30ninja’s has been publishing an exclusive interview with John Bruno, the Oscar-winning VFX master who has worked on all of James Cameron’s movies since 1989, and the latest segment discusses the process used to create and animate Colonel Quaritch’s giant Amp Suit.
And what was so cool about that was, you can take the animation, you take those Maya [software] files, you’d have the animation move, and you’d have the motion-control move or the camera move, you could feed that into a motion-control system, put an actor in the [giant] amp suit torso that was rigged by [Virtual Production Supervisor] Glenn Derry on a motion base that would actually move based on the approved animation. So the actor was in for a ride! And the camera system would follow the camera move that was done. Now, the genius thing that I loved about this thing is, it’s a Simulcam system: There was a system that would show you the animated scene, the template—Jim could see that through his camera lens—the camera was synched up in the same volume, Jim could actually line up, knowing which lens was used, in stereo. He would walk [on the stage] with the actor … and he could see Stephen Lang as Quaritch in the amp suit with the animation amp suit locked together and the background that was around them.
30 NINJAS: So in a sense, he’s actually watching the film through the lens of the camera, and walking around to find the angles he likes.
