As first blush, it seems anything but extravagant — a bunch of padded walls and cameras contained in a room the size of an elementary school gym.
But the work getting turned out of the facility is touted as the new next big thing in the world of TV, movies and video games.
The Vancouver Film School (VFS) rolled a new performance capture facility May 18 that has school officials abuzz with talk of Emmys, Oscars and the like.
“This is the only film school in the world where you can get this training,” said VFS executive producer Christopher Bennett. “Someone’s going to get an Oscar in the world of performance capture, and it’s going to get done here.”
Performance capture is different than traditional motion capture — think Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies — because it can capture sound, body movements and other nuances. The technology is used in the worlds of film and TV, video games and is the type of application that has bigwigs projecting its reach could be well into the billions of dollars.
Graham Qually’s company Mimic Performance Capture Inc. has partnered with VFS to bring the room and the technology to life. Because of the rapidly-changing world of digital landscape creation, Qually suggests there are about 100 people in the tech sector nation-wide who have a firm grasp on performance capture. Only one other facility exists in Canada, and it’s located in Toronto.
At just 35, Qually is on the cusp of the performance capture boom. He put in more than a decade working for international video game giants before going it on his own earlier this year. The Vancouver resident entered into talks with VFS earlier this year and ground was broken on the project in late February.
“Working with a big company was like trying to turn a large battleship, but working with students is like working speedboats,” Qually said. “They want to do all types of stuff and they’re the ones who will keep us on top of this type of stuff and ahead of the curve. No billion-dollar company is going to take a risk to try certain types of new ideas. Students don’t have that fear.”
VFS students get 40 days’ worth of training in the performance capture studio and that training supplements their discipline of choice: animation, acting, directing, editing and more. Depending on what grads specialize in, six-figure salaries are common, if not expected. The school’s alumni has its fingerprints all over Hollywood, with numerous credits on everything from The Hobbit and Star Wars franchises to the animated movie Frozen and Game of Thrones.
The facility is fully soundproofed to the point that the walls and doors operate on gaskets to eliminate any possibility of vibrations or sound interference. Forty cameras surround the room, and each costs $25,000 a pop.
Even before the facility opened, an 18-month waitlist had developed with clients ranging from Electronic Arts to Microsoft. Qually said he’s meeting with executives from massive companies the world over who want a piece of the action.
“I’m not getting animators contacting me,” Qually said. “I’m getting CEOs, CFOs and presidents contacting me and saying, ‘I need to see this, I need to know what you’re working on.’”
