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 Jackson-Premiere bei Billboard-Awards 18. Mai
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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.
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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 -
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.
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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. -
... ein IV mit den Talauega-Brüdern zur Entwicklung
und ihrem Involvement bei der Performance.... -
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 wärenTII 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.
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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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