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Alan Wake Uses CaptiveMotion's Proprietary Facial Capture Technology for State of the Art Cinematics

Philip Weiss, managing partner for metricminds, talked about the project. "CaptiveMotion and metricminds came together at the end of a 5-year project to create facial animations for the cutscenes in Alan Wake. The challenge was to not only use a team of actors to create compelling performances for 21 characters but present the data in a fashion that Remedy could easily integrate it into their pipeline which already included full body motion capture from 6 months earlier."

Work on this project commenced with a 5-day shoot in late November, shooting with talented actors in the Tempe-based CaptiveMotion studio. Over the course of 7 weeks, CaptiveMotion and metricminds generated 51 minutes of facial animation in 445 unique sequences. This animation, captured with CaptiveMotion's proprietary Embody technology, tracked as many as 1,600 individual markers per actor. After capturing the actors, the performances were mapped to a total of 21 separate characters. Proprietary tools then allowed the team to seamlessly synch the facial performance to the pre-recorded voice over work as well as drive realistic tongue animations. Additional services that were provided include rigging, skinning, and geometry modification.

"Working with Remedy and metricminds on such a highly anticipated title was an exceptional opportunity for us," said Adam Kraver, CEO of CaptiveMotion. "We've been big fans of the Max Payne franchise, and I have personally been looking forward to Alan Wake since it was first announced. But as an avid gamer, there is a big downside to working on a project like this, spoilers."

Look for new trailers including work from CaptiveMotion and metricminds to be released by Remedy Entertainment in early March 2010. Current material can be found at www.captivemotion.com.

metricminds
Philip Weiss, +49 69 759 3380
philip@metricminds.com
or
CaptiveMotion
Mark Carson, 480-899-6222
mark@captivemotion.com