On the Stick

In the United States, Mazda ads show the open road. But in Japan, they feature a family of pizza-loving stick people made possible by state-of-the-art computer effects. Animated by Venice-based House of Moves, one spot has the stick dad running through the rain, carrying a pizza. He jumps in his Mazda Capella sedan and places the pizza on a reclined seat for an impromptu family picnic. This is how House of Moves--which specializes in “motion capture” technology--made the stick characters move:

1. Human actors are suited from head to toe in blue costumes and placed in front of a blue screen. The screen and suits filter out unwanted motion by the characters, allowing seven cameras placed around the scene to tap only information from 32 markers attached to each actor’s suit. These markers (decidedly low-tech plastic deodorant caps covered with duct tape) reflect infrared light emitted by the cameras back into the cameras to be recorded on video.

2. The video--which combines images from all seven cameras--is run through computers resulting in an effect that looks like a dot-to-dot drawing (in which the dots represent markers worn by the actors). Technicians connect the dots to form a rudimentary skeleton that performs the same movements that the actors did during filming. This digital image is projected onto a computer-generated skeletal model that makes the figure appear solid and mimics three-dimensional movement.

3. House of Moves then forwarded the computer-generated images to Burbank-based Rainmaker Digital Pictures, which completed the shots by transforming the skeletons into stick figures and adding color, lighting, digital props and rain.