A Five-Day Motion Capture Shoot Adds Life to Crowd Scenes, Ice Skating and Attacking Polichinelles in a Magical World
In Walt Disney Pictures’ latest holiday blockbuster, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, filmmakers create a stunningly beautiful and romanticized version of Victorian London, complete with 19th-century families celebrating the holiday season. One scene of Christmas revelry includes several people ice skating against a backdrop of the fictionalized London, which required an unusual setup. To create these moving characters on ice, VFX house Audiomotion used its Vicon motion capture system to turn its studio into an ice skating rink – minus the ice.
“This film allowed us to create multiple worlds, each more impressive than the last,” said Brian Mitchell, Audiomotion’s managing director. “The ice skating scene was challenging for us to create as we needed to provide the best possible footage covering such a large area, and we couldn’t have done that without Vicon.”