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In a dark warehouse in Troy, Michigan, Davo Scheich sits at a computer and casually hums an arbitrary tune. He maneuvers a mouse to rotate and zoom in on a little jumping CGI model that looks remarkably like himself.
That’s because it very much is himself.
Scheich is the first body-in-motion to be converted to CGI. He is not exactly the star of the next Pixar movie though; he’s a photographer. And the warehouse is his studio. As he examines his digital doppelganger, he answers his assistants’ questions as they lug heavy equipment around in preparation for a shoot later in the day.
Scheich started his studio eleven years ago and mostly did work for automotive companies. “As automotive fell away, we just kind of expanded into the electronics zone and blew up this side of it,” he says.
Scheich specializes in camera array, a film technique that involves – in his case – sixty hi-res SLR Nikons encircling the action and taking pictures in sequence at the speed of his choosing. The effect it creates is one in which the action appears to stop or slow down while the camera pans around it at a normal speed.
See “The Matrix”? Yeah, it’s the effect.
In fact, Scheich and his sales representative, Kent Lund, used to call this studio “The Midwest Matrix.”
“It’s used for slow motion or motion capture,” says Lund, who is sitting nearby. “It’s moving around a point-of-view.”
On either side of the rail of Nikons is a video camera, which makes for an easy transition back into motion once an array shot has been completed. The technique is impressive enough for movies and commercials, but the technology has changed since the days of the movie that made it so popular. Results can be produced much faster these days.
“This technology has gotten to the point where you can get these images out of the cameras… and on the air in about thirty seconds,” Scheich says. “This means you can do direct-to-air stuff, which you’re going to see a lot of.
“At a sporting event, you’d have your live action, you cut to your slow-mo and, by the time you’ve seen that slow-mo, this is ready to go. Pretty darn close to real-time.”
However, it’s still seen as something you’d only catch in a major motion picture. Scheich and Lund are trying to deflate that stigma.
“The costs have gone down and the production times have gone down so it isn’t so much the shooting cost as it is the whole post back-end time,” Scheich says. “This makes it affordable for web stuff. Nobody ever thinks of this as a banner or a web ad.”
A SMALL NETWORK WITH BIG IDEAS
Scheich is part of a very small group of camera array photographers – so small, in fact, that he once received a phone call from a friend in Los Angeles who recognized the patterns of tape in a parking structure as Scheich’s signature from a previous photo shoot. He describes this group as “just a couple of dedicated guys.”
“A couple” is right. Only four studios in the world do camera array the way they do: Scheich’s in Troy and three others in Los Angeles, Texas, and London.
“It’s a franchise,” Lund says. “It’s the same at all four points.”
“We all adhere to the same set of standards and the same production pipeline,” Scheich adds.
The studio in London is called TimeSlice and is owned by founder Tim Macmillan (or “Father TimeSlice” as he’s known within the company). Macmillan is accredited with developing camera array as a mainstream film technique.
A photo shoot in Spain hooked up Scheich with Macmillan.
“In the course of a dinner, we realized we were very good at different things,” Scheich says. “I’m not a post-production guy. With thirty years’ experience, [TimeSlice] is the absolute best when it comes to post-production.”
Together, Scheich and Macmillan formed TimeSlice USA. “If you have a shoot in Europe, those guys will handle it,” Scheich says. “When they get the phone call and the shoot is here, I’ll go out there and handle it. But you know that it’ll be handled in the exact same way.”
CHANGING INDUSTRIES
Scheich is also partnered with the post-production house, Digicave, which edits Scheich’s work and turns it into a final product.
“They’ve written an algorithm program that allows us to take our capture much further than anyone else has,” Lund says.
The program is a way of re-skinning a CGI mesh with pictures taken from all angles of a moving person. (Perfect if you have access to – let’s say – sixty cameras that can all take your picture at once).
Which brings us back to Scheich’s CGI self.
Scheich used his array to get shots of himself jumping and sent the photos to Digicave, who then created a rough mesh of Scheich and re-skinned that mesh with the body from the photos. The end result is incredibly lifelike.
Lund calls it historic. This, he says, will revolutionize the movie industry. With this, not only will it be easier to correct or add shots to movies without the actor even present, but it will also decrease any risk to stuntmen during exceptionally dangerous scenes.
“Instead of [the stuntman] having to spin and land where these cameras are set up, you can now spin this guy,” Scheich says as he spins his character for emphasis. “And you can now throw him wherever you want to throw him.”
This is also a big deal for video games too: Scheich and Lund have already welcomed two video game companies to the studio to show off what Lund describes as “pushing the envelope.”
The best part is that it’s not technology that is coming; it has come. It’s available now and it deserves to be followed closely as it becomes more accessible.
