My inspiration : "Curiosity is the most powerful thing you own." - James Cameron

It all got going around 5 years back, when I was in 11th grade at Kendriya Vidyalaya INS Hamla, Mumbai.. I was really much impressed after watching the James Cameron's motion picture "Titanic". ( Yeah ! I watched it for the first time, back in 2009 ). And permit me tell you guys, I literally cried after watching Titanic. Not only the story narration, but I like each and every part of that motion picture, the music, the screenplay, and mostly the unbelievable scenes ( Yeah ! including that one too ) like the million dollar shot.

James Cameron with his team reconstructing the exact events of the Titanic’s final moments.

After my exhaustive research about the film, I can see how much efforts, James Cameron has put into Titanic to break from the script-and-research to reality. His five years of research on the Titanic have actually manifested the reality. To perform an interior survey of the wreck of that ship, which had never been done before, he created that technology that didn't exist earlier. His team developed robots which could shoot the scenes of Titanic wreck in those tremendously extreme environments of high atmospheric pressure in the rear end of the ocean. He hasn't just filmed a movie, but also he has done science and exploration.


The birth of "Motion Capture"

This scene is called the "Million dollar shot", in which the people, the smoke, the ocean water was all digitally added.

At that time, in 1996, the mocap (Motion Capture) was a brand new technology which Cameron incorporated in his movie for visual effects. This is a technology with which a motion of a person is detected and recorded. This recorded data (mocap data) are then applied to the digital character rigs, so that the movement of the real person is replicated onto that digital character. In most of the sequences (such as the million dollar shot), the characters walking and interacting on the ship looked and acted like real passengers, but in fact they were all digitally added to the ship. This is the thrilling potential of motion capture technology. Isn't it great !!

Modern Motion capturing system

But at that time, the extent of motion capture was limited as compared to today's capture volumes. For motion capturing they used wired magnetic system, that means the motion sensors attached to the person were transmitting data via a set of cables. The results generated in those years were very inaccurate and needed a lot of work.

From an engineer's point of view, the sensors weren't accurate, the sampling rates were low and the cables added noise to the data. Even though this technology was at the beginning of its development, they worked upon it to clean up noise and increasing the quality of mocap data, resulting in extremely photo-realistic visual effects.


The ocean simulation (the digital ocean water)

This is a computer generated scene of an ocean, that I recently created on my computer.

The video shows a photo realistic view of ocean at sunset. It's quite embarrassing to tell how much time a computer takes to render a single frame of an animation. The scene looks perfect and real, however, behind the scene, it took 10 hours to render all the 120 frames of this 5 second long animation i.e. roughly 5 minutes per frame. And then sooner than simply waiting for my animation to finish, I thought of writing this.

Talking about that film, I think the biggest illusion for the us is the seamless ocean, which is in fact a result of very well finished computer generated ocean simulations. And it is very spectacular in its perfection.

According to me VFX is more than a trick. It is like a pond of resources that is utilized to give meaning to a film. It's like, you imagine a person is jumping off from the ship, and you can transform that vision into reality. That is what modern VFX is capable of. So that, you can put on the screen whatever you imagine. What's required is exactly the thought of how to utilize that pond of resources; and James Cameron did it. Once that is accomplished, the main focus lies in the idea of how these technologies can raise to make work easy.

See you soon.