VFX House Digital Domain Launches Markerless MoCap Facial Tracking System (EXCLUSIVE)

04.17.24Featured on Variety

By: Carolyn Giardina

Visual effects studio Digital Domain is introducing a new version of its Masquerade facial motion capture system, which eliminates the need for actors to wear tracking markers on their faces during production. CTO Hanno Basse tells Variety that the company is sharing the development with customers and “we’re probably going to do several projects this year” using the tech.

A bit of history: Earlier versions of Masquerade were used by Digital Domain to enable Josh Brolin to play Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” and Tatiana Maslany to portray the titular “She Hulk.”

Basse believes that by eliminating the need to use tracking markers, Masquerade3 can save time and money while getting a more precise performance.

“It removes the need of getting the dots on people’s faces every day. So it saves time and money on set,” he says. “The other thing was, because the dots would never exactly be in the same place from one day to the next, there was a lot of post processing that we had to do to clean up that tracking data. We don’t have to do that cleanup anymore. We basically use machine learning directly from the performance of the actor. … That means not only is it easier on set, it’s also saving time and cost on the postproduction side. It’s also is less error prone.”

Digital Domain’s recent film and TV credits includes “Blue Beetle,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Dark Matter,” “Ahsoka” and “The Last of Us.”