Bodka
Year: 2019
Motion capture, Matchmove, Compositing – 355 vfx shots
The JOJ television’s detective series in Slovakia features a unique protagonist – a talking dog. To make the dog’s speech seem as realistic as possible, trained dogs with similar appearances were used during filming. The dog received instructions from its trainer off-camera, and when it was necessary for the dog to talk, its muzzle had to be animated. We used match-moving and MOCAP techniques to accomplish this. To create the animation, an actor spoke the dog’s lines, and the mouth movements were analyzed as a basis for animating the virtual model of the dog. We stabilized the image of the dog’s snout and placed the virtual puppet on it. The rendered animation of the muzzle was then superimposed on the real dog in each shot of the talking dog throughout the series. This process was repeated for every instance of the talking dog in the series. We collaborated with Studio 727 during this project.