Welcome to week five of my Pinhead Internship blog! This week flew by, and I also anticipate the remaining two weeks of my time here in Los Angeles as well. All five days at work this week were spent on set on the main stage shooting motion capture and audio for an upcoming video game! Unfortunately, this means I am restricted by a non-disclosure agreement and cannot share many details about the content we were capturing, so by nature, this blog will be shorter than my other posts.
Monday was a rehearsal and prep day for shooting the rest of the week. Greg and I arrived at work at 7:00am to organize things for the arrival of the majority of the crew at 8:00am. Breakfast and lunch for the shoot crew and actors was catered, and snacks were provided all day (craft services). It amazing how important it is to have a well-fed crew, especially when some shoot days could run 16+ hours long for some crew members. Breakfast was served from 7:45-9:00am, and work began following that. The morning was spent calibrating the 122-camera mo-cap system on our stage, as well as fitting the seven actors in mo-cap suits and headpieces for the head-mounted cameras. For the remainder of the day, the actors went through rehearsals with a stunt coordinator while the Digital Domain mo-cap crew worked with the director and cinematics supervisor to review and organize all of the assets for the shoot. Assets consist of all the digital environments (locations), characters, and props. These are viewed and manipulated in Autodesk’s Motionbuilder (as discussed in a previous post) throughout the shoot. This allows the crew and actors to see the environments and the characters/props that they drive in real-time. Lunch was served from 1:00-2:00pm, and our day officially ended around 6:00pm.
Tuesday was our first shoot day! For the next four days, our schedule would be very routine:
- Arrive at the stage – 7:15am
- Breakfast – 7:45am
- Actor prep (putting on suits, face markers, and head-mounted cameras) and scene prep (building the set on the stage) – 9:00am
- First shot of the day – 10:30am
- Shooting until lunch
- Lunch – 1:00pm
- Back to shooting – 2:00pm
- Day wrap – 6:00pm
- Leave the set around 6:30pm
My responsibility in the shoot was as a witness camera operator. I was working with three other camera operators, and we were in charge of capturing reference video from all angles of every take. This reference video will be used in other stages of the post-process to ensure the data is processed correctly by providing video reference for instances where markers may have been hidden from the camera, actors may have been in contact, head cameras may have been obstructed, etc. It was really great to have a meaningful role in the shoot, because it kept me engaged and attentive to everyone else and what they were doing.
This is the witness camera that I used for this shoot
We shot for four days, Tuesday through Friday. For this particular project, we were capturing body and face data as well as sound, so there was a sound crew present in addition to DD’s mo-cap crew, the actors, and the clients. It was so interesting to dive into the life of being on a motion capture shoot, because the process was quite rinse-and-repeat. Get up, go to work, shoot all day, get home, run, eat dinner, go to bed, get up, back to the set, etc. That said, it was not a bad thing at all. I thrived being fully engaged with my work, and learned so much in those few days when I didn’t have to worry about anything else outside of what was presently ongoing on set! This past week was certainly a highlight in my internship this summer! Next week, we will be shooting again Wednesday-Friday for another client, and I am eagerly looking forward to that shoot!
On Friday evening, after we wrapped the shoot and most of the crew left, I took an Uber to Venice where I met a friend from Telluride and experienced “First Friday”. First Friday is a legendary monthly gathering of the best food trucks in the Los Angeles area! I managed to devour a double 1/3lb burger as well as churros and fried ice cream. After we wandered around all the food carts, we went up to Huntington Beach for bowling, which was a lot of fun and a nice way to conclude the week.
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