Mo Cap One: Motion Capture your Imagination

Mo Cap One from The Boot Room on Vimeo.

Visualisation of products and places that don’t exist serves several purposes: selling ideas to financiers, assisting the production process, allowing fine-tuning of designs and promoting plans to the public, not to mention creating self-contained works of art and entertainment. But to look their best, especially to an audience whose expectations increase in line with technology, any visualisation needs to use a blend of technical mastery and design excellence to create efficient but believable visuals. (Some of us remember being wowed by Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing video. Now look at it!) Nowadays visualisation can often mean entering the fourth dimension, with fly-throughs, walk-throughs and probably swim-throughs putting new demands on visual designers – demands that Mo Cap One are facing every day.

Mo Cap One, run by J Hogan A Burrows with Warren McKenzie, already have something of a presence in the Sharp Project, mainly thanks to the sheer entertainment value of their motion capture suit(e). More on that later, but think ping pong balls, and Lycra catsuits and you won’t go far wrong.

The founder of Mo Cap One, J Hogan A Burrows, arrived where he is now through academia and a healthy dollop of initiative: “I studied at UMIST doing electronic and electrical engineering in Manchester and Coventry doing industrial product design. In 2004 I graduated as an industrial product designer and set up a small consultancy doing product design. Because it was only two people at the company we were quite agile and changed from being a product design outfit to an animation studio, really focusing on large-scale property development, doing the fly-through visualisations.” This agility let the company start to morph into a full-scale visualisation company after clients started making specific demands on their animations that could all be fulfilled through digital visualisation.

So what has changed in the morphing from a design/animation outfit into a visualisation one? “It’s just a different an angle. As a product designer you get presented with a problem and you find a solution to fix it, and I suppose it’s the same with animation. You’ve got to find the quickest, perhaps easiest solution to make things move along quickly. So I’d say that visualisation does use similar trains of thought to attack a problem with a logical, methodical approach, and break it down to bite-size chunks.”

One thing driving Mo Cap One’s confidence in their business model is the fact that they can offer their services at a fraction of the price charged by larger outfits. Small businesses and start-ups might see some benefits from including some motion-captured visualisations in their marketing and online materials, but when charges start at £5000 per day, and that’s before animation and modelling charges are added, they are likely to go with something with less impact. “I couldn’t really fathom £5000 in a day’s budget. It’s quite expensive, so what we’ve tried to do is drive down costs and offer basically a two-man performance,” says Hogan. “It’s not just one guy talking to a wall. You can have a bit of a playful conversation that works and that is timed properly.”

And who knew that mouth and facial capture were such rare skills? It’s surprising considering the personality and emotion that can be brought into animated work, but rare it is. Indeed, Mo Cap One believe no one else in Manchester is offering this service.

Something else Mo Cap One are proud of is their virtual camera. Essentially it’s a camera without a lens, but it’s used just like a normal camera. It senses its own movement and direction and has all the focus, zoom and depth of field capabilities of a normal camera, the image relayed onto a monitor. The image itself is virtual, so a camera operator can literally walk, run and jump around a virtual world and record the scene as if he were there. Combined with the motion-capture suit and some digital manipulation, live action can be included in the image. And as the “live action” can be abstracted from the suit as digital points in space, it can become whatever you want, from a robot to a giant sloth. It’s this technique that James Cameron used on Avatar. The result is a much more natural feel to what can otherwise be a sterile digital environment, partly by allowing camera operators to take their time-served skills into digital realms.

Many of us will have seen motion capture suits in use on the television. They consist of a body-form black catsuit with little high-visibility hemispheres placed at key points, roughly tracing the main joints of the human skeleton. When filmed with a camera, these points can be isolated to create a new wire-frame skeleton onto which any virtual skin can be added. The motion is the main thing. Realistic human movement can be recorded digitally complete with actual effects of momentum, gravity, personality and limits of human flexibility, which are difficult to reproduce artificially. It’s been used in animation and video gaming for some time, but there’s necessarily an endless desire for new captures as new virtual roles are created.

Hogan started out with more traditional types of animation, though: “I did try and hand-animate and you did about seven seconds a day. For me to make a three-and-a-half-hour thing, you know, we’re talking ten years or so.” But some purists still see that method as the only genuine form of animation. “Some people say it’s a cheat but I really don’t see a computer as a cheat. Some people in industry genuinely see it as a bit of a cop out. You know, ‘you shouldn’t be using a computer; you should be drawing it by hand.’ It goes over me, that.”

And besides, why would Hogan want to go back to hand animation when he’s the one who gets to wear the catsuit? “Yes, I sport the Lycra, I do indeed; but you could do it yourself if you had your own custom moves that you needed the performance of. We could let you wear the suits.” So he’s a natural born performer then? “Well, I’ve always been quite able-bodied and I did sport as a child. I didn’t actually enter this thing with the idea that I would wear the suit. Far from it. I envisaged that people would come in saying, ‘I want to do this,’ but, yes, it’s worked out that I wear the suit, which keeps people in check around here anyway.”

So does he have to get into character? “Yes, it does help if you’ve got someone acting like something. If they don’t convey it properly then ultimately it just won’t work; so, yes, the person in the suit might have to act like a giant sloth or a giant lizard, whatever. The computers aren’t magic.”

Hogan surprisingly does not deny rumours that a super hero has taken residence in the Sharp containers. “Yes, the ping pong man,” he says, “he’s infamous.” But he insists that any resemblance to his Lycra-clad self is purely coincidental, although the two of them are never seen together.

Mo Cap One’s current direction is towards TV. Hogan is as candid as ever: “I thought I’d get into TV; there’s a lot more money in it. That was about six months before the crash, and it turned out to be quite good foresight, really. I don’t get any large-scale developments. They’re not going on any more. Well, there are but they’re so few and far between that getting the work just falling on your lap just wasn’t happening, so I think changing to a broadcast-geared model is more profitable, shall we say, in the current climate.”

But isn’t TV suffering from the downturn too? “Yes, it’s a tough time to sell TV shows. Yes, the money’s gone from it all. But making a product is incredibly expensive, getting the models and everything else. But making an animation like we do, you can do it all at your computer and the costs are pretty much the computer, the render file and your time.” And of course, there’s the vital element in the creative process: imagination. A good imagination, with years of problem-solving experience suspended in it, saves hours of painstaking design and fine-tuning at the computer. Along with the agile nature of this dynamic duo, it’s another reason why both small operations and squeezed a media sector are turning to Mo Cap One.

It’s time for Hogan to get back to his desk now; the catsuit is beginning to chafe somewhat, and the phone is ringing. Mo Cap One is helping to create virtual worlds with unprecedented realism and detail, and they’re channelling everything they have into it – even Hogan’s moves. And that alone is worth checking out.

Mo Cap One, the Sharp Project

Charlie Hankers