MOTION CAPTURE FILM

During the Opening Ceremony of London 2012, there were moments where the pixels took the lead role. Unfortunately, as always happens with live shows, this didn’t go exactly as planned.

This film is a one man/one day/one camera project I made, documenting the process we at Crystal went through to create one of these ‘Hero Moments.’

The idea was fairly simple; we wanted Olympic Legend Jesse Owens to do a lap of the stadium around the pixels as the Olympic flag was raised. Obviously the grainy footage from 1936 wasn’t going to be usable so we decided to recreate the moment using CGI.

We hired a professional sprinter who we identified as having the distinct upright running position and went about trying to recreate Jesse’s run using a motion capture suite. After much trial and error we got exactly what we needed and the remodeled CGI looked convincing.

When It finally came to show time, just as the footage started to play, they wheeled out sporting legend Mohamed Ali. The whole crowd rose to their feet in applause and our pixels where so completely illegible, nobody has any idea the footage ever existed.