A fascinating talk at the TED conference 2009 by Ed Ulbrich, president and digital-effects guru of Digital Domain, on the subject of creating Brad Pitt at ages 60, 70 and 80 for the Oscar-winning film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Deeming traditional facial motion tracking inadequate, his team underwent the near impossible task of tackling the holy grail of the CG industry – the human face – and produced a jaw-dropping performance, with Benjamin being computer generated for the entire first hour of the movie.

After much research, a technique dubbed Contour was chosen, which involved painting Brad’s face with phosphorous so four special HD cameras could scan and produce a real-time 3D reconstruction of the surface movements of his skin. They also created three maquettes of Brad at ages 60, 70 & 80 and scanned them at very high resolution to create digital replicas. The digital maquettes were then transposed onto the contour scan to produce a CG character that mimicked Brad’s movements.

Effectively we created the digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face. There are no animators necessary to come in and interpret behaviour or enhance his performance…. we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology Emotion-capture as oppose to just motion capture.

This is a huge break through for the CG industry and the team at Digital Domain were rewarded for their efforts on sunday with an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects category.