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Sunday, June 23, 2024

Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin

[Screenshot]

Back in 2020, Hal Hickel answered a Quora question with great detail
about how we created Grand Moff Tarkin for "Rogue One" (2016), and in
the interest of film history preservation, I got Hal's permission to
reprint it here. (I was a lead on the digital human team at ILM for
Tarkin, and worked closely with Hal on the film.)

Hal summarizes our process succinctly, and corrects many
misconceptions and untruths about how we made Tarkin, so I feel like
this is an important document. To be frank, I hesitate to talk
publicly too much about our Tarkin and Leia work for "Rogue One"
because for some folks it generates a lot of... emotion.

I, like Hal, have no interest in defending the quality of our work.
I'll say this: immediately after the movie came out, I talked to a
lot of regular, non-industry people who saw the movie and asked them
their thoughts on Tarkin, 'you know, the older gentleman who was
Krennic's boss.' Many folks didn't understand the nature of my
question, nor why I was asking it. They liked his performance, and
didn't think anything further of it. Then I let them know that Tarkin
is a digital creation, meant to resemble Peter Cushing who appeared
in the original "Star Wars" (1977) and who died in 1994. I got a lot
of stunned reactions from relaying that news. A lot of people who saw
"Rogue One" had no idea that Tarkin was a digital, synthetic
character, and just assumed it was a regular human actor.

I hope you like Hal's piece.

. . . . 


Quora: Why does Tarkin's CGI in Rogue One look so plastic-y? Could
they have made it look more realistic?

Answered by Hal Hickel, Animation Supervisor for "Rogue One"

Hi, I was the animation supervisor on Rogue One, and as such I was
intimately involved with the creation of Tarkin.

I've decided to chime in for one purpose only, to clarify the process
we used. I have no interest in trying to convince anyone to like the
results more than they do, or to argue with anyone about how "real"
our work looked in the film. Again, I just want to clarify our
process for informational purposes.

The broad plan was to hire an actor, film them on set in costume, and
just replace the head with a CG Tarkin head, leaving the real body in
the scene. The actor on set would be wearing a helmet with small
cameras mounted to it, to record their facial performance (similar to
what you've seen in the behind the scenes footage from Avatar, or
Planet of the Apes).

That's what we did, excepting that in about 30% of the shots, we
opted for full replacement (head and body) with CG, because for
certain shots it just made more sense.

[Screenshot]
[Screenshot]


Guy Henry was cast because he's a terrific actor, and had the bearing
and vocal quality we were looking for. It was helpful that he also
had a certain physical resemblance (high cheekbones, etc), though
that was not essential, given that the plan was to completely replace
his head with our CG Tarkin. That said, when remapping the facial
expressions of one person onto another (Henry to Cushing), the more
similar they are, the easier it's going to be.

The intention was never for Guy to do either a vocal, or physical
"impression" of Peter Cushing, but rather to give us a performance
that "felt" like Tarkin, both physically and vocally. So we never
asked for, or expected a spot on vocal match, or for Guy to smirk,
etc, like Cushing.

We didn't do any modulation or any other audio tricks with Henry's
voice. We didn't compare waveforms with Cushing audio, talk to his
old manager, or any of that other stuff mentioned elsewhere in this
thread. We just used Guy Henry's voice. I'm sure Guy watched the
Tarkin scenes from ANH endlessly, and did his best to find a tone and
delivery that felt right.

Guy didn't wear any prosthetics or makeup as part of the process,
with the exception of the dots that help us track his facial
movement. Someone in this thread talked about "makeup, cosmetics,
physical altering". No. Again, we just put dots on Guy's face to
track it's movement, that's all.

Guy was filmed on set, in the costume. The movement of the dots on
his face, and his voice were recorded simultaneously during filming.
I mention this, because some VFX companies prefer a method where
Facial Capture is done separately, on a specialized stage at a later
time. We prefer to capture an actor's performance all at once (voice,
body, face) whenever possible.

We also scanned Guy Henry on the ICT Light Stage, to give us a high
resolution CG model of Guy Henry, and to capture his skin texture.
Now why would we need a CG Guy Henry?

