Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” had a rocky route through production, enduring strikes, changes in production companies, and other difficulties. In the end, the Framestore had the tough task of taking all the shot footage and adding in the proper CG faces. Lacking several niceties of usual processes (flight camera, stationary models, environment map shots) they had a lot of work to do.
The first way into the maze was to do a camera track of all the shots. In that one piece of work, Framestore had about 1,600 facial tracks to do. Thankfully for Framestore there were markers on the faces, placed there by the crew on the day. A lo-rez head was placed in as a guide, so they knew the general angle of the face in space. “Now a lot of the CG texture of the face comes from a camera matte of the faces,” says White. “The edges of the eye-lids, lips and nostrils had to nail down the initial head track which gives the head position and rotation. Then the team would go in and line it up even further so we could actually get a decent texture from it. We’d validate this by doing a UV Unwrap of the face and from that, you could see where problems were if they arose. We had an excellent team of about 35 trackers here at Framestore.”
Read the full writeup on the process over at CGSociety.
