Visual Effects (VFX) - History, Growth of Industry, Motion Capture and Double Negative

This article provides an overview of the history and growth of the VFX industry, including the use of motion capture technology and the role of Double Negative. It covers the evolution of VFX from the early 1900s to the present day, with a focus on the UK film industry. The article also discusses the benefits of motion capture technology and how it has revolutionized the animation process. Finally, it explores the work of Double Negative, one of the largest providers of VFX in the world.

Running head: VISUAL EFFECTS
Visual Effects (VFX)
Name of Student-
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History of VFX
The history of Visual Effects started in the early 1900s. The first ever animation film that
was introduced in the year 1914 was Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie the Dinosaur was the first film
that had featured characters from a popular comic strip (Barber et al., 2016). The films that were
made at that time by visual effects had a method of single frame that involved image protection
at high volume frames per second. Gertie the Dinosaur was the first ever successful animated
film over the globe.
First full length animation film that was made using single frame animation was the
world famous Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs movie by Walt Disney in 1937. Another world
famous movie King Kong, in the year 1933 was one of the most pioneering movies in
Hollywood VFX that uses the techniques of visual effects (Smith & Martin-Portugues Santacreu,
2017). This film was made with visual effects including stop motion photography. This involved
a set of hand drawn sketches and photographs of real puppets and models. Theses puppets and
models were manipulated in one big frame all at a time for creating an effect in the movie.
Hollywood visual effects or VFX introduced another technique of visual effect. This was
using the miniature model for creating movie effect. This idea was taken to next level by classic
franchise of Sci-fi known as Star Trek or Star Wars (Zone, 2014). They used hundreds and
hundreds of miniature model that were manipulated by some excellent and expert camerawork
for making these films.
Another visual effects based movie was released in the year 1978 as Superman, was
considered as one more milestone in the industry of special effects. The effects in Superman was

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done by using cables, expert camera tricks and wit blue screen. The flying motion of the
Spiderman was created with these elements.
By the end of 1990s, use of CGI (Computer generated imagery) came into the scenario.
This CGI effects in VFX made the effects more clear and prominent (Day et al., 2016). This soon
became popular among all the Hollywood makers and the moviegoers. The films that became
famous in the 1990s were Terminator 1 and Jurassic Park that were also made with the help of
CGI. In 1982 as well, a movie was made with CGI effects named Tron.
The scenario of film making is changed with the involvement of visual effects in it
(Griffiths, 2018). From earlier days, the Hollywood films makers were considered as the king of
special effects but, now all film makers uses the advantage of visual effects so that they can
enhance their works. The most demands for VFX is in the film industries of India and China.
The popularity of visual effects have changed the world of cinema totally. The demand of
visual effects and CGI is increasing day by day and the demand of special effects in rising
mostly in the Toolbox Studio Company that has also done attractive work in the field of VFX
(Fleming & Brown, 2015). For the film UnIndian, the visual effects were created by the
company, which has involved Bret Lee (Australian cricketer) as a protagonist.
Growth of VFX Industry over the years in England
The scale of production of visual effects and their complexities have increased
tremendously, the VFX film production industries in United Kingdom’s have changed
themselves from cottage industry to multi-national industries and enterprises. UK has released
many films with the help pf CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) that includes Jurassic Park in
1993, Judgment Day in1991, and Terminator (Wilcox et al., 2015). Each of these films contained

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almost 50 shots of visual effects. More advanced, Jurassic Park in 2015 had almost 2,000 shots
using visual effects and the Terminator Salvation of 2009 had almost 1250 shots made through
visual effect or CGI.
The VFX industries in United Kingdom has undertaken a great change in the recent
years. The invention of double negative has changed the film production a lot in the recent years
(Finance & Zwerman, 2015). The concept of Double negative was started as a boutique
operation in the year 1998 with 30 staffs. Double Negative started to merge the creative service
of Prime Focus World in June, 2014. This created one of the most famous visual effect company
with about 4,500 employees working.
The shot capturer Cinesite in Jurassic Park took Vancouver’s Image Engine in June in the
year 2015 and the owner of MPC, Technicolor has paid £190m in September for making a short
form of VFX giant, The Mill.
Most of the successful films over the globe uses the VFX effects in huge amount. The
Avengers: Age of Ultron from Marvel have used more than 3,000 visual effect shots for making
Doctor Strange and Guardians of Galaxy 2.
The skills of VFX software and the skills are increasing day by day with other types of
film. Cinesite, the fanous shot capturer created about 138 photo real shot from the environment
for the film The Revenant (Simon, Benghozi & Salvador, 2015). Another famous shot capturer
Warner Bros completed Jungle Book by creating Framestore with forests and digital jungle for
excluding the cost of location shooting.
The recent movie in UK Age of Ultron has used visual effects from 12 VFX houses it is
not possible for a single studio to capture this amount of work in single outfit. The studion will

