head. The result was a computer-generated
Burton that mimicked exactly Brian Mallon’s impeccable performance.

    The final stage was to take the model, combine it with the animation, apply all the textures, set the lighting, and in Barton’s phrase: “render it all out until finally, we had… Richard Burton!”

    The effect was breathtaking and, as Damian Collier recalled: “When it all came together, and our production team saw and heard for the first time the opening words of our Journalist, ‘no one would have believed...’, it said it all.”

    EON Reality, one of the world’s leading interactive 3D visual content management and Virtual Reality software providers, integrated and co-managed the photo-realistic animation of Burton that was produced by Image Metrics. Its team also executed the final rendering of the animation, and along with Digital Video Enterprises (DVE), developed HOLOstage, the patented holographic projection system that displayed the 11-foot high ‘floating’ head of Richard Burton.

TPi
With thanks to Jeff Wayne
www.thewaroftheworlds.com