Mark ardington

Today we had are first guest speak who happened to be Mark ardington on the visual effects behind Ex-machina, It was a great talk as it gave me a behind the scenes look at the movie that I'd watch in the cinema, I found it better than the vfx break down videos YouTube as it was more personal and he explained everything in detail and I got to hold an Oscar which is awesome on its own. Mark started the talk by introducing us to the story line and how the directors wanted Ava to look, there was no need for a motion capture suit or green suit because the actress had a suit on that covered most of her body expect for her arms legs and core, instead they used tracking in post-production.

During per-production Mark created a basic model so that the director and actors had a references and an idea of what Ava was going to look like thought filming Ava's design stayed the same until post-production when the director had saved some money and he wanted part of Ava head to be robotic so only the front was human. The main problem they face on shoot was that they used tracking on all of Ava's joints because of this her legs would bend backwards when she walked, Mark wrote a program called crazyIK that allowed them to correct her joint movement, it also gave them more control over Ava.