Rooftop Fight

Final edit for the fight sequence

Lights, Camera's.... Editing

When deciding what to capture earlier in the year we looked at a few action and fights scenes to try and gain inspiration and ideas. We also looked at the best way to present action and fights to an audience and a lot of it happens in quick succession with plenty of action and reaction shots to convey the story without dialog. Above are some of the shots I have chosen to shot the contact of the punch as well as the reaction.

In MotionBuilder we previously looked at camera's, lenses and focal length and in this screen shot I'm using a fairly wide camera which distorts the shot but I'm using it to emphasize the sweep that is about to occur. The wide lens with the low angle helps to sell that idea (I think) and it also breaks up the constant over the shoulder action/reaction to wide/full shots. I've also decided to use some point-of-view camera's to help get over the "line" and create a bit more tension. 

 Here is an example of some of the lighting I used in MotionBuilder, found it a little confusing but I think I got most of it to work and create an eerie night mood. 

Fight Scene Clean Up

The fight scene is coming along! Above is the second part of the sequence and I've set up a comparison from just the capture/actors to the finalizing stage of the clean up (still have a few minor changes to do). You might notice that I've had to add reactive and exaggerated animation in some areas mainly because the actors didn't make full forced hits so some of their reactions were a little withdrawn. I have found this to be a major part of the clean up so far (other than the standard marker glitches), just trying to avoid that staged performance feel to the animation. But I think this issue is something that could mostly be dealt with during the capture as a directive issue and really knowing what you want and how to capture what you're after, which I guess comes with experience and more dedicated time to capturing footage.

Below is the first half of the sequence with the comparison of the semi-raw captured footage. The scale of the characters as shown is somewhat larger than the actors which did cause the shoulders to hunch/shrug a little, this was corrected using the character offset and solving options in motionBuilder. The varying sizes of each character also required extra tweaking with the contact hits to make sure they landed in the correct places. 

Fight - All Captures

Above are most of the successful shots in MotionBuilder with only the actors. As you can see some of the problems with heads breaking, were the type of issues that we were dealing with when cleaning up the data in Motive but on different body parts. Some of the issues as seen above, we couldn't fix in Motive so decided that those were better dealt with in Mobu.

Fight Capture

Here is some footage from the day of the fight capture session. We got some cool action and shots and had a lot of fun but unfortunately we also had a number of issues throughout the capture. The wanding to calibrate the space and camera's took 3 attempts before motive was able to calculate a satisfactory space. When we did finally get to the capturing the first few shots were good but with the continuous fast action and connecting hits the markers were moving on the actors and at certain times markers would end up on the other actor or just flying off. This began causing issues within motive with it breaking the characters and at times characters would switch over. This did slow down the process because it wasn't always a simple fix by replacing the markers. In the end most of the footage was usable but did require some time in Motive to fix the broken connections before we exported it. 

Rigs for Fight Capture

Here are some of the rigs we might choose from to use for the fight scene. The rigs are from the free character section on mixamo site. Not certain about the type of scene we're looking for but I think these give us some options considering the circumstances, time and setting up the rigs. All these rigs are Mobu ready with the correct skeletal naming conventions, which will speed up the characterizing process. We'll simple have to drop the rigs into the captured data and re-define their source to the actors, which will be exported with the data from Motive. 

Action/Fight Capture - Inspiration

We have another opportunity to capture some new footage, but this time it is unrelated to the short film we're creating. We've decided to do an action/fight scene, which will be our first attempt at capturing two actors in the capture space. With the size of the space our best option is to stay away from anything too dramatic and stick to some close combat fights. With this we could create a more dramatic scene in MotionBuilder using cameras lights and editing. Here are some inspirational/example scenes that we have decided on and passed onto the actors to give them an idea of what we're after.


The beginning of Casino Royale has a pretty cool chase scene but from about 2:48 there is a fight on a crane arm and because of the location the actors are required to fight in a confined space which I thought kind of represented the capture space minus the actual crane. This type of combat could be interesting.


The Bourne films have quite a lot of really cool close combat scenes. This scene is in a simple environment with some props (a knife, newspaper & cable) as weapons which could be a good opportunity to get some constraints to the hands inside MoBu. There is also some grappling and wrestling which would require a bit of clean up to make sure body parts aren't passing through each other.


In this Special ID scene there is good action in another simple setting and close space which is ideal for what we're looking for. Besides the car there are no other props. The action has more kicks and back and forth fighting in a short time.