For more information of the happenings at Davo Photographic, email Kent Lund at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
In a dark warehouse in Troy, Michigan, Davo Scheich sits at a computer and casually hums an arbitrary tune. He maneuvers a mouse to rotate and zoom in on a little jumping CGI model that looks remarkably like himself.
That’s because it very much is himself.
Scheich is the first body-in-motion to be converted to CGI. He is not exactly the star of the next Pixar movie though; he’s a photographer. And the warehouse is his studio. As he examines his digital doppelganger, he answers his assistants’ questions as they lug heavy equipment around in preparation for a shoot later in the day.
Scheich started his studio eleven years ago and mostly did work for automotive companies. “As automotive fell away, we just kind of expanded into the electronics zone and blew up this side of it,” he says.
Scheich specializes in camera array, a film technique that involves – in his case – sixty hi-res SLR Nikons encircling the action and taking pictures in sequence at the speed of his choosing. The effect it creates is one in which the action appears to stop or slow down while the camera pans around it at a normal speed.
See “The Matrix”? Yeah, it’s the effect.
In fact, Scheich and his sales representative, Kent Lund, used to call this studio “The Midwest Matrix.”
“It’s used for slow motion or motion capture,” says Lund, who is sitting nearby. “It’s moving around a point-of-view.”
On either side of the rail of Nikons is a video camera, which makes for an easy transition back into motion once an array shot has been completed. The technique is impressive enough for movies and commercials, but the technology has changed since the days of the movie that made it so popular. Results can be produced much faster these days.
“This technology has gotten to the point where you can get these images out of the cameras… and on the air in about thirty seconds,” Scheich says. “This means you can do direct-to-air stuff, which you’re going to see a lot of.
“At a sporting event, you’d have your live action, you cut to your slow-mo and, by the time you’ve seen that slow-mo, this is ready to go. Pretty darn close to real-time.”
However, it’s still seen as something you’d only catch in a major motion picture. Scheich and Lund are trying to deflate that stigma.
“The costs have gone down and the production times have gone down so it isn’t so much the shooting cost as it is the whole post back-end time,” Scheich says. “This makes it affordable for web stuff. Nobody ever thinks of this as a banner or a web ad.”
A SMALL NETWORK WITH BIG IDEAS
Scheich is part of a very small group of camera array photographers – so small, in fact, that he once received a phone call from a friend in Los Angeles who recognized the patterns of tape in a parking structure as Scheich’s signature from a previous photo shoot. He describes this group as “just a couple of dedicated guys.”
“A couple” is right. Only four studios in the world do camera array the way they do: Scheich’s in Troy and three others in Los Angeles, Texas, and London.
“It’s a franchise,” Lund says. “It’s the same at all four points.”
“We all adhere to the same set of standards and the same production pipeline,” Scheich adds.
The studio in London is called TimeSlice and is owned by founder Tim Macmillan (or “Father TimeSlice” as he’s known within the company). Macmillan is accredited with developing camera array as a mainstream film technique.
A photo shoot in Spain hooked up Scheich with Macmillan.
“In the course of a dinner, we realized we were very good at different things,” Scheich says. “I’m not a post-production guy. With thirty years’ experience, [TimeSlice] is the absolute best when it comes to post-production.”
Together, Scheich and Macmillan formed TimeSlice USA. “If you have a shoot in Europe, those guys will handle it,” Scheich says. “When they get the phone call and the shoot is here, I’ll go out there and handle it. But you know that it’ll be handled in the exact same way.”
CHANGING INDUSTRIES
Scheich is also partnered with the post-production house, Digicave, which edits Scheich’s work and turns it into a final product.
“They’ve written an algorithm program that allows us to take our capture much further than anyone else has,” Lund says.
The program is a way of re-skinning a CGI mesh with pictures taken from all angles of a moving person. (Perfect if you have access to – let’s say – sixty cameras that can all take your picture at once).
Which brings us back to Scheich’s CGI self.
Scheich used his array to get shots of himself jumping and sent the photos to Digicave, who then created a rough mesh of Scheich and re-skinned that mesh with the body from the photos. The end result is incredibly lifelike.
Lund calls it historic. This, he says, will revolutionize the movie industry. With this, not only will it be easier to correct or add shots to movies without the actor even present, but it will also decrease any risk to stuntmen during exceptionally dangerous scenes.
“Instead of [the stuntman] having to spin and land where these cameras are set up, you can now spin this guy,” Scheich says as he spins his character for emphasis. “And you can now throw him wherever you want to throw him.”
This is also a big deal for video games too: Scheich and Lund have already welcomed two video game companies to the studio to show off what Lund describes as “pushing the envelope.”
The best part is that it’s not technology that is coming; it has come. It’s available now and it deserves to be followed closely as it becomes more accessible.
For more information of the happenings at Davo Photographic, email Kent Lund at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
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Friday, May 18, 2012
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