[Screenshot]

The CG version of Guy Henry (left) and the real Guy Henry as
photographed (right), from Rogue One - A Star Wars Story: The
Princess & The Governor Featurette


We needed it for a few reasons: One is that once we've tracked the
motion of the dots on his face in a given piece of performance,
rather than immediately applying that motion data to the CG Tarkin,
we instead apply it first to the CG Guy Henry. This give us an apples
to apples comparison to see if we've captured and processed the
facial performance accurately. When we're satisfied that we have, we
then apply it to Tarkin.

Another reason, is that having the lighting data that is captured
with Guy Henry on the Light Stage, gives us a sort of "ground truth"
that we can compare our CG Tarkin to, to see if his skin is reacting
to light realistically. Also, because there are many things about the
fine details of Guy Henry's skin that are appropriate for Tarkin's
skin (general tone, pores, etc), we can use the Guy Henry textures as
a way to get a leg up on the Tarkin skin textures, rather than
starting from zero.

Ok, so we've hired an actor, and shot them on location. We've built a
CG copy of that actor in order to be able to check out facial capture
data to see that it's accurate, and to give us a "ground truth" for
the skin texture and lighting.

Now we (obviously) have to build a CG Tarkin.

I noticed some comments in another answer in this thread about his
mouth "not being aligned to his chin", or the ears being "too long".
Again, I'm not here to argue the merits of our work, but I think it's
useful to point out that if you assembled hundreds of photographs of
Peter Cushing (as we did), you would find that he can look vastly
different from one photograph to another, depending on his
expression, the lighting, the makeup, the focal length of the lens,
the year the photo was taken, etc etc. So comparing a single frame of
our Tarkin to a single photo of Cushing is not a particularly valid
way to troubleshoot whatever issues there may be.

Luckily, we didn't have to work from just photos. We had in our
possession a life casting of Peter Cushing's face. It was made not
long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing's
age, etc. Of course we know that sometimes the process of taking a
life cast can slightly distort the face of the subject (the weight of
the casting material can pull down on the skin), so we were mindful
of that. That casting was a terrific starting point for us, and gave
us very accurate information.

Starting from there, a very accurate CG model of Tarkin was created.
As well, highly detailed textures, with pore detail, age spots,
veins, etc etc. The CG hair groom was challenging, as the styling on
Cushing for that role was a bit eccentric.

So taking one shot from the film as an example, let's say a medium
close up:

We track the movement of Guy's head through space, so we can move the
CG Tarkin head in the same way.

We track the dot motion on Guy's face to extract his facial
performance. We apply that motion to the CG Guy Henry, and if we're
happy with how it looks, we apply it to the CG Tarkin. By the way,
someone in this thread theorized that perhaps the CG Tarkin was
missing "micro expressions". While we are always trying to increase
the accuracy, and detail of our Facial Capture system, I have to say
that even now, we are capturing very fine detail, including very
tiny, barely perceptible micro movements. We are familiar with Paul
Ekman's work, and the importance of Micro Expressions, and have tried
hard to be sure that level of fidelity exists in our work. If it was
happening on Guy Henry's face, it was happening on Tarkin's face.

[Screenshot]

Now we have the real Guy Henry body, with the CG Tarkin head. We
paint out any bits of Henry's head that Tarkin doesn't cover up.

We make adjustments to the facial performance to make it feel more
"Tarkin", since (unsurprisingly), Guy Henry doesn't use his facial
muscles the same way that Peter Cushing did. Guy doesn't smile like
Cushing, doesn't form phonemes like Cushing, etc. So we have to do a
sort of "motion likeness" pass. This is done by our animators, using
a very light touch. Note: the point is NOT to change the acting
choices made by Guy Henry, it's just to adjust things so that when
Guy chooses to smile, it looks like a Tarkin smile, not like a Guy
Henry smile. Of course in doing so, we have to be very careful to
maintain exactly what sort of smile it is. We don't want to transform
a mocking, insincere smile into a genuine, warm smile.

The Tarkin head with final facial performance is lit to match the
lighting in the footage, and rendered.

The rendered CG Tarkin head is composited onto the real Guy Henry
body.

There are of course many many steps to each one of the steps I've
outlined above. Each one of these steps encompasses the highly
skilled work of many many very talented artists and technicians.

So again, like it, don't like it, that's none of my business. I just
wanted to get the facts out there, in terms of our process, because
there was some inaccurate information being posted.

Thanks for reading.

H



Posted by Todd Vaziri at 6/23/2024 03:50:00 PM # #
Labels: Rogue One, Tarkin

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