Richard has always enjoyed entrepreneurial businesses – perhaps his most challenging role was in helping establish Artem Digital. The Company worked across Video Games/Feature Film and Broadcast – each involving different work practices, commercial deals and work schedules. Artem was both service provider, offering Motion Capture services, and software and technology developer – pioneering a new, performance driven, 3D facial animation system – nVisage. Although Artem had their own West London studios they frequently worked on location, both across the UK and abroad.

Troy

One of Artem’s biggest projects was the “swords and sandals” epic Troy, starring Brad Pitt – they provided all the motion capture on the film. They worked with two of London’s most respected post-production companies to deliver over 10,000 seconds of 3D animation. Motion capture uses actors’ movements to drive Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) – it is used to create lifelike animation. The actors are tracked in 3D using special cameras and the resultant data is then processed to drive CGI characters. These digital characters add a sense of spectacle to the film – they populate battle scenes, and for Troy, they also crewed the 1,000 digital ships that Agamemnon launched to rescue Helen. Other epic feature films included; Alexander, King Arthur and Kingdom of Heaven – in these, in addition to human animation, part of the challenge was to create life-like horse animation. Motion capturing horses is challenging – it involves days of work in some of the UK’s largest indoor equestrian centres and it needs extreme patience to make sure everything goes exactly as planned. But perhaps the most demanding motion capture project was for Harry Potter where Artem had to motion capture a dog – on screen it became a ferocious CGI werewolf!

The Bourne Ultimatum

Yes, the agent with no past required ground breaking facial animation for one scene in what has become one of the most successful film franchises spy/thriller films ever. Matt Damon came to Artem Digital for an nVisage facial capture session and then had to be out in under an hour so that he could catch a flight to Madrid later that morning to shoot sequences set up for the late afternoon – it seemed to the team that Matt's schedule was almost as frantic as the film itself. So can you spot the sequence in the film? Answers on a postcard...

Photographs courtesy of Artem Digital