​Michael Jackson-Premiere bei Billboard-Awards 18. Mai

  • Mir gefällts auch sehr gut. Ich denke Mike würde ausflippen vor Freude, dass sie sowas auf die Beine gestellt haben. Michael liebte technische spielereien. Vorallem ist er auch bei dieser neuartigen Technologie wieder pionier!;-)

  • Michael, erster virtueller Weltstar. Damit könnte ich sehr gut leben. Ich sags gerne nochmal. Michael ist eine der wenigen posthumen Figuren der Kunst- und Bühnenwelt, die quasi nach so einer Innovation schreien.

  • Habe es gerade zum ersten Mal gesehen. Hm... Weiß nicht ob das jetzt an dem Video lag, aber für mich passten da die Mundbewegungen nicht zum Text und die Tanzbewegungen nicht zum Rhythmus, das ganze wirkte seelenlos. Technisch hätte es Michael bestimmt gefallen und was da durch weitere Verbesserungen noch alles möglich sein wird, haut mich ziemlich um. Irgendwie ist es komisch für mich, ich war immer mehr begeistert von dem Menschen Michael und danach erst "Fan" seiner Musik und Shows. Das jetzt so zu trennen, das geht für mich nicht, ich spüre nichts, wenn ich das Hologramm sehe und wenn ich Michael in einem Video tanzen sehe, erreicht es immer mein Herz.


    sigoyf.jpg
    Para amarte
    Necesito una razón
    Y es difícil creer
    Que no exista una más que este amor
    Pero olvidaste una final instrucción
    Porque aún no se como vivir sin tu amor

  • Michael, erster virtueller Weltstar.



    Mal von den Gorillaz abgesehen. Obwohl die echten Musiker da natürlich parallel bekannt waren.



    Kann mich auch schwach erinnern, dass es irgendwann in Michaels letzten Jahren eine Meldung gab,
    dass er Interesse hätte so eine virtuelle Figur von sich selbst zu erschaffen. (Was damals wohl von den Gorillaz inspiriert war).
    Falls wahr...


    Davon ab ist Michael Jackson sicherlich die schwiegriste Person die man sich bei der Umsetzung für sowas überhaupt vorstellen kann.
    Es gibt wohl keinen bei dem jede kleine Bewegung so durchgestyle und geschliffen war wie bei ihm. Umso kritischer guckt man sich das an.

  • wenn wir alleine an TII denken, und all das was ihm damals so vorgeschwebte,
    dann kann man sagen dass man weiss, dass diese neue sache genau sein ding gewesen wären :ja




    TII auf diese Weise nochmal ins Leben zu rufen, das wäre gigantisch. Wer nicht wagt, der nicht gewinnt. Sag ich da gerne. :)



    Ansonsten gabs eigentlich schon eine Kritik, die es erbärmlich fand, dass Michaels Holo hier playback sang. ;D

  • super detaillierter Artikel über die Entstehung der Performance mit sehr schönen Bildern. Der Gesichtsabdruck aus Ghosts wurde anscheinend auch verwendet :)
    Erstellt wurde alles in 7.5K Auflösung (höher als beim "Auftritt" gezeigt)


    http://www.fxguide.com/feature…f-michael-jackson-reborn/


    The Technology of Michael Jackson Reborn


    Mike Seymour


    June 16, 2014


    Stephen Rosenbaum was tasked with digitally creating one of the world’s most
    famous performers, Michael Jackson, to promote a new song, Slave To The Rhythm,
    at the live event of the Billboard Awards. It was a digital performance
    with excellent facial animation built on a range of technologies from LightStage facial capture to motion capture.


    Given the enormous importance of Michael Jackson to music generally and his global
    reputation for stunning live performances, the job of allowing an
    audience to once again see him perform brought with it a justifiable
    amount of pressure. Clearly, after decades of enjoying his performances,
    the audience knows how Jackson moved, they know how he looked, and
    literally anything less than stunningly accurate wasn’t going to work.


    Stephen Rosenbaum completed the project from his base in
    San Francisco. In fact, as fxguide spoke to Rosenbaum he was sitting
    much where he was when he started his career when it was ILM – an irony
    that was not lost on the visual effects supervisor. “This is the room
    where I started my career 25 years ago, so I am literally sitting back
    in one of my old offices where Joe Letteri sat, where Scott Anderson
    sat, where a bunch of us started back in the early days of ILM. And the
    decor has not changed,” he joked.


    Prior this project, Rosenbaum and his team were heavily involved in
    modernizing a creature pipeline. It was this wealth of experience that
    made them a great choice for this production. The Michael Jackson Estate
    brought the project to Rosenbaum and Pulse Evolution (A specialist
    human animation company) in October of 2013. In light of the current
    migration of projects from California to Canada and beyond, Rosenbaum
    was particularly pleased to be doing such high quality work, but in a
    new arena and expanding the massive skill base of the artists still in
    California. “One of the things that is so exciting about this project
    was that we are applying our skills and expertise in an area that is
    largely untapped,” he says.


