Digital Actors in Documentary Film

The research lab at Animationsinstitut of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg has initiated numerous projects dedicated to convincing creation of human faces and their application across Animation, VFX and Interactive Media. In this latest project the team took a closer look into the potential of documentary film formats.

 

The selected use case investigates the convincing digital recreation of a historical character. While actors in re-enactments resemble the original only to some degree, completely digital characters can become convincing counterparts down to the smallest wrinkle. However, the project does not aim at substituting the actors, but tries to define pipelines to conserve their unique performance, including voice and gestures to create natural looking and appealing digital actors. For this use case, Albert Einstein served as a subject of investigation. His face is well-known and found its way into pop culture, although there are almost no color images of him. The results of the project are several short episodes where Albert Einstein comments on recent events, stating some of his famous quotes. As a variety of technical approaches are available to digitize existing humans, this work is particularly dedicated to tools for fully artistic approaches. Three short films were released on our YouTube channel in December 2017.

 

The technological basis for creating this digital actor is based on former research initiatives at Filmakademie (Facial Animation Toolset). These tools have been further enhanced to meet the requirements of this production. The technical innovation has been presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 workshop on Data-Driven Animation Techniques. To further support the global effort in creating convincing digital humans the digital assets of this production were released in early 2018.

 

This project was partly funded by the MFG Foundation in the scope of the Karl-Steinbuch-Forschungsprogramm (KSF) research program.

Dataset

The dataset DIGITAL ACTOR ALBERT EINSTEIN 2018 by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg is intended to support the global effort in creating convincing digital humans. Make sure your read the Terms of Use before downloading the dataset.

 


Download Dataset DIGITAL ACTOR ALBERT EINSTEIN 2018

 

From analogue sculpt (left) to digital model (right).

Publications