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have to book multiple shops so that they can achieve the scale as well as access the financial
rebates.
The facilities that the United Kingdom VFX usage is magnifying day by day and with the
growth some of the companies are identifying the development to their IP (Intellectual property)
as business opportunity. The Framestore and the Double Negative effect created by Cinesite have
made the results of animation as a mix of results.
Motion Capture
Motion Capture, commonly known as MoCap is basically a process that records the
movement of the objects or the people. MoCaps or Mobile Captures are basically used by
militaries, sports, entertainment, medical applications, and are used for validation for computer
vision as well as robotics. In the industry of film making and in the industries of video games
developing, the Motion capture actually captures the actions of the human actors, and that
information is used to animated the models of digital character in 2 Dimensional as well as 3
Dimensional computer animations (Stewart, 2017). The motion of the face or finger are captured
or subtle expressions are captured, then the process of motion capturing is known as
Performance Capturing. Many sectors calls Motion Capturing as MoCaps or Motion Tracking,
the Motion Capture is known as Match moving in the game and film making industries.
Motion capture usually provides significant saving of time for the animation projects.
MoCaps can easily simplify the process of animation when the characters of animation are
recreated which makes the animation complex and realistic (Rüling & Duymedjian, 2014). There
can be involvement of interaction of many 3D characters and participating in the common

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activities of the game or the film. Simple animation of a character walking is very easy and
realistic when it is captured instead of making it by hand.
Mocap are also able to capture nuance easily. If a record of a female actor is recorded and
loaded with the movement of a 3D male character, then also it can be easily recognized. MoCaps
are such efficient. The most modern an innovated Inertial Motion Capture System is known is
the Pixelhunters (Zone, 2014). The Pixelhunters are one of the modern equipment that provides
most innovative solution for the Motion capturing that is camera less. This camera less motion
capturing was developed by Xsens. This technology is used in recent films such as X-MEN,
JOHN CARTER, TED and many more. This helps to make virtual characters very easily. This
technique is also used in real time animation for fantabulous effects.
Double Negative and their work with Motion Capture
Double Negative, most commonly known as Dneg is one of the largest provider of VFX
or visual effects in the world. This provider of VFX are mostly used by films makers in
Vancouver, Mumbai, and London (Wood, 2015). The recent films that the Double Negative
produced includes Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Interstellar, Ant-man, he Hunger
Games: Mockingjay Part 2, Bridge of Spiesand Ex Machina, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation,
Spectre and many more. These film makers are permanent customers of Double Negative and
request more new and innovative features with new hardware.
The use of Double Negative piplined with Motion Capture has made the idea a new one.
By doing this, the most advantage that can be gained is that they can export the data of raw
MoCap from the software al session end with no extra processing (Barber et al., 2016). This
helps to deliver the data back to all animators very quickly leaving no time to work for

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animations. The quick time of capturing makes the animator to capture as well as process the
time giving the animator to test many ideas for their shots.

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References
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effects an industry perspective of structure from motion. In Proceedings of the 2016
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Day, B. L., Muller, T., Offord, J., & Di Giulio, I. (2016). Dual processing of visual rotation for
bipedal stance control. The Journal of physiology, 594(19), 5661-5671.
Finance, C., & Zwerman, S. (2015). The visual effects producer: understanding the art and
business of VFX. CRC Press.
Fleming, D. H., & Brown, W. (2015). FCJ-176 A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content
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Griffiths, A. (2018). Science and spectacle: Native American representation in early cinema.
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Smith, T. J., & Martin-Portugues Santacreu, J. Y. (2017). Match-action: The role of motion and
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