    To help with accuracy in dancing, styling and approach, Rosenbaum was
    offered the chance to work with dancers, performers and wardrobe
    specialists who had all worked personally with Michael Jackson. This
    proved invaluable. In addition to a wealth of reference footage,
    Rosenbaum could talk directly to people who could speak to how Michael
    Jackson approached his craft and how he creatively solved problems. “I
    could turn to them and say here is a specific piece of performance, I
    was going to have him do this, and they would be able to say, ‘Well,
    actually Michael might have done this – turned his head to the side
    instead of back – because this was the way Michael would be thinking,’”
    explains Rosenbaum.


    Rebuilding a legend


    The decision of what age Jackson should be in the performance was, at
    least in theory, wide open. The performer could have been almost any
    age, as his career spanned decades. In reality, an actual ‘plaster’ life
    cast of the singer’s face made in 1997 meant that this would be the age
    of the Jackson the world would see: 39. It was at this age that the
    veteran special effects expert Stan Winston made a life cast of the
    singer for the project Ghosts.
    The team got access to that original life cast and had the mold
    scanned. As great as Stan Winston’s work always was, the very weight of
    the material and the agents used to avoid it sticking to a subject’s
    face can fill in skin pores. So while the life cast was a great measure
    of the performer’s dimensions it was not as accurate as today’s
    techniques for accurate skin pore texture. “It got us only about 75% of
    the way there,” estimates Rosenbaum.


    “The pressure from the alginate (plaster) not only pushed out some of the
    pore features but some of the facial features, chin, general skin,” adds
    Rosenbaum. “Michael has a very unique face, and part of his face was
    softer (thus it was more affected), so we had a bit of a challenge, we
    also had a physiological challenge of what we think Michael Jackson
    looked like at age 39, what we perceived he looked like, but from the
    hundreds of images we got from the Estate, we arrived at what he should
    actually look like.”


    The other issue is that a life cast is just one neutral pose. In modern terms, if
    an actor is being scanned it would be normal to get multiple FACs poses
    in addition to the neutral pose, so that animators could see how the
    face looks in various poses. With just the one life cast the team was
    limited.


    The combined issues of not having fine skin pore detail and no additional poses lead
    Rosenbaum to decide to get some additional reference in to provide extra
    detail. What would be important in the final is providing organic micro
    displacement maps to add to a traditional meso level bump that one
    might get from a cast. Interestingly this was most visible in creating a
    specular breakup and it was this that greatly improved realism. The
    team found various additional reference which could provide the missing
    texture details and provide reference for how a face moves between key
    poses. While these people were not, of course, the real Michael Jackson,
    the team only needed to extend in high frequency detail missing from
    the real life cast and get controlled reference footage. While a lot of
    real footage of Michael Jackson was used as reference, FACs poses are
    very particular and recorded under control lighting. The team also got
    additional key iconic expressions filmed to analyze and study. “Michael
    had a very distinct way of emoting,” says Rosenbaum, “so we got them to
    try and match some of the iconic expressions from his hero performances,
    and then on top of the FACs expressions do additional key concept
    expressions, and that was central to our success – not just relying on
    what the facial muscles technically do, but also how Michael might have
    emoted.”


    Unlike some earlier attempts at this performer re-creation, Michael
    Jackson’s mouth was very visible on stage. He performed without using a
    hand held mic held in front of his mouth as was the style of Tupac
    Shakur. This meant the mouth or lip sync needed to be much more accurate
    than previous staged ‘holograms’. Michael Jackson had very distinctive
    hair that needed to be recreated. “Unlike Tupac who was bald, Michael
    deliberately used his hair during a performance when he is dancing,”
    notes Rosenbaum. “He would use it as part of his expressive
    performance.”


    Key academic research has been done recently in the area of micro-geometry for improved
    facial accuracy. Rosenbaum had the desire to use this new innovation in
    providing micro geometry displacement. These maps “proved to be hugely
    valuable to us and a significant step up in look development than what
    we’d done on prior projects,” he says. The logic of micro-geometry
    is very interesting. It would be reasonable to think at first glance
    that any character not seen in extreme closeup would not benefit from
    very small scale micro geometry. In fact it could be seen as adding to
    render times, disk space and something to easily be dismissed. But what
    has been found by the recent research is that while the actual pore
    detail is itself not read, the much larger specular highlight that a
    cheek or forehead may exhibit does change rather remarkably with the
    addition of the micro geometry of the skin of the face. While the skin
    pore resolution is very small, the highlight may be a quarter of a face
    in height in any one frame, with the textural quality and – more
    importantly – the realism, is greatly enhanced by modeling the skin to
    seemingly incredible levels of detail.


