“Kinski Revisited” by Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
Conference:
Title:
- Kinski Revisited
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg
Description:
“Kinski Revisited” is an homage to the German actor Klaus Kin-ski, who died in November 1991. Our intention was to recreate the actor as he would appear in 2007. The re-creation process was restricted to referencing filmed material and photographs. These constraints led to a nearly entirely artist-driven approach to creating a convincing and realistic digital performance.
The 34-second film shows Kinski at the age of 81 acting in origi-nal film sequences and giving an interview, his voice performed by David Zimmering. The entire facial performance was created by “hand” animation; no performance-capture technique was used.
Klaus Kinski was a very emotional and expressive actor, so we chose him to demonstate that our animation tools and tech-niques are capable of creating not only believable but also realistic results.
The visuals were generated using tools and techniques developed within research projects at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg’s Institute of Animation. The Adaptable Facial Setup presented as a sketch at SIGGRAPH 2004 was further developed to match the requirements of this production.
Software:
Facial Animation Toolset for Maya Version 1.1 (Institute of Animation), Maya 8.0 on Windows, MentalRay, Shake v2.5, Reelsmart Motionblur, Displacement extraction of life-cast by RGBXYZ, Mudbox 1.0, Shave and a Haircut 4
Additional Contributors:
Project Supervisor & Rigging: Volker Helzle
Rendering & Shading: Robin Reyer
Compositing: Andreas Krein
Animation Supervisor: Angela Jedek
Live Cast: Jan Ptassek
Voice: David Zimmering
Technical Directors: Stefan Habel, Lars Demel, Hendrik Panz
Director: Andreas Krein
Producer: Volker Helzle
