Motion Capture: Capturing Interaction between Human and Animal

http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/BradfordAnimationFestival/BAFGame

http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/Events/BAF/2013/M/MotionCaptureCapturingInteractionBetweenHumanAndAnimal.aspx

This talk, carried out by Karl Abson, a lecturer at Bradford University, was very interesting to me, even though I would have wanted to see more results of the motion capture with more animals, but the lecturer did state that the reason they focused their experiment with a horse was because it was easier to teach and control.
The talk was mainly about how introducing Motion Capture using animals could help prevent risk, removing danger, can create quicker and cheaper results. It will eliminate the need for animators who have to animate an animal's movements quicker without them needing to look into the anatomical study of the animal's body use the information taken from the motion capture to inform them.
He said, animator's might be worried about their job being taken away but do not look at it that way, it is used more to reduce the time spent on researching everything about the animal which you might as well be a vet, he stated.
To carry out the experiment on the horse, his team needed to hire a studio, equipment, vets to make sure the animal was in good condition and care, VFX artists and animators. The technology used to read the information from the cameras was Blade (http://www.vicon.com/Software/Blade). This software is meant to give you quick feedback of your readings, it saves time and allows the user to still have full control giving room for experimentation.

The negative points of using motion capture on animals is that it is harder to control them obviously due to the communication factor, and depending on the size and type of animal, the markers emit light received by cameras need to be placed correctly on the animal so it can be read properly. The problem of what material to use to attach the markers to the animal is also hard because you do not want to hurt the animal which is why Karl Abson had vets on hand to keep the horse in check.
However, a time when the use of motion capture on animals would have been a good use was during the filming of Life of Pi, at no time was the tiger on set as that would have created many problems, so animators had to animate and create a 3D tiger, but studying the way it moved and its actions would have taken them a very long time.

I decided to talk about this lecture since my interests do lie in Visual Effects and Film, this research study could be more used in the future since there are University and studios experimenting on different types of animals.