Congratulations to all the team at Aardman and Digixart. 11-11: MEMORIES RETOLD has been nominated for British Game and Game Beyond Entertainment in this year’s BAFTA Games Awards.

We were very proud to play a small role in this game when we were commissioned by Aardman last year to provide the motion capture.

11-11: MEMORIES RETOLD is a story-driven narrative adventure set during World War I with a unique painted style that plans to deliver an entertaining experience unlike anything before. The Aardman team spent nearly two weeks with us in the CAMERA Studio over the course of nine individual shoots to get the motion capture data they needed to animate most of the major characters in 11:11. The capture sessions were delivered using CAMERA’s Vicon system, and involved two performers, Chris Brown and Alison Garner, along with a selection of props including a rifle and even a stuffed cat. For each shoot the CAMERA team would attach 50 passive optical markers to the performer’s motion capture suit. The cameras then track the position of those markers in space to create a skeleton that is used to animate a digital avatar.

Real-time pre-visualisation, or pre-vis, is a method of showing live how the motion data that the performer is generating looks on the character avatar. It uses a pipeline taking the motion data into the game engine Unity where it is applied to the character in real time to give a ‘rough’ version of what of the final outputs will look like. Pre-vis was used during shoots to help the Aardman team direct the performer and make decisions about how the shots should be done. We also had input during the shoots from the lead animator based out in Singapore, who was able to watch the performance in the studio via video link. In total CAMERA delivered around 8000 character seconds of body motion capture data for the project.

For more information on 11-11: Memories Retold.

For more information on BAFTA Games Awards 2019.