Meet "Emily" - Image Metrics Tech Demo (video)

Links (7)

Will Supernatural Demons Run Round the “Uncanny Valley”?
Published 8/19/2008 by jonathan at Supernatural Watch
Supernatural has done an amazing job at special effects that don’t tread into the cheesy. Recently, series creator Eric Kripke stated that they learned their lesson in Wendigo. Anyone who’s seen The Six Million Dollar Man [in 2008, that's Bill Gate's lunch money] fight Bigfoot, or had to sit through a Power Rangers battle against a big rubber villain, knows that good special effects are no easy feat. Even more challenging is the animation of realistic human faces. It’s a cliché in the CGI world that the more realistic human animation becomes, the less convincing it becomes. ...

Who Needs Humans When You Have Emily?
Published 8/21/2008 at Adrants
Who Needs Humans When You Have Emily? Hollywood-based Image Metrics which has done special effects and animation for several Harry Potter Films and Grand Theft Auto released a demo illustrating the realistic quality of their animation technology. The person in this video ...

Making Actresses Even More Fake [Advertising]
Published 8/21/2008 by Hamilton Nolan at Gawker
This video is a sales pitch demo for Image Metrics, a digital animation firm. Notice anything strange? The actress is a fake. Her face is computer-generated. She's a digital freak. Would you have known if we didn't tell you? No, you would have tried to ask her out for a drink later on. The point is, soon all actors will be unemployed. Click to watch the vanguard of your pixellated overlords. [via Adrants] ...

Viral Video: Spooky Weird New Animation Process
Published 8/21/2008 by Variety.com * at Thompson On Hollywood
I think I'll wait for James Cameron's Avatar. The Holy Grail for VFX is creating animated human beings who are believable in a live-action context. Many movies like Superman Returns, Spider-Man 2 and Lemony Snicket have done it for split seconds or minutes between live action shots. But the humans are usually silent. ...

The Death of Motion Capture, the Future of Porn and Personal Rights [Commentary]
Published 8/22/2008 by Cole Abaius at Film School Rejects
I get made fun of a lot for my faith in the future. My trust that one day, millions of nanobots will be patrolling my body fixing things without me knowing, allowing me to live for several hundreds of years. My hope that when I need it, a cyberknetic arm will be able to replace a useless limb. My joy at the prospect of having neuro-implants that make my brain millions of times faster and capable of holding obscene amounts of memory. I get laughed at for all of it, but I never get made fun of when those technological advancements have to do with art. It’s for good reason. We like our art to be as realistic as possible without ...

CROSSING THE UNCANNY VALLEY
Published 8/24/2008 by Scott Macaulay (noreply@blogger.com) at Filmmaker Magazine
I've written before about the "uncanny valley," the term used in discussion of technological attempts to simulate the human visage. It refers to the phenomenon where things intended to look human suddenly seem unrealistic as they closely approach a realistic representation of the human. There was talk this month at SIGGRAPH about Emily, a completely animated character that promises, in the words of creator David Barton, "new levels of believability in computer animation." From the linked piece in the Daily Mail: To create the footage the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies made a a computer generated ...

The Emily Project by Image Metrics. A Better, Quicker Alternative to Motion Capture?
Published 9/17/2008 by slashfilm.com at /Film
When the 3D animation company, Image Metrics, showed a promo video entitled The Emily Project at last month’s SIGGRAPH conference in L.A. it was only a matter of time before the buzz spilled online. As impressively demonstrated in the clip here—you see, Emily isn’t “real”—the company’s patented “Markerless” 3D facial animation technology is being touted as quicker, cheaper and altogether superior to the traditional motion-capture method used in many Hollywood films. When we first started working on ...