MPC recreates the faces of WWII leaders

Tiger Aspect has completed production on the forthcoming documentary drama ‘Virtual History - The Secret Plot to Kill Hitler’ for the Discovery Channel, airing on October 24.
This groundbreaking documentary focuses on events unfolding on one momentous day, July 20 1944. It follows Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin as they make decisions that will change the course of history forever.
The programme adopted remarkable cutting-edge computer animation techniques, created by The Moving Picture Company. MPC’s mission, based on historical documents and accounts, was to transform the faces of actors into exact replicas of the leaders and turn contemporary live action footage into authentic 1940's colour archive.
The process MPC used to re-create the political leaders involved several main stages. Firstly, plaster casts were made of the actors’ heads. A sculptor then used these as a base upon which to fashion realistic faces of the historical figures. Once the faces resembled the leaders at that time of the war, the busts were laser-scanned in order to create digital copies in the computer. The faces were then extracted from the heads and textured.
During the live action shoot, the actors wore specially designed rigs with markers, which allowed for the subsequent tracking of their heads in the footage, and the replacement of their faces with the CG versions.
After this, the actors repeated their lines in a facial motion capture session. Their facial movement (dialogue and expressions) was recorded and processed, and then applied to the CG faces, bringing them to life.
The fully textured digital faces were lit to match the on-set lighting conditions, and then composited into the live action footage.
Once the team were happy with the re-created leaders, digital grade and damage effects were added to the shots. In order to emulate authentic archive material, the team researched the properties of different film stocks of that period, and also created a probable ‘life-story’ of this exposed film, from the 1940’s up to the present day. Using this knowledge, American, German and British looks were created, each displaying different colour slants and propensity to damage.
The resulting archive footage closely matches that of the 1940’s.
The programme airs on the Discovery Channel on Sunday October 24 in most European countries, the Middle East and Africa.
(GB)