1/4 A character from A Final Transmission.
Computer games are becoming more and more realistic and the images are often hardly distinguishable from the real thing. Students of the Breda University for Applied Sciences (BUAS) make games, but also films. Their short film ‘A Final Transmission’ was received with acclaim at two film festivals in Amsterdam.
Not a Hollywood production with expensive actors and huge budgets, but a classroom and a laptop. A student wears a super-tight suit with 17 motion sensors. Every movement he makes is digitally recorded, resulting in a computer puppet with human movements.
Of ‘performance capture technology’ people and animals come to life in games and movies. Student Luuk Hoffmans from Boxtel: “The suit with sensors sends all movements to a computer that records everything.”
Fellow student Max van de Plas has put on the suit and is making dancing movements. The figure on the screen mimics everything. It is now a kind of wire puppet. “We can then make anything out of it: people, monsters, aliens,” says Luuk.
The students’ computer characters not only move humanly, the faces also look almost perfectly human.
The short film can now be seen at the Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam. The students were assisted in the making by director Kelly Klingenberg. “They are huge creatives and it’s really impressive what they can make. And all because of a lot of work behind the computer.”
According to Klingenberg, the three-minute film is not inferior to what is made in Hollywood: “Really amazing. I think that the students of this program really have a bright future.”
This is how the video was made with motion capture:
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