If you’ve watched some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters in recent years, you’ve almost surely seen Kiran Bhat’s work.
It is thanks to Kiran and his former colleagues at Industrial Light & Magic that digitally-created characters like the Hulk in The Avengers or Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars: Rogue One.
Last week, Kiran and his colleagues Michael Koperwas, Brian Cantwell and Paige Warner, were honoured for the revolutionary ILM facial performance-capture solving system they created. The team was given the Scientific and Technical Award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, popularly known as a Technical Oscar award.
Speaking to The News Minute over email, Kiran, who originally hails from Coimbatore and currently lives in San Francisco, spoke about his work and the joy at being recognised for it.
How do you feel about receiving the award? You now join an elite group of only seven other Indians to have a won a prestigious Oscar Award. How does that feel?
It’s quite humbling, and I am super honoured to be on this list!
You had received some intimation about the possibility when the Academy had contacted you some six months ago. Did you think then that you would eventually receive this honour?
The Sci-Tech Academy committee is extremely thorough and can even take years before they give away an award. I was delighted to find out (six months ago) that they were investigating our work for 2017. But these awards tend to be extremely selective, and so I wasn’t raising my hopes then! I was cautiously optimistic though, given that we had done several high profile movies using this technology.
Could you tell me a little more about the technology that you developed with Michael Koperwas, Brian Cantwell and Paige Warner, which has won you the award?
This technology analyses an actor’s face from the video and automatically animates a 3D digital character that completely matches the actor’s facial performance. For example, the Hulk character’s face in The Avengers was built and animated from Mark Ruffalo, a Hollywood actor.
The technology allowed the ILM to automatically create the Hulk’s facial emotions by analysing Mark’s performance on a movie set. Another example was the Tarkin character (fully computer-generated) in Star Wars: Rogue One, which was animated from the facial performance of Guy Henry, a British actor.
What got you into your line of work, which seems to be an interesting mix of highly technical and artistic work?
I’ve always been fascinated with understanding movement and nature; so studying facial movements and representing it in a computer felt like the ultimate challenge in this aspect.
Representing faces in a computer is tricky to get right – we have to capture both large scale movement (jaw movement and lip sync during dialog, for example), but it’s even more critical to capture subtle movements and nuances because they are very important in conveying emotion. I pursued this challenge using computer vision algorithms, which analyses human faces from video and converts them into animation signals.
Do you see yourself and your work coming into Indian cinema in the near future?
I think you will see our work at Loom.ai in VR sooner than cinema. Loom.ai’s technology will allow you to create your 3D avatars in minutes from a selfie, and will let you immerse yourself in virtual environments such as VR arcades or theme parks or even video games.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)