Vancouver: In DreamWorks’ comedy smash Blades of Glory, Will Ferrell and Jon Heder perform cutting-edge figure skating moves on the ice, but the most challenging lifts happened behind the scenes at Vancouver’s Rainmaker Visual Effects.

Led by CG supervisor Kody Sabourin, VFX supervisor Mark Breakspear and senior VFX producer Shauna Bryan, the Rainmaker team developed state-of-the-art technology to lift the faces of Ferrell and Heder onto the bodies of skating doubles.

Sabourin, a face replacement expert, previously worked on the Matrix films with George Borshukov at California’s ESC Entertainment.

‘From this experience, I knew the best way to approach this project was with capturing animated textures at the same time we captured the actor’s performance,’ Sabourin says.

‘I knew what we needed to achieve, but at the time we did not have the tools or the pipeline at Rainmaker to do the job. We looked for a company to outsource, but were unable to find one,’ he says.

After three months of R&D and six months of production, Rainmaker came up with a new technology dubbed ‘p-cap,’ or performance capture.

They began with plaster-cast molds of the actors’ faces that were scanned at high resolution. Then they determined 102 key points on the faces of Ferrell and Heder to capture how their muscles move, and added these dots during makeup to each actor’s face. Next, the actors sat in a chair surrounded by mirrors, three HD cameras and one film camera, and watched footage of the real skaters doing their moves, providing facial expressions that mimicked those of the skaters.

Using the Realviz MatchMover Pro tracking system and Maya 3D animation and FX software, Rainmaker translated the recorded performances to the CG models, creating a seamless 3D effect.

In post, Sabourin and 150 Rainmaker staff cranked out 150 face replacements over six months.

‘It was fun, but tedious,’ he recalls. ‘When the end result is to produce an accurate representation of a human face, there is little room for error.’

Local shop Image Engine Design was called in to provide compositing for 38 shots when the film’s release date was bumped up to March 30.

Rainmaker provided a total of 300 FX shots for the movie – which was shot in part in Montreal – also including transforming the 3D background of the Los Angeles Sports Arena to look like three different venues, and populating crowds using Massive Software. *

www.rainmaker.com