Hello, and welcome to my Pinhead Internship blog for this summer! My name is Jaden Evans and I am from Telluride High School in Telluride, Colorado. For the next six weeks, I will be interning in the Virtual Production division of the visual effects studio, Digital Domain, in Los Angeles, California. Under the guidance of my mentor Greg LaSalle, Director of Visual Development at Digital Domain, I will be primarily working in the motion capture department as well as getting a chance to learn about the other related processes of previsualization and visual effects.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Motion Capture (or “MoCap”), it is essentially the process where an actor or object’s movement is recorded and translated to digital models, which allows for efficient and realistic animation for films, commercials, and video games. A couple of recent examples of MoCap, among countless, are the Beast in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast film, and Thanos in the Marvel films. Some examples of Digital Domain’s work (including the above two) can be seen in the reel found at this link:
https://www.digitaldomain.com/feature-films/
Just a brief note on confidentiality. Due to the nature of this industry, with digital media being a commodity with the utmost value, all of the current projects at DD are under strict confidentiality. Therefore, unfortunately, I will be able to share very little on the actual details of the projects I will be working. However, I will do my best to explain the technical processes of the projects that I will be working on without reference to the projects themselves.
On Thursday afternoon, I landed at LAX and used Uber for the first time to travel to the house where I will be living for the duration of this internship and met my mentor and host, Greg LaSalle. Greg generously offered to not only mentor me through my time at DD (Digital Domain), but also to host me in his home and be my personal guide around the best parts of Los Angeles!
The following morning, we drove to the studio just a couple of miles away from my first day of work! Typically we would bike, but Friday was the worst day in a heat wave this weekend that has been well into the triple digits, so it was simply too hot to consider biking that day. Once I arrived at the studio, I was given a brief tour and history of the location and the company, followed by an HR orientation of work procedures and confidentiality. I was then showed to my work station which is directly adjacent to DD’s largest MoCap stage. My work station has access to nearly all the software used in the department, including Motionbuilder, Maya Autodesk, Vicon Shogun, and Vicon Cara, so I look forward to opportunity to get familiar with the various programs.
Exterior of Digital Domain
Later that day, DD did some v-cam “pickup” shots for a project that I got to experience. A “v-cam” or “virtual camera” shoot is a key step in the process of motion capture.
Virtual camera example (from Google Images)
Essentially, after the motion capture work with actors has been completed, the motion has been translated the the characters, and the characters have been assembled in a virtual environment, the filmmakers must still record footage as if they are filming in a real location. To do this, a “virtual camera” (basically a piece of equipment with sensors and no real camera) is moved around the MoCap stage and the virtual environment is shown on a monitor in real-time as if the camera is “seeing” the environment. This allows the director to get the exact shots that they had envisioned in the virtual world, by filming them like they would in the real-world. It was a really fascinating process to see unfold in real-time.
The V-Cam shoot concluded in just a few hours, so I spent my remaining time at the studio going through Maya Desktop tutorials to begin getting familiar with the modeling software. Maya is the most common 3D modeling and animation software that is the industry standard at any VFX or animation studio, so certainly a useful program to be familiar with.
In my short amount of free time in LA when I’m not at DD, I’ve already done plenty of great stuff. A highlight was certainly seeing live jazz music played by a “big band” at the famed Lighthouse Cafe: a shooting location for one of my favorite films, La La Land. I’ve also gone on two distance runs (one along the beach and one around my neighborhood). Below are some pictures. Thanks for reading and more to come soon!
Always a must! Stopped on the way from the airport.
“Eatalian” authentic Italian restaurant!
Perhaps familiar to those who have seen La La Land
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