    “What we found is that the specular contribution to skin is vital,” indicates
    Rosenbaum. Previous research had suggested two specular lobes
    contributing to the overall response on facial skin, “and we in fact
    incorporated three,” says Rosenbaum. “You don’t, at first glance,
    realize that you are looking at three levels of specular contribution.
    What you see is subtle grading and fall-off across different surfaces
    such as the cheek or the forehead or chin – they all have different
    responses within the highlight itself. It is actually the key
    contributing factor we found to realistic looking skin.”


    Highlights seen across micro geometry, while being more realistic, can actually be
    more intense – in a way that a make up artist might want to reduce if
    seen on a real set. For this reason, and for the realism of what a
    performer such as Jackson would actually wear, ‘digital’ makeup was
    added to mimic the correct look that the singer might actually have
    used. This was a key part in moving from general realistic skin to a
    realistic skin on Michael Jackson, performing at a major event. This
    digital makeup was based on “a lot of tests we did with real makeup,”
    says Rosenbaum. The team examined someone with and without makeup to
    note the differences in specular contribution that professional makeup
    would contribute and the final solution actually involved multiple
    layers of this subtle but important ‘digital’ makeup.


    The final maps were 6 x 8K, and rendered in RMS 18 (RenderMan). “Everything was
    ray traced,” Rosenbaum commented. While the team used high end
    SubSurface Scattering (SSS), “what was giving the most realism was the
    micro-geometry.” Additional R&D or work in SSS would not have made
    much difference, especially given the performer’s makeup which naturally
    reduces the effect of SSS, according to Rosenbaum. The face did have a
    varied SSS across the face, but for the lips, which are normally central
    to any SSS discussion, the team still found that it was the micro
    displacement based on the new research work that lead to the greatest
    return in realism. “The fine amount of displacement that was being
    revealed by the specular contribution,” explains Rosenbaum, “you get
    this additional octave of specular response – that is what made them
    realistic – versus say varying amounts of sub-surface contribution.”


    For the singer’s eyes, the team got great help from the Estate and the dancers
    and performers that had worked with Jackson. “He always commanded the
    crowd,” says Rosenbaum. “What we found is that someone may dance for
    themselves and where they might be going, but Michael was such a
    consummate performer, he was less thinking his performance than feeling
    his performance. He would look out and make eye contact deep into the
    audience.”


    “While the face was where we emphasized critical look development efforts, a lot of
    time and energy was put in to the overall body and character
    performance to reinforce accurate Michael likeness,” commented Stephen
    Rosenbaum.



    Costume
    For the great skill as a singer and dancer, Michael Jackson was also a showman and
    his costumes were always important. Here the team were lucky enough to
    able to work with Michael Jackson’s costume designer, Michael Bush. Not
    only was this helpful in planning, but the designer was accessible right
    through production to advise. Bush had created most of MJ’s personal
    and concert tour wardrobe in the past. The costume seen on the stage is a
    new design of an outfit that might have been worn during this period of
    the singer’s career, he created this original piece just for the show.
    “We had a lot of conversations about how Michael wore his clothes and
    the types of clothes he wore and how they fitted on his body,” says
    Rosenbaum.


    The new work had an eye to the future. In many respects just as the life cast became
    invaluable years later, the team wanted to make sure this work would be
    well documented in case this was wanted or needed for any future
    project. ”We went in building the highest quality assets,” notes
    Rosenbaum. “We built in facial detail, the hair, the eyes – everything
    to the highest quality. In fact, we were working at 7.5K resolution,” a resolution significantly higher than was projected on the night.


    “We built the asset to be re-used,” adds Rosenbaum. “I’ve always been a fan, and I
    think he looked great.” The results were well received. After the
    performance the team showed it to Jackie Jackson, Michael’s brother. “We
    replayed it to him after the show, and he was smiling throughout and he
    kept saying ‘That’s Michael, that’s Michael’ – you could tell he
    believed what we had done was true to Michael’s persona and his style of
    performance.”

  • Ich finde die Animation im Großen und Ganzen auch ganz gut gelungen. Klar, einem Fan fallen selbst die kleinsten Dinge auf, wenns um die Authentizität geht (Aussehen der Figur nicht perfekt, Bewegungen nicht ganz wie Michael.. Sidewalk in die falsche Richtung etc.) aber ich gucke es mir immer wieder gern an. Vor allem auch, weil ich diese ganze Produktion total klasse finde und die Technik, die dahinter steckt. Finde auch nicht, dass das jetzt irgendwie respektlos Michael gegenüber ist, dass sowas mit ihm nach seinem Tod gemacht wird (wie ich online gelassen hab), denn so bleibt der Liebe immerhin auch lebendig. Finde ich echt